Untangling Time and Tech (Asynchronous Session)
Technology in Public Health: Biostatistics in Biomedicine and Informatics View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Esther Pearson
We are encountering in our daily lives more exposure to the gathering of data and its use in medical research. This intensive gathering of data or big data allows the use of statistics more than ever before as numbers are calculated, patterns are observed, and data becomes information as it is placed in context of a problem to be solved. This information has given rise to “Health Informatics” which is a combination of “Health Information Technology” as computing components, “Health Information” as collected data, and “Health Information Management” as the organizing and summarizing of information. The combination of these are used to perform and improve decision-making and value-based delivery of healthcare. Hardware, Software, Data, Procedures, and People are all key components of Health Informatics in the context of healthcare with Biostatistics harnessing large amounts of health data to accelerate decision-making. This paper looks at the application of statistical methods to the solution and decision-making in biological healthcare problems.
Ungendering Technology: Women Retooling the Masculine Sphere View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carol Haddad
I will present an overview of my recent book of the same title. It offers fresh insight into women’s mastery of technologies commonly associated with men, with important implications for institutional efforts to identify and support technical proficiency among girls and women. The work is structured across five original case studies featuring: breast cancer survivors in Newfoundland who constructed a wooden dragon boat using hand and power tools; Egyptian women who used information and communication technologies for political action during the Revolution of 2011; pioneer female audio engineers in the United States working in live concert and studio venues; U.S. female commercial airline pilots who mastered the complexity of flying large aircraft; and a university-educated woman working in sewer maintenance and repair for the City of Detroit in the 1970s. The case studies capture women’s own voices and present a range of historical and geographic locations. A major contribution of this volume is the multidisciplinary analytical framework used to explain women’s motivation to engage with non-traditional technologies, the role of peer and political support in encouraging persistence, and informal as well as formal knowledge and skill acquisition. Above all, it is a story of women's empowerment - individually and collectively.
Technology, Digital Media, and Refugee Narratives: Understanding Refugees in the Online Spaces View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anindita Shome
The increasingly globalised and interconnected world is countered with border restrictions, increasing hostilities, and conflicts in nations, and a lack of understanding of the refugee crisis in the mainstream narratives. A "RAND Social and Economic Well-Being" research report informs: “In the past two decades, the global population of forcibly displaced people has more than doubled, from 34 million in 1997 to 71 million in 2018 (2019: ix).” With increasing political strife and unrest, refugees are left with no option other than seeking refuge and a safe haven in other nation-states. With antagonism from the natives of a place and the policies against the refugees getting harsher each day, do technology, the Internet, and online spaces help in creating alternate spaces to help disseminate the refugee stories and narratives to foster understanding and garner support and solidarities for the displaced individuals and communities? This study attempts to understand how selected blogs and social networking pages are being used to create alternate and unconventional spaces for the refugees. Selected content from pages such as, “Refugees At Home”, “UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency”, etc. are analysed to understand if the humanitarian aspects of the refugees are being brought about through these online pages, and whether, the refugees are being given a human face through the online stories. This paper reviews how the refugee crisis is being constructed in the online spaces with the aid of technology, and how several binaries are contested in these online spaces.
Canada's Indigenous Language Policies in Law and Practice View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tomasz Soroka
Wars, diseases, the past policies of territorial expansion, Christianisation, acculturation and the assimilation of Indigenous peoples led to irreversible cultural and linguistic losses. Since the arrival of the first Europeans in the New World, hundreds of Indigenous languages have irrevocably disappeared from the linguistic map of North America. Many of them died out centuries ago, whereas others – like the Beothuk language in Newfoundland – have disappeared relatively recently. Without political action, revitalisation strategies and appropriate legislation, the preservation of Canadian Indigenous languages might be impossible. Therefore, it seems justified to pose the question of what Canada is doing in the political and legal sphere to protect the linguistic rights and heritage of its indigenous people. This paper makes an attempt to answer the question, by means of analysing regulations (and their implementation) concerning Indigenous linguistic rights as contained in the Constitution, federal acts and laws regulating linguistic issues in selected Canadian provinces and territories. All this - supplemented with a brief comparative analysis of steps undertaken to protect Indigenous languages in the immediate vicinity of Canada (in Greenland and Alaska) and in the countries with similar colonial history and significant Indigenous population (Australia and New Zealand) – allows for an assessment of the effectiveness of Canadian language policy towards its native population.
