Horia Maior - Workload Alerts - Using Physiological Measures of Mental Workload to Provide Feedback during Tasks
I will be doing a CHI 2018 practice presentation for my Friday slot.
Paper Abstract: Feedback is valuable for allowing us to improve on tasks. While retrospective feedback can help us improve for next time, feedback “in action” can allow us to improve the outcome of on-going tasks. In this paper, we use data from functional Near InfraRed Spectroscopy to provide participants with feedback about their Mental Workload levels during high-workload tasks. We evaluate the impact of this feedback on task performance and perceived task performance, in comparison to industry standard mid-task self assessments, and explore participants’ perceptions of this feedback. In line with previous work, we confirm that deploying self-reporting methods affect both perceived and actual performance. Conversely, we conclude that our objective concurrent feedback correlated more closely with task demand, supported reflection in action, and did not negatively affect performance. Future work, however, should focus on the design of this feedback and the potential behaviour changes that will result.
Esmeralda Bon - How to measure post-truth politics on social media: Coding evidence and emotion in the EU referendum
PhD Student, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham
Study 1 of my PhD project concerns an examination of the posts of prominent UK political actors and civil society actors published on Facebook during the EU referendum campaigns, between February and June 2016, considering the use and presence of types of evidence and emotions. Early academic reflections on the process and proposed implications have only recently been published. Therefore, much remains to be said and explained for understanding the vote, as well as the wide-spread observation that the campaign was largely devoid of fact.
The Facebook posts of politicians and civil society actors are compared to assess whether the actors communicated and mediated information and news differently. These posts are specifically analysed for the presence and absence of evidence and emotion, to answer the research question: To what extent do evidence and emotion feature in the news and information posted during the EU referendum campaign by UK government and civil society actors, on Facebook?
First, pragma-dialectics, a branch of argumentation theory and rhetoric studies that considers rationality as an ideal that involves the critical testing of arguments, is used to reconstruct the positions of the parties and actors. Thereafter, a manual quantitative content analysis is performed to precede a scaled up, automated content analysis, which both focus on the identification of emotionality, emotions and evidence in the text of the posts. The indicators used in this content analysis are not only inspired by pragma-dialectics, but also by framing research and studies of the rhetoric used in populist discourse.
Advice is sought regarding the proposed automated approach to analysing this text on a larger scale and to identify patterns that may otherwise not be found. Concrete examples of text will be given.