Stories, Computing, and the Politics of Health Care: Folklore Perspectives on Narrative from Paramedics to Anti-Vaxxers

Stories, Computing, and the Politics of Health Care: Folklore Perspectives on Narrative from Paramedics to Anti-Vaxxers
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This is a past event

How do people tell stories? How can they help us understand illness and health care today?

In this presentation, I explore various folkloristic aspects of the broad domain of health care.

I begin with narratives from paramedics in large urban areas, explaining how storytelling helps these first responders deal with the demanding work they do. Expanding on fieldwork from the last two decades, I explore how computational methods can help us understand these narratives from a macroscopic perspective.

I then turn my attention to the explosion of online discussions of health care and illness, with a focus on the anti-vaccination movement and the rise of vaccine hesitancy. By exploring millions of blog posts on parenting sites over nearly a decade, I show how we can use computing to discover communities, and how we can use techniques from text-mining to discover the narrative frameworks that underlie these often short blog posts.

Both of these projects are deeply informed by Folklore studies: how people tell stories, how those stories vary, and how they circulate over time. Understanding these dynamics may allow us to devise strategies to help first responders negotiate their complex work environment, and to avert the health care crises that are driven by under-vaccination.

Speaker
Professor Timothy Tangherlini
Hosted by
Elphinstone Institute
Venue
MacRobert Building, MR051
Contact

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