karen louise smith

Last week during the DGPis40 conference, Nora Yong from CBC radio interviewed Ron Baecker on the multimedia biography project. For the past year, I have worked (on a part-time basis) with a team of researchers on this project. In brief, the research involves a research assistant working with a family where an individual has Alzheimer’s Disease or Mild Cognitive Impairment, to create a DVD movie of their life history. My main role has been to complete qualitative data analysis on the video data from the project. The video data set is from the ‘premiere’ and follow-up screenings with the participants.

To find out more about this work you can access the mp3 of the Spark episode. Ron’s segment is roughly the last third of the mP3.

A recent article in The Star by Carol Goar, announced that the Canadian Health Network (CHN) is being axed. Part of my master's thesis research was to study screen capture video files (collected with consent) from end-users who looked for health information using the CHN. The fact that the CHN is a collaboration of organizations (i.e., government departments, non-profit health organizations, universities, etc.) and is a non-corporate source of health information makes it an interesting resource to study. I will be watching for further announcements and to see what the political rationale is for the funding cut.