Table of Contents
Acknowledgement
Introduction
Theses
| 1. Voices of the Terrorized (2023) |
Taylor Green |
| 2. A Public Space Designed by Taiwanese Society: Case Study of Street Dancer Occupying Taipei Expo Park (2023) |
Chi-Peng Tsui |
| 3. Reflected Reality: Showcasing Adverse Environmental Effect of Textile Industries (2022) |
Uttamasha Monjoree |
| 4. Human Hybrids: The Digital Extensions of the Self (2022) |
Dante Anthony Jaramillo |
| 5. How Music Effects Patients with Alzheimer’s/Dementia (2022) |
Devi Kasturi |
| 6. Transdisciplinary Intelligence: Linking Factors of Knowledge Production and the Cultural Dimensions of Industries (2021) |
Alex Garcia Topete |
| 7. Visualizing Future Through Past in Augmented Reality: Experiencing Design Inspired by Native American Heritage at the University of Texas at Dallas (2021) |
Sultana Naznin |
| 8. Artificial Theaters: Staging Life in the Age of Biotechnology and Artificial Intelligence (2020) |
Yvan Calvin Tina |
| 9. Peering into the Blackbox [:] the Role of Digital Game Development in Game Studies (2020) |
Luke Skye Bernfeld |
| 10. Essential Elements of Narrative and Agency in Digital Interactive Narrative Games (2022) |
Lindsey Joyce |
| 11. Does studying music enhance academic skills in undergraduate non-music majors? A phenomenological approach (2016) |
Kathryn Evans |
Publications
| 1. Artificial Art and Its Implication: A stumble into text-to-image neural networks (2023) |
Clement Seiga Lee |
| 2. Arts-of-Living” in HCI: Philosophical Praxis in Human-Computer Interaction for Leading a Reciprocal Coexistence (2023) |
Yeuh-Jung Lee |
| 3. Students Hiring Students (2023) |
Nirmala Rani Pinnamaneni |
| 4. Federated Queries- An Optimized Way to Query Your Cross-Region Stored Data (2023) |
Kirtan Pathak and Prof. Judd Bradbury |
| 5. STONKS: Analyzing Financial Discussions on Reddit (2022) |
Omkar Ajnadkar |
| 6. Dialysis Buddy Whitepaper: Analysis of at-home peritoneal patient’s quality of life (2022) |
Neil Rathod |
| 7. The Complexity of Distributed Cognition: Concepts, Artifacts, and People (2022) |
Kirtan Pathak, Hunter S. Newborn, Chris A. Lee |
| 8. The OASES Code (2021) |
Omkar Ajnadkar |
| 9. Look and Decipher (2021) |
Akash Singh |
| 10. Esports Cyberathlete Development (ECD): The initiative to Enhance the Esports Player Cognitive Performance and Wellbeing (2019) |
Lauren Bernal and Kristen Deupree |
| 11. A Tale of Two Thinking Systems (ToTTS): The initiative for teaching and learning art and science in the ways that brains work (2019) |
Lauren Bernal, Eun Ah Lee, Kathryn Evans, Linda Anderson, Roger Malina |
| 12. Curriculum in the Cracks: Encouraging Cross-Disciplinary and Art-Science-Humanities Teaching (2018) |
Cassini Nazir |
| 13. Breaking Down the Silos: Curriculum Development in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (2015) |
Kathryn Evans and Roger Malina |
Endnote
Acknowledgement
In his short story titled The Kidney-Shaped Stone, Haruki Murakami writes, “Once the rest of the story had become visible to him, writing it out was relatively easy.” This is how I felt when in the midst of my short summer assignment, Dr. Roger Malina asked me to take up this project. My association with the ArtSciLab (ASL) in the year 2023 was just a summer long. When I approached the lab Co-Director, Dr. Malina, he immediately accepted my request to join the lab over the summer, by virtue of my prior employment with them in the academic year 2021-2022. Due to the limited time frame, I was assigned the task of compiling past publications facilitated by the ArtSciLab. The task was daunting since there was no linear record of the publications and the challenge intensified when Dr. Malina asked me to present the compilation in the form of a book. I thank him for his belief in my ability to do so, despite having no prior experience in the field.
