Talks by Steve Benford and Adrian Hazzard

Steve and Adrian will present during the lab meeting this week.

Steve Benford - Oral Tradition and the Internet

Oral traditions are is conventionally seen as ones in which knowledge and culture are passed on between individuals and generations by word of mouth, or by ear in the case of music. What happens as oral traditions migrate onto the Internet? To what extent can Internet culture be considered to be a kind of oral tradition? John Miles Foley's 2012 book 'Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind' makes an intriguing argument that cultural practices on the Internet are closer in nature to oral traditions than to textual traditions. I'll revisit this argument in the light of our own studies of how Irish Sessions and Folk Clubs have taken to the Internet that I think, reveal similarities between these traditions, but also significant tensions, and suggest that the Internet can disrupt and transform oral traditions in unexpected ways as they migrate online. There's a recent blogpost about it here: https://carolanguitar.com/2021/05/09/91-bard-or-monk/

Adrian Hazzard - Designing an Adaptive Embodied Conversational Agent for Health Literacy

This talk will cover the ALTCAI project which focuses on the application of embodied conversational agents (ECA) in providing pre/post-natal advice to maternal women. A salient factor of this work concerns the design and deployment of embodied conversation agents (ECAs) which can sense the (health) literacy of users and adapt to scaffold user engagement and comprehension in this setting. The talk will present an account of a Wizard of Oz user study of `ALTCAI’, with a group of 44 maternal women who have differing levels of literacy.