Humanities Computing Research Colloquium
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Colloquium Series for Winter 2010
The Canadian Institute for Research in Computing and the Arts and TAPoR are sponsoring a Humanities Computing Research Colloquium at the University of Alberta. Here is the Winter schedule. Locations, Titles and Abstracts will follow.
February 4th, 3:00pm, Arts 112
Peter Baskerville University of Alberta
- Title: Worth of Children and Women: Life Insurance in Early Twentieth Century Canada
- Abstract: In the late nineteenth century life insurance came of age in Canada. Indeed one contemporary believed that he lived in an era that exhibited a “mania for life insurance”. While historians know something about growth trends and the major companies involved in that business—although not nearly as much as we might wish—, we know next to nothing about the people who bought life insurance. This is especially true for women and children even though a special insurance called Industrial insurance emerged in this period largely to satisfy the demand for children and womens' insurance needs.
- Who insured children? Who were the women who took out insurance? This paper argues that cultural and economic differences underlay decisions to purchase industrial insurance in early twentieth century Canada and that these purchases contributed to and were markers of changing gendered behaviour in the public sphere.
February 26th, All Day
HuCon 2010: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing This is a full-day conference. See the web site at http://huco.ualberta.ca/~hucoconf/
Colloquium Series for Fall 2009
The Canadian Institute for Research in Computing and the Arts and TAPoR are sponsoring a Humanities Computing Research Colloquium at the University of Alberta. Here is the Fall schedule. Locations, Titles and Abstracts will follow.
September 24th, 3:00pm, Arts 112
Teresa Dobson and the INKE Research Group University of British Columbia
- Title: The Role of Multimedia Literature in Critical Literary Education
- Abstract: It is arguable that some of the most innovative text experiments online—ones that truly push the boundaries of established conventions of writing, and that work to explore the particular affordances of digital media—have occurred in creative contexts where the literary and design communities converge with a view to generating alternate, innovative, multimedia forms. One such form is electronic literature, which is defined by the Electronic Literature Organization as a class of “works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer” (ELO, 2006, n.p.). E-literature includes genres such as hypertext fiction, reactive poetry, blog novels, Flash fiction and poetry, generative art, installation, code poetry, and so on. This presentation considers the features of multimedia literary forms through an examination of two examples and contemplates the value of these innovative texts for critical literary education.
October 9th, 4:00pm, Arts 112
Mark Davies Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics, Brigham Young University
- Title: Using robust corpora to examine genre-based variation and recent historical shifts in English
- Abstract: We'll use data from a number of different corpora that we've created to look at change and variation in English. The corpora include the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA: 400+ million words, 1990-2009+), the TIME Corpus of Historical American English (100 million words, 1920s-2000s), the BYU-OED Corpus (37 million words; Old English - Present Day English) and the BYU-BNC Corpus (UK, 1980s-1993). We'll look at the range of queries afforded by these corpora (lexical, semantic, morphological, and semantic), as well as how they are made possible by the corpus architecture. We'll also briefly consider some design issues, such as genre representation and copyright issues.
November 20th, 3:00pm, Arts 112
Sandra Gabriele
- Title: Visual Differentiation in Look-alike Medication Names: Evaluating design in context
- Abstract: The aim of this study is to evaluate ways that visual communication design, and more specifically, typography, can be used to help combat the problem of medication errors that occur during the medication process due to the confusion between pairs of look-alike (orthographically similar) medication names. Methods and results from a smaller study were revisited to inform the design of this larger study.
- Nursing and pharmacy participants will help determine the effectiveness of changing the visual appearance of part of a look-alike name to help distinguish it from its look-alike counterpart. Names will be evaluated with in contexts that simulate situations found in a hospital setting – shelf labeling, electronic patient charts and medication labeling – thus making the results useful to current practices in healthcare.
December 10th, 3:00pm, Arts 112
- Title: Exploring User Experience through Participatory Performance
- Abstract: We have adopted a pragmatic strategy of addressing technologically mediated participatory performance in order to use collaborative performance as an investigatory tool in the exploration of user behavior. By taking a holistic view of the evaluation of the interplay between the designed artefact (the performance content) and the people who interact and relate to it, we can extract insights from the performance with the intention of informing the process of designing interaction mechanisms for more conventional public interfaces. This presentation will describe some of the participatory performances we have created, and explore our observations of design issues which occur when interactive technologies are deployed in public spaces.
Thanks to Sean, Stan and John for helping organize this.
