Join us on 2/26 at the SI and IE research meetings for talks with Rachel Midura and Sushmethaa Muhundan

Rachel Midura, an assistant professor in the Virginia Tech History department, will present “Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EmDigIt): Modeling European Place and Space, 1545-1746” during the Social Informatics meeting this Friday at 10 am. She approaches the seventeenth century as an information age created by the printing press and European postal networks. From dictionaries to gazetteers, the early modern period was the age of the reference book, with more than 1,600 guides published between 1470 to 1599 alone.The EmDigIt database represents the first attempt at a comprehensive bibliography, and currently consists of eighty-four itinerary books representing 3,655 unique routes, connecting 1,587 cities, published and republished over the course of two centuries. I will discuss applications of Social Network Analysis in a forthcoming article for the Journal of Social History, as well as next steps for the project using the Transkribus text recognition software.

Sushmethaa Muhundan (CS) will present "Exploring the effects of language if in-vehicle agents on driving performance, situation awareness, and perceived workload" during the Immersive Experiences meeting this Friday at 1 pm. Her study explores the effects of the language of in-vehicle agents on drivers’ emotion and behavior. The influence on the driver of native and secondary language, specifically Hindi and Chinese, are compared with the absence of an in-vehicle agent. Studies show that drivers’ affective states play a vital role in influencing driving performance and have an effect on driving safety. Besides affect, language is an important influence on human behavior during social interactions. Results show that language has the potential to influence human information processing. This provides an exciting opportunity to design in-vehicle agent interactions with drivers to help regulate their affective states, and to improve information processing to ensure better driving performance and increased situation awareness.

Please contact CHCI for zoom links.