The monthly PGR meeting was held on Wednesday 21st September, 10:00-12:00, Room MC3108.
We had 1 speakers for this month seminar:
Miss Grace Ataguba
Exploring Story Telling Technologies for Memorialization in Cemetery and Living Spaces
Abstract: Memories are interesting part of everyday lives and storytelling is one form we adopt to share memories. Memorialization of the dead which involves remembering the dead through story telling has been in existence since time immemorial. The rise in digital death has relatively brought about a rise in digital memorialization as compared to an existing practice where the bereaved is constrained by cultural and religious beliefs as well as a certain space to commemorate their dead; especially the cemetery. Therefore the shift in the use of current technologies for memorialization is one of the indicators of how well people are willing to continuously establish bonds with the dead. In our study, we wish to consider stories people are willing to share in memory of their loved ones to identify relationship that exist among the likely variables that influences their response. These variables include: the length of time since the loss: closeness of the relationship measured in various forms and the story teller. The research will be adopting participatory research design approach in getting the focused group involved in the study. However we designed our instrument- an online survey to collect these stories which has been given ethical consideration and approval. Participants for the study are being recruited through emails, university news blogs, advertisements, social media and discussion groups. The data collected will be analysed using basic concepts of data sciences – emotion mining and statistics. Results of the analysis will serve as a pilot study to our main study.
The next seminar will be held in October. The date and venue for the next meeting will be announced.