Emergent Methodologies 101

Jul 5, 2024, Roger F. Malina, Fred Turner Robert Stern, Tina Qin, and Paul Fishwick

Summary

We are starting a UTD Center for Emergence Studies. There are several motivations, but one is that the COVID-19 pandemic enabled growth and reduction of certain phenomena. In general, these were detected late by large top-down organizations. In this white paper, we enumerate methods and observational techniques we plan to use and evolve as we make discoveries of note.

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic provoked some rapid changes in human societies. On our own campus, we noticed that changes enabled by students and staff often preceded the top-down decisions of the university. The pandemic also provoked a move to online life for many social purposes from education to health care etc. A group of UTD faculty, co authors of this white paper, started meeting regularly online. By coincidence, they were all over 70 years old. This led to the concept of ‘senexism’, or the growing impact of aging populations in many areas of societal activities.

 The weekly meetings continue, and the group continues to grow and evolve. In July 2024 the group felt that the novel work they were undertaking was of significance. They proposed the creation of a UTD campus Center for Emergence Studies; originally, they named it an ‘anti-center’ or ‘non-center’ with the observation that in most complex systems emergence does not get triggered in a “center’.

 Prof Malina’s Edith O’Donnell Chair was renewed for 6 years; it was decided to use some of these funds to hire a student researcher for the center. The 6-year horizon is part of a methodology learned from Hakim Bey and Robson Tsou’s Technology Ethics.

His work on Temporary Autonomous Zones. A relevant citation is TAZ-theory tries to concern itself with existing or emerging situations rather than with pure utopianism. All over the world people are leaving or “disappearing” themselves from the Grid of Alienation and seeking ways to restore human contact. An interesting example of this — on the level of “urban folk culture” — can be found in the proliferation of hobby networks and conferences.

The emergence group can be compared to hobby groups.

Prior Research

The blog white paper co-authors have some background in the topic of ‘emergence.

1. They published an article in the UTD Atheneum on Emergence.
2. Roger F Malina working with Max Schich and Isabelle Meirelles ran a series of symposia and published an eBook. This was the first anthology of articles to foster the emerging convergence of arts, humanities, and complex networks in Leonardo journal. The emergence of transdisciplinarity between arts, sciences and technologies was noticed by Frank Malina who founded the Leonardo Journal in 1968 which focused on this topic. Ironically in 2024 this area of research has become so common across the planet, that we could identify a submergence or involution.

Methodologies

Consistent with the thesis of the Center, our methodologies will evolve, and we hope that some novel approaches will emerge that have desirable impacts.

1. Fred Turner is an advocate of the method of ‘anecdotes’. The word anecdote (in Greek: ἀνέκδοτον “unpublished”, literally “not given out”) comes from Procopius of Caesarea, the biographer of Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565). Procopius produced c. 550 CE a work entitled Ἀνέκδοτα (Anekdota, variously translated as Unpublished Memoirs or as Secret History), which consists primarily of a collection of short incidents from the private life of the Byzantine court. Gradually, the term “anecdote” came to be applied^[9] to any short tale used to emphasize or illustrate whatever point an author wished to make.

This method was one used in their second article, in press, on the Emergence of the Arts and Humanities at UTDallas.  

• Data Analytics and Data Visualization. Dr Tina Qin, a member of the Center, has pioneered the use of making new discoveries using different metaphors in data visualization. Malina notes that the human brain can be described as a ‘pattern finding machine’. Metaphors foreground different ‘patterns. She discovered that Chinese and American crooks think with different metaphors, and that fraud detection can be improved by using a metaphor dashboard.
• Emergent Terminologies. Last century co-author Malina started a company in Spain to detect innovations by analyzing the internet for coined words, cf memes. For instance, Roy Ascott coined the term ‘moist media’ in anger for the separation of physical and digital media used in art. The term came and went as can be seen in google ngrams which tracks usage of words over time.

The word ‘emergence’ continues to trend up. We will detect emerging terminologies systematically.

• Transgenerational Collaboration

Most ‘think tanks’ rely on the use of ‘experts’. We will systematically rely on experienced people but also less experienced ones with the hope of noticing phenomena missed  by experts.

• Transcultural collaboration

Most human societies/groups  are culturally very ‘homogeneous’. The Science of Team Science however reveals that heterogeneous groups have a higher likelihood of making novel discoveries. We will therefore seek to enable cross-inter-trans cultural analysis.

• Emergent Poetry:

Co-author Fred Turner is an eminent poet. Poetry often identifies items that are ‘emerging’ in peoples minds but have not yet been analytically identified or defined. Turner is working with Qin and Fishwick to publish AI generated poetry; they may discover emergent phenomena that AI notices before humans.

• Biogeodynamics:

Stern and ETH colleague Taras Gerya are developing an exciting emergent transdisciplinary field called Biogeodynamics.  Biogeodynamics focuses on understanding how the interior and surface evolution of Earth and Earth-like planets interact to modulate landscape, atmosphere, oceans, climate and life and quantifying these relationships. Their pioneering work was reflected in the recent blockbuster paper “The Importance of Plate Tectonics for the Evolution of Complex Life: Implications for Finding Extraterrestrial Civilizations” published in April 2024 Science Reports. Gerya is leading the newly approved EUROBIG initiative, which aims to jumpstart Biogeodynamic advances by identifying and connecting a diverse pool of Early Career to Senior researchers from Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Biology, Atmosphere, Ocean and Climate Sciences, Astrobiology, Exoplanetary Sciences and Social Sciences and motivates collaborations across science and society. Because of problems that Stern is having with NS&M, he would like to say “Screw you” to them and carry out his Biogeodynamic research under the new proposal center.  Hopefully productive refugees from other UTD departments and schools will be similarly attracted to the C4ES

Initial Novel Results?

Note: we do pay attention to ‘innovation’, but also it is important to study ingenuity, or the transfer of innovation from one place to another, or from one time to another. The methodology of Translation Studies, initiated at UTD by Rainer Schulter is an exemplar of emergence studies.