The creation of this book has been a collaborative journey. Therefore, my biggest and utmost gratitude is to all the authors whose words grace these pages. Your passion for your subject and dedication to your field have helped us all achieve this project. Your creativity, insight, and expertise have made this book a remarkable endeavor. I thank you for sharing your knowledge and passion with us through your works.
Although I learned and improved under the guidance of Dr. Malina, it was Dr. Kathryn Evans, co-director of the ArtSciLab, who helped elevate and enhance the project by suggesting additional materials to be included. Their support and contribution helped me access some of the remote works and allowed them to be included in and get credited. Dr. Evans also allowed me to include some of the works she has published through the lab.
I also extend my gratitude to the other lab members, namely, Evan Acuna (ASL Lab Manager), Misal Shah (ASL Finance Coordinator), Ojal Bhatnagar (ASL Research Assistant), Alejandro Garcia (ASL Experimental Publisher), and Anagha Ajnadkar (ASL Webmaster). Their cooperation and support helped in the successful completion of the project in a timely manner.
Lastly, but in no sense the least, I would like to express my regards to my partner, my friends, and my family for bearing with me and for staying by my side while I finished up this journey. All in all, this project was a collective effort and a testament to the power of collaboration and a passion for knowledge.
Swati Anwesha
Editor
Introduction
In an ever-evolving world of advancements, where the past is as important as the future, we have created a work that is a confluence of art, science, technology, and philosophy. These works blur the boundaries set forth between disciplines and intertwined fields of study that one seemed disparate. A ten-year milestone project of the ArtSciLab, this collection is a credit and tribute to all associated with the lab this past decade. The ArtSciLab, located within The University of Texas at Dallas, is an interdisciplinary lab dedicated to the works that have emerged from the collision of various fields.
This compilation consists of a total of twenty-five papers (Eleven theses and Fourteen publications). Established on the works of past lab members, this collection has been broadly divided into two sections. The first section is a compilation of all the Masters and Doctorate theses written and presented by members of the ArtSciLab. The lab’s primary objective is to enhance the academic and professional achievements of its members as they transition from the protective confines of School to enter the broader real-world landscape. Despite the lab’s efforts, not all members have been able to complete publishable work, instead, the work they did with the lab contributed to their degrees and academic theses. Therefore, adding the theses to the collection would enhance their credibility within their fields and allow for a larger audience to their work and skills.
The second section is a compilation of all the publications made by the lab members in the last ten years. These papers and projects have been self-published within the lab and have been accessible on the website all this while. However, we now feel the need to compile them all together and make it easier to access in one place for all who might be interested. ArtSciLab members have worked in fields beyond their personal niche and comfort to create these publications. These papers are either works of individual interest or collaboration with peers from other specializations. These are the projects that justify their existence and are further proof of the emergence of the fields of arts and science.
As you embark on a multi-dimensional voyage within the pages of this collection, you experience the transition of technology into art, enjoy the intersection of philosophy with everyday existence, and the evolution of society through these ever-expanding dialogues. “ASL Over The Years” persuades its readers to explore the connections where each and every chapter offers a window into a world that is both, novel as well as familiar. The original plan was to publish the work digitally, which would further allow for easier access to all the papers mentioned in the book. However, when published physically, this would not be possible. Thus, when distributed in print format, the book acts as a physical guide to as well as an acting summary of the projects done by the ArtSciLab.
Let the intellectual odyssey begin, as we traverse the nexus of innovation, creativity, and contemplation that shapes our world today and the world that is yet to come.
Swati Anwesha
Experimental Publisher
UTD ArtSciLab
Theses
This MFA thesis is about spreading the awareness of domestic violence that has risen since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic. Photo montage videos will exhibit a variety of notecards that will shed light on a glimpse of survivors’ or their confidants’ thoughts after or during a critical predicament.
By including graphic design images, I will show statistics on the drastic rise of domestic violence during and after the covid-19 pandemic. Through this creative project, I iterate on my initial participatory installation (2020). My installation creates a connection with survivors, their confidants, and viewers.
Occupying public space is a common action and dynamic among people. People can stay in a park occupying a bench for an afternoon or sit in a train station hallway waiting for the train. People could have many different purposes to occupy the public. Dancing in public spaces is an everyday activity in street dance communities. In the case of Taipei Expo Park, there are spots often occupied by street dancers for practicing or rehearsing their dance.
