12:45 - Joining the webinar
13.00: Welcome from Professor Melissa Terras, Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture & Society
13.15 – 14.15: Panel 1 (Chair: Professor Kenny Smith)
- Mirella Blum (School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences): A descriptive analysis of the tone system of Hol Dinka.
This study presents a descriptive analysis of the tone system of the previously undocumented Hol dialect of Dinka (West Nilotic, South Sudan and abroad). The language is comprised almost exclusively of closed monosyllabic words, and has a complex set of suprasegmental contrasts; tone, voice quality, and vowel length all operate independently. The tone system of Hol is broadly similar to other dialects of Dinka, with several clear differences. This paper postulates the four underlying tonemes of the dialect, provides evidence for contrastive alignment of the tones, and describes several contextual processes that affect their phonetic realization. I also provide evidence for the correspondence of the four tones of the dialect to the three tones of the Agar dialect, and describe a context in which tonal change is the only factor in marking both inflection and case.
- Alison Mayne, Beverley Hood & Siobhan O’Connor (Edinburgh College of Art / School of Health in Social Science): VRinMind: Knowledge co-creation in designing immersive virtual reality experiences to support mindfulness practice.
The benefits of virtual reality (VR) in managing pain are increasingly recognised in the health and design communities. It may also enhance mindfulness practice, a successful therapy for managing chronic pain particularly for those wishing to self-care at home. The hardware and software in VR systems are advancing rapidly making more immersive 3D environments and experiences possible. The VRinMind project seeks to co-create an application for mindfulness practice to aid the management of chronic pain. It is exploring how users experience different types of VR equipment and immersive applications.
A review of the literature to consider the benefits and limitations of VR to manage chronic pain and practice aspects of mindfulness was undertaken. The findings helped craft a co-creation workshop where mindfulness practitioners explored different VR equipment and environments that could be used for mindfulness. Participants also engaged in a creative enterprise using textiles, images, and paper to reimagine VR settings where mindfulness practice could be further enhanced. Users’ insights revealed features of VR environments such as colours, sounds and avatars that may support or hinder mindfulness practice. The participatory design approach also led to personalised visual environments that could be used in time to design a VR mindfulness application.
14.15 – 14.45: Break and Poster Session
- Siobhan O’Connor & Sam Quinn (School of Health in Social Science): An ethnographic exploration of a visual, communication tool to enhance therapeutic conversations between nurses and learning disability patients in forensic services: a study protocol.
In the United Kingdom, 7% of people in the criminal justice system have a learning disability (LD) compared with 2% of the general population. Adults with LD can have difficulty understanding risk and safety and communicating their needs, leading to poor outcomes and greater health inequalities. Talking Mats is an electronic tool (www.talkingmats.com) that uses visualisations to improve communication for people with LD. However, its use in forensic health settings has never been explored.
An ethnographic approach will be adopted to understand the lived experiences of nurses and adults with learning disabilities when using Talking Mats to facilitate therapeutic conversations around risk and safety in forensic health services in NHS Fife. Ethical approval will be sought. Interviews with nurses and adult patients with a learning disability will be conducted before and after using Talking Mats. Observation of the digital tool and visualisations being used will also be undertaken.
Data will be analysed thematically and underpinned by Tronto’s Ethics of Care, a normative ethical theory, and Douglas’s Cultural Theory on risk perceptions and risk regulation. This will illustrate how Talking Mats impacts therapeutic conversations between nurses and adult patients with learning disabilities in forensic settings which may improve their assessment and treatment, leading to better outcomes. https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/stay-safe/
14.45 – 15.45: Panel 2 (Chair: Dr Ben Fletcher-Watson)
- Niamh Moore (School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences): DIY Academic Archiving: Sharing data and curating research materials for posterity, pedagogy and play.
Researchers are being encouraged to create open data, to deposit research materials with official data repositories, to make sure data is FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable), and encouraged to engage with new technologies which allow working with large corpora of text, including text mining. Yet for many social science researchers, especially those engaged with what now appears as ‘small data’, working with intimate interviews and ethnography, such changes can seem intended for ‘other’ researchers engaged with ‘big’ data, computational datasets, or medical or scientific research. This session reports on projects which take up the affordances of creating online archives of research materials (specifically using the platform Omeka.org), as a way of extending possibilities for engagement with data beyond depositing data in the official archives of the UK Data Archive, or even in library repositories. I introduce a current project, Reanimating Data: experiments with people, places and archives, where a team of researchers is creating an online archive of 150 interviews with young women created in the immediate aftermath of the emergence of AIDS, from a landmark ESRC-funded project in the late 1980s, the Women, Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP). We are putting these interviews online, alongside extensive resources, which document our experiments with data, bringing these interviews back to communities in Manchester where the interviews came from, through a collaboration with community archive, Feminist Webs, and where we are working to ‘reanimate the data’ through creative work. We will launch our new archive at the Cancelled Conference.
- Alice M. Kelly (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities): Canon, Canons and Anti-Canonicity: Queer Cultural Memory and the Textuality of Swan Queen '#fic recs' on Tumblr.
Anti-canonicity is an essential characteristic of fan fiction archives because fan fiction runs fundamentally counter to canonical ideals of textual boundaries. How, then, is the innately anti-canonical nature of digital fan archives affected by canon-building on Tumblr in the form of '#fic rec' posts? The fic rec tag is a way for users to circulate recommended fan fiction reading lists for particular fandoms, writers or themes. The fic recs I will look at concern the Once Upon a Time (OUaT) femslash ship Swan Queen, the pairing of Emma Swan and Regina Mills (the Evil Queen). These fic recs are canon builders, both in the sense that they operate as reading lists, but also in the sense of shaping an alternative canon to OUaT. When certain narrative arcs are used as marker points to collate and group fics, such as 'Neverland' or 'Dark Swan', the weight of the overarching heteronormative machinery that dominates OUaT is redistributed, so that major plots are re-inscribed as signifiers for queer transformative works. By treating Swan Queen fic recs as texts in their own right, this paper explores the multiplicity of queer female desires being circulated, curated and memorialised in digital cultural memory.
15.45 – 16.00: Break
16.00 - 17.15: Performance and Q&A - 'Interval and Instance' (Chair: Rachel Hosker)
Interval and Instance is a solo audio-visual work by composer/performer Jules Rawlinson exploring digitised archival material from the University of Edinburgh’s pioneering scientific filmmaker Eric Lucey, adding an electronic score to fixed sound design that reflects on and responds to Lucey’s studies. Lucey's film-making was defined by his manipulation of speed, motion and scale as tools for observing behaviour using a variety of techniques, most famously time-lapse or very high-speed film, and microphotography. The subjects of his films include a range of scientific themes as well as exploratory studies into feedback, interference and pattern. All of these aspects provide a useful prompt for developing sonic and musical processes that support and draw attention to the visual character of the films. The abstract qualities of pattern, texture and detail in fractured crystals, billowing ripples and other elements are related to shape and texture of sonic material. The work is non-narrative but the archival clips have been assembled to provide moments of continuity and contrast. In particular the soundtrack makes use of extensive layering, time-stretching and time-compression, extreme pitch-shifting, physical modelling and frequency carving to create unexpected points of audition which offer audiences a detailed and immersive audio-visual experience.
The performance was followed by a discussion and Q&A session.
17.15: Closing Remarks from Professor Melissa Terras