‘Overcoming language barriers’ – Daniela Petrelli speaks at the Cross-Lingual Bibliographic Search final workshop

Sheffield Hallam’s Professor of Interaction Design Professor Daniela Petrelli has been invited to speak at the final workshop of the Cross-Lingual Bibliographic Search (CLuBS), on Friday 07 June 2019 at the Saarland Informatics Campus in Germany.

The aim of CLuBS is an empirical evaluation of four different approaches in the field of cross-lingual information retrieval based on the psychological search engine PubPsych with the final workshop to answer the question: Does overcoming the language barrier contribute to global advancement of science or has English become the lingua franca of science?

Daniela will be giving a speech entitled A designerly approach to interactive cross-language information retrieval. 

When a new technology is invented, it is unknown how a potential user could and would interact with it. To design for such new scenario means to simultaneously understand and define what the scenario itself is: how does the user approach such new task? what do they do? How does the system perform? What works and what instead must be changed or improved? When designing the user interface and the interaction for a cross-language retrieval system, I had first to understand what the task really was, how potential users would approach it, and then progressively try different solutions in order to find the optimal one.

Through this iterative process I was also able to reveal some limitations of the translation-retrieval mechanisms that, when addressed, radically improved the user interaction. In turn, the improved performance of the system changed the way users responded and pushed for changes on the user interface and interaction. I will use two case studies in cross language text and image retrieval to illustrate the key stages in the design process and show how the research progressed iteratively through phases of user evaluation and redesign.

Professor Daniela Petrelli is Professor of Interaction Design at Sheffield Hallam University. Daniela’s current research focuses on novel forms of interaction design that combine digital technology with product design, also known as Tangible and Embedded Interaction. Her investigations into these hybrid digital-physical scenarios are within two different domains: personal memories and cultural heritage.