While Taipei Expo Park had met multiple times of transformations by the government for different uses and policies, these public spaces are originally not designed for the activity that street dancers do. This phenomenon shows there is a gap between the design of the space and its usage by people who enter it. Under the paradigm of designing public spaces, “community-building” (社區營造 Shequ Ying Zao) is one of the most popular terms in Taiwanese discourse on the topic of urban planning.
This paper seeks to understand how street dancers complicate the idea of community – building by reappropriating a space when they enter it, and what this means when an urban design plan does not meet the people’s needs, necessitating them to reshape the meaning of urban design. He wants to raise street dancers in Taiwan as an example that challenges the meaning of this community-building interaction between the government and the people, and how this phenomenon shows the position of the dancers in the social hierarchy, which embodies the theory of Bourdieu’s cultural capital and symbolic violence.
This project is a collection of interactive art installations that addresses the adverse environmental effect of the global manufacturing process considering the textile industry of Bangladesh as a case study. I will use copyright-free sources; for example, World Resource Institution, BreezoMeter, Google images of pollution, etc., and find out which components of the environment are being affected. The project Reflected Reality is an attempt to emphasize environmental communication and encourage our collective responsibility. The project will demonstrate that developed countries share a crucial responsibility as the primary consumer of products manufactured in these polluted countries. The project will outline different facets of environmental pollution and illustrate how workers and general people from these polluted countries suffer because of the manufacturing process.
In this thesis, I observe the representations of social media usage through a cultural studies lens, in both fiction film and television within the American educational setting. I analyze a curated list of films and television series that contain these depictions of human behaviors, interactions, and dialogue in recent years, to explore the possible effects these representations have on the targeted audience. I extract and examine the possible messages producers send through this medium. In parallel, this thesis is written at the time when the social media profession has come of age. It also emphasizes the critical need to research these media during a time of high internet usage in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic brought a change to the way more humans work. This paper includes three sections: 1) the possible on-screen reallife behaviors, categorized as desirable v. undesirable outcomes 2) discuss the social implications these representations of social media have on American students and popular culture 3) and how this new media has created human hybrids, and evolved our language. Lastly, I evaluate these discoveries in terms of representation, actuality, accuracy and argue why it is important to research these portrayals and the crucial need to represent the beneficial outcomes of social media usage more frequently.
Alzheimers disease is a developing disease during middle or old age that demolishes memory and important mental functions due to the decline of the brain. Alzheimers disease, also
known as Dementia, is one of the most common diseases in people over the age of sixty five. It can be caused by a combination of genetics, lifestyle, and environmental factors which can effect the brain over time. The main symptoms of Alzheimers are confusion and memory loss. Many people experience a combination of symptoms that are cognitive, behavioral, mood related, and
psychological. Treatment for this disease can involve cognitive-enhancing medication. However, this can only temporarily improve the symptoms. Although, there is no cure for people that have Alzheimers, music has been shown to be a very powerful tool for minimizing symptoms and recalling memories for these patients.
This research project developed metrics, tools, and a training program that help experts from different fields and diverse publics to collaborate on finding hidden insights for future-making and on solving the wicked problems of the world. Current transdisciplinary practices and tools in this area have a limited scope, mostly concentrated in the fields of translational medicine and environmental sciences. This project blends together research trends and theoretical discourses from a wide array of academic fields to build the Transdisciplinary Intelligence (TDIQ) framework, a cohesive and complementary theory of transdisciplinary knowledge production and the societal impact of industry. The framework includes a double-helix training program consisting of an apprenticeship and a simulation meant to prepare individuals for transdisciplinary work. The framework also offers a portfolio of quantitative and qualitative instruments to measure the Transdisciplinary Intelligence of individuals, collectives, organizations, and other networks, as well as a Transdisciplinary Intelligence Inventory that assesses the context/environment in which these actors operate. This Transdisciplinary Intelligence approach to knowledge production, innovation, and problem-solving stands to benefit a variety of stakeholders, such as research institutions, innovation-focused organizations, policy-makers, and governmental agencies. The results from the research herein have implications for higher education, research practices, training for the jobs of tomorrow, and the co-production and co-design of desirable futures.