Understanding Complex Views on the Rapid Introduction of Technologies for Public Services View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Luciana Blaha
The purpose of this study is to propose figuration as an analytical tool for capturing complex understandings on the representations, values, feelings, and practices of stakeholders (such as public servants and the general public) on the rapid introduction of AI and automation in response to the pandemic. With the acceleration of digital transformation and the launch of the Scottish AI Strategy as facilitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, the aim of the research project is to provide a framework for a comprehensive, actionable investigation of how new technologies are received and used, in order to guide management practice and make their implementation as effective as possible. The research was conducted as a case-study looking at interview and documentary data, which was collected and analysed using a posthumanist, science and technology studies-based approach (STS). The data was coded and analysed in NVivo, and then structured using the concept of figuration. The research shows how individuals both within and outside a public organisation can hold multi-faceted understandings of the same technology. The project further sets the foundation for modelling how technologies are understood by different stakeholders, thus enabling managers to rapidly re-evaluate the impact of implementing automation, AI and other technologies in their organisation. The findings are relevant to public sector operational decisions, as well as private sector organisations, AI and automation regulatory considerations, as well as further research in the business management and STS fields.
Self-representation on Social Media During Lockdowns in the First, Second, and Third COVID-19 Pandemic Waves View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alexandra Valéria Sándor
The current pilot study aims to offer an explanation of the trends in self-representation on social media, including social networking sites and social messaging platforms, as well as their potential relationship to mental health. The research adds greatly to the understanding of the mental health contexts underlying social media use and self-representation and helps to broaden the knowledge on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. This topic requires an interdisciplinary approach from various fields, such as sociology, psychology, and communication and media studies. An online survey has proven to be the most suitable method for data collection of self-perceived social media usage, self-representation habits, and mental health assessment. The three-step survey included the same 20 questions over three separate data collection periods during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Hungary between April 22, 2020, and April 4, 2021. According to the results, (1) time spent on social media and (2) willingness to share self-representative content have both increased during the pandemic waves and are associated with (3) higher and growing risk of major depressive disorder among the most active sharers, as reported by the embedded PHQ-2 questionnaire. In conclusion, the current study contributes significantly to the mounting evidence of the psychosocial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its interaction with other global phenomena such as expanding social media usage and changing self-representation patterns.
New Horizons and New Potentiality of the Public Space: Interaction, Sociality, Communication, Technology, Neuroscience, Architecture View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elnaz Ghazi
This substantial work investigates the experimental field of the interaction between architecture, neurosciences, and social sciences. It draws on facial expression tests and studies on the brain waves that occur when individuals use certain spaces in an attempt to establish a new planning method that takes into account perceptions, feelings, and emotions to fine-tune the architectural and social features of public spaces. This research developed the possibility to create a new architectural space where public spaces could be tools or social sharing and growth, and where people could interact empathically while maintaining their individuality to build a socially satisfying common future. Based on this the research, focused on the studies conducted in contemporary neurosciences, speculating whether findings concerning the operation of Brain-Computer Interface could be applied to the planning of public spaces to improve the quality of the interaction between individuals (or between individuals and spaces themselves).The potentiality of the public space can be viewed based on the concept of body as a medium, whose extension becomes the basis or a practical intervention on the interactivity between body and space, and consequently on social interaction. It is in this sense that technology plays a part in the relationship between human beings and environment. The present study offers an architectural solution to the renewed need or social communication by incorporating an intelligent component into public spaces. This component, integrated in the project, is able to catch brain waves as an interactive architecture to increase social interactions in the space itself.
Revitalization and Sustainability of Rural Regions Using Social Networks: Focusing on the Inflow of Funds and People View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bolormaa Battsogt
This study clarifies how rural regions can be revitalized and sustained through social as well as clarifying the nature of the governance framework required for the same. It is becoming increasingly apparent that rural populations are both declining and aging. This is attributed to the outflow of young people to urban regions. In rural regions, diminishing national land conservation has become obvious and has led to difficulties in sustaining these regions. At the same time, urban individuals’ participation as financial resources and decision-makers in rural regions through social networks has become prominent. Therefore, this study focuses on the movement of funds and people from urban to rural regions using hometown associations linked with social network services. From the perspective of these areas, the study clarifies (1) the factors of continued participation of individuals by analyzing re-movement of funds and people to rural regions, (2) hometown association’s efforts to inflow funds and people toward local governance, and (3) the possibility of a theoretical framework for new local governance based on linking urban individuals to the inflow of funds and people to rural regions.
