Veteran Communities Projects

Our Veteran Communities projects are run by grad students, some of whom are also veterans themselves. These projects are designed to develop new tools for use in VA-related issues, including new tools for “Narrative Medicine”, new tools for encountering veteran cemeteries with the “Dayton VA Graveyard” project, and new tools to better understand veteran relationships via “Social Network Analysis of Veteran Records”. A first completed project on VA hospital encounters has identified a need for better ways to translate the patient experience. The next project will use art-based methods to develop strange tools for narrative medicine that can be used to increase empathy in VA hospital encounters. Another project seeks to enable narrative engagement with Dayton Area VA cemeteries by developing strange tools based in augmented reality (AR) technologies. The goal is to give current veterans new ways to experience gravesite encounters. A further ongoing project uses advanced data visualization and quantitative social network analysis on VA cemetery records to identify connections that can be experienced by visitors and explored further by researchers.