Development of a design concept for a campus structure requires understanding of the identity of the academic institution. Identity is shaped by present uniqueness, the history-the past narrative that led to the present, and the institution’s aspirations for the future. All these components of identity formation were considered in the development of a design concept for a proposed multi- functional structure serving both the arts and the sciences disciplines at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) campus. UTD is a beneficial product of settlement colonization; Native American history is currently absent from its identity. The developed design concept takes inspiration from Native American Caddo Tribe who used to live in North and Northeast Texas and UTD’s institutional distinctiveness and future aspirations. To convey this design concept to an audience, Augmented Reality (AR) technology was used. AR allows digital contents to be seen through a phone or tablet camera at real world locations. The project through AR provides the audience visualization and walk around experiences of digital versions of Caddo huts, crops, and pottery from the past in real world scale. In addition, the AR experience will show to the audience the proposed multi-functional planetarium in digital real-world scale designed considering all 3 components unique to UTD’s institutional identity and the artist’s own background. Both these AR experiences appear at a current parking lot where the future Arts Village is planned according to UTD’s 2018 Masterplan.
The use of artificial intelligence and biotechnology in art has led to a radical reformulation of theater as living performance. These technoscientific practices have displaced the subject of performance and produced various new discourses: In this study, I propose to make use of these practices to expand the frame of theatricality to the realm of artificial life art. The displacements operated by means of theatricality in the artistic field are taking place both on the level of the artworks and the level of discourse. In light of such operations, we see the potential of transformation relying on the use of these materials in theatrical aesthetics, as well as the obstacles found in them. Taking place between the arts and the techno-sciences, the study proves that the theatricality of technological works relies on the artifice of language.
Digital game development is a critical tool in game studies due to its ability to communicate and its academic value as a mode of understanding the medium. Understanding digital game development and gaining some appreciation of the complexities of development, whether by direct development experience or indirect observation of the process, must be a goal for game studies scholars. Blackboxing, according to Bruno Latour, is when a machine or process runs so efficiently that no one bothers to examine it (Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on The Reality of Science Studies, 1986). While this is the goal of any good developer, game studies scholars should seek to look within the black box and understand development. Digital game scholars should understand the fundamentals of digital game development. In my work, I have reviewed the existing literature produced by game studies scholars related to the process of development to explore the ways that scholars have discussed and utilized development. I also examined ways that developers write about and approach digital game development exploring how these related to game scholarship. I studied a strong example of digital game development in scholarship by approaching the text Metagaming, which utilizes development at the end of each chapter. I examined the game Doki Doki Literature Club to further explore how development and development tools are used in the process of play, considering the ways that development itself can become a tool. I then explore The Art of Failure to examine the game developed in collaboration with Jesper Juul to see the benefits of collaborative development. I look at the games Super Meat Boy and Stardew Valley as examples of small team and solo development to better understand how scholars can utilize these development methodologies. I then used the methods of solo development and made a game. I documented the process of developing Game Lab Sim extensively to explore further scholarly development. This work contributes to the growing body of literature approaching digital games as scholarly artifacts. It is the intent of this work to call to game studies scholars to open the black box and engage with the act of digital game development. This work does not intend to engage with other fields or act as a tool of gatekeeping; instead, it is the intention of this work to interact with game studies scholars and development scholars. This work recommends that scholars actively engage with and study the development process.
Digital interactive games, or video games as they are more commonly called, have the substantial potential to involve players in the act of story creation. Though not all video games contain a narrative with which the player can interact, many do. These games, known as digital interactive narrative games, purposefully embed a narrative structure and allow the player to interact with narrative elements in order to produce a unique story product. Thus, while not all games should be considered narrative media, this text deals with those that can. This text, therefore, begins by addressing the counterproductive argument that suggests video games are not a narrative form of media. Instead, this text posits that, if we acknowledge that digital games have narrative potential and that many game developers want to incorporate narratives into games, then we can likewise proceed with inquiries about how digital games support story creation. While some Game Studies scholars argue that the inclusion of a narrative limits a player’s agency, this text suggests that such arguments not only misrepresent how narrative structures lead to the creation of stories but also how those narrative structures support numerous type of player agency. As such, this text begins by examining narrative theory and its structures in order to show how those structures map to digital interactive narrative games. Next, this text similarly engages with social agency theory to consider new ways of understanding the states and types of agency players possess in digital interactive narrative games. Based on these analyses, a set of evaluative criteria is generated to aid in the assessment of narrative and agency in digital interactive narrative games. These criteria are then tested and applied in a series of three case studies of four digital interactive narrative games: Mass Effect 2, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Kentucky Route Zero, and The Banner Saga. Two primary conclusions are drawn in this text. The first is that players of digital interactive narrative games act as agents who simultaneously perform as both the narrator agent and the character agent found in traditional, non-procedural, narrative mediums. The second is that agency is not static in games, nor is agency of a single type. Rather, there are different types of agency a player can possess and maintain, and these occur at different times and to different degrees. The level of agency a player maintains will always be in flux; as the player interacts with the game, its rules, and its procedures, the player also interacts, mediates, and negotiates agency within the world the game creates. Similarly, the types of agency the player may experience are numerous. Given the focus of this text, two kinds of agency are directly considered: narrative agency and ludic agency. By neither oversimplifying the understanding of narrative nor of agency, this text, establishes new ways and new methods for understanding and analyzing digital interactive narrative games and the ways in which these games are and can be designed to contain a well-formed narrative while also establishing ways for the player to intervene and participate in the creation of a story.
