Do you care if your child’s teacher has a visible tattoo? Is Justin Bieber a more significant Canadian than David Suzuki? Have you ever stopped to consider how the alphabet you learned in kindergarten influences your current world views?
These and more than 150 other queries currently being studied by researchers at Western University will be explored as three Western faculties – Arts and Humanities, Education and Information and Media Studies – will come together next week for one celebration of their collective work at Research Day 2012, scheduled for 3-5:30 p.m. Monday, March 19 in The Great Hall, Somerville House.
Dozens of Western’s internationally recognized faculty members alongside post-doctoral fellows and graduate students will be on hand to discuss their findings with university colleagues, the media and general public.
Arts and Humanities will showcase more than 50 research projects covering a wide array of topics ranging from Horror Studies to Ancient Rome to Digital Humanities.
Included among the research, Laurence De Looze from the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures will present his poster, How the Alphabetic Letter Has Conditioned the Western View of the World. From the classical Greek alpha/omega to the modern-day Helvetica typeface, he argues our alphabet and how we express ourselves through the formation of letters has a strong influence on our cultural viewpoints.
Education will present 75 projects featuring a number of topics.
Included among the research, professor Kathy Hibbert and a team of interdisciplinary scholars will present their poster, The Quest for Effective Interdisciplinary Graduate Supervision: A Critical Narrative Analysis, which describes how supervisory relationships unfold and what systems of support facilitate interdisciplinary graduate supervision. Hibbert’s team aims to enrich faculty expertise in graduate supervision to better support the next generation of scholars.
Information and Media Studies will feature a number of research posters relating to contemporary technology and information issues.
Included among the research, professor Victoria L. Rubin, along with Library and Information Science PhD students Niall Conroy and Tatiana Vashchilko, will present posters that demonstrate their research into pinpointing the objective cues distinguishing truth from deception in language. If such cues are identifiable, an algorithm could be created allowing a computer to determine whether a complaining email that came from a customer is sincere, or contains deceptive elements.
For a full listing of presenters and topics, visit the website of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Faculty of Education and Faculty of Information and Media Studies.
Research Day 2012 is supported by the Office of the Vice-President, Research.