Numerous studies show a correlational relationship between the study of music and academic achievement, but what principles of music study enhance the higher order learning skills required for academic excellence? This research study looked at the experiences of students at UT Dallas taking music and sound design classes who are not music majors, through a Qualtrics survey and follow-up interviews. The data from the survey and interviews was analyzed using phenomenological methods. Additionally, three cohort comparisons were conducted: music and sound design students; STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) majors and non-STEM majors; and ATEC (Arts, Technology and Emerging Media) majors and other STEM majors. From the analyses, we conclude students who have taken music and sound design courses feel that those experiences enhance their lives in many ways, and the majority of them feel it enhances their academic abilities. Students benefit by the nature of their experiences in music and sound design, but they benefit the most from the more analytical aspects of music and sound design courses. Those that had taken music theory saw a great benefit from those experiences. They benefit from the experience of listening to aural streams for extended periods of time with attentiveness to detail. Students experience “flow” during music or sound design experiences, which may transfer to other subjects. Students benefit from the two-dimensional nature of both music and sound design by the requirement of analyzing a score or sound design project in both the vertical and horizontal directions. The results of this work can lead to future research projects, and use the specific skills that were reported by students as a testing ground for evidence-based research. Further, the study has pedagogical implications for curriculum in both music and sound design. Courses should place more emphasis on the analytical skills that transfer to other academic subjects. While study in music and sound design gives students many psychological benefits, the educational benefits should be studied more and in a controlled environment, in order to significantly add to the body of evidence that courses in the arts can lead to higher academic achievement.
Publications
This white paper covers how to get the images you want, how to tell if an image is generated, how to use it in the real world, and ethical and moral issues that arise from this technology.
If you ever wanted to express your ideas really fast, usually you’d make what we call a napkin sketch, something to write down the overall concepts so we can see if the idea is worth pursuing. The technology which he used helps create what he would consider very refined napkin sketches. Here is an AI model called DALL-E 2. It was developed by a company called OpenAI and the model generates images you want from a text or image input. What I have been trying to do is explore the limits as to what the tool can do, and the functionality of this. What are its implications?
One thing he noticed about this is that there are mainly two types of people who generate images. One from the first type would keep his prompts vague and use it to generate new ideas. The second type he calls the shopping list prompters. One from this group would have an image in his head and use the AI to create it, listing as much detail as possible.
But how is this useful? He had a friend who he met from this interest get to the New York Times because he submitted one of his generations to an art contest and won. Inspired by this, he teamed up with a friend to make a demo game to show that you could get ideas for game assets with AI-generated art. He also plans on printing out stickers based off of AI generations but as of right now he does not have access to that technology.
Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a subfield in computer science to study and improve computational tasks, such as working processes, human factors and ergonomics, and psychological effects. However, its origin and development as a well-educated, middle-class, and heterosexual Western white men-dominated territory make it subject to cultural biases and problematics. With global consumerism in computing technologies and new schools of thought, HCI faces multiple challenges from various disciplines.
This paper confronts HCI regarding its Western, masculine, anthropocentric, and user-centered characteristics. Drawing on Eastern philosophy, feminism, and posthumanism, the paper elaborates on the concept of art of living practicing in HCI and frames it as aesthetic HCI. The paper analyzes four dimensions of arts-of-living in HCI (virtues and values, cultural spectra, social and emotional interaction, and safety) and proposes ten heuristics in designing such an interaction between humans and computers.
The “Student Hiring Whitepaper Version 2.0” details the findings of an experiment conducted by student lab participants to direct the recruiting and recruitment process with the extension of the version 1 white paper. The lead author presents crucial insights that were learned during the hiring process to solve the questions concerning it and to encourage current and potential members in realizing its intricate nature. It explores the factors that are considered when employing students for the position of Communication Producer.
In this era of Big Data, companies produce tons of data every day and it seems to grow exponentially with time and become more complex. Storing, processing, and analyzing such huge amounts of unstructured data becomes a costlier and more tedious process. Many companies shifted their local storage to Cloud services that provide them with advanced features to handle and process such huge amounts of data and analyze them in an optimized way. Here we propose some of the federated query strategies to query your data stored in different cloud services and in different regions. We have used Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the primary cloud service provider to query data stored in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. In experiments, we demonstrated the optimized ways and suitable platforms to perform SQL join queries. We observed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) outperformed all other cloud service providers when it comes to cost-cutting methods for federated queries and partitioning of data stored in a cloud database.
Social-media has become an important part of digital web life, the effect it has on financial decisions is also increasing. The social media conversations on websites like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook are having an ever-increasing effect on stock prices as well as the way in which companies make decisions. This has made it important to analyze this data to make accurate predictions of stock prices in the future. In this paper, we try to analyze financial discussions among users of Reddit by extracting hidden patterns, themes, and user characters to predict future actions and consequences on the market. We explore techniques based on natural language processing to pass conversations through the data pipeline along with extracting stock tickers, manual as well as automatic theme extraction, and word clouds. We also discuss common text processing techniques which can also be applied to other problems involving text analysis along with a co-relation model focusing on sentiment analysis as a predictor of stock movement.
At home dialysis methods have become increasingly popular due to the ease of adaptation of personal schedule. Home dialysis is not without fault, however. Running the risk of inadequate dialysis performance, psychosocial burdens arising from isolation and physical fatigue, and possible demand for a caregiver are common disadvantages for patients. Unfortunately, with the knowledge we currently possess, dialysis is at a stage where very little improvement can be made to reduce the time of treatments in both home and clinical settings. However, quality of life improvements and strategies are yet to be matured.
Based on study conducted of patients, quality of life priorities for patients included fatigue, coping skills, ability to travel, free time, family impact, employment, and sleep. Among these, fatigue plays a major role in compiling other quality of life concerns. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to provide a solution to at-home dialysis patient fatigue through the use of robotics. The scope was further narrowed targeting only Peritoneal Dialysis (PD) patients as there exist a larger distribution of at home patients for PD. Existing technologies in robotics was considered including computer vision, autonomous navigation, etc. The result is an idea for a medical robot assistant that can detect and act upon fatigue levels in patients reducing psychosocial burden.
In this paper, we begin an attempt to understand and explain the ontological origins, epistemological structure, and both social and neurological mapping of concepts. Through mapping out complex networks of concepts, people, and books from small scale local environments to inter-continental links, we attempt to analyze connections in new ways. The aim of this is to gain insight into how distributed cognitive networks unfold and form, along with finding novel ways of revealing latent or hidden structure in such networks. In analyzing the network of concepts, people, and books that constitute the ArtSci lab at UT Dallas and expanding our scope to an ever-evolving international web of concepts and people, we seek to reveal any patterns that emerge across levels of analysis within these distributed cognitive networks. To explore this in an applied way, the conceptual basis and initial steps of three different experimental projects will be detailed. Brain of Books (B.o.B.) seeks to find the conceptual links between books on the shelves in our lab. Further, it aims to find the relevance of these connections for interlinking people in the lab, authors of titles and those cited within titles. Constellation Mapper is an online forum for facilitating the formation of a widely distributed network of people and concepts as a social media platform. Digital Iterative Glossary (D.I.G.) focuses on forming evolving glossaries of concepts and context-relevant definitions for groups or networks of people (e.g., the ArtSci Lab). In this paper, we will consider the area of 4E cognitive science as the contextual landscape.
We will lay out this perspective and its relevance and various implications on the current topic and set of projects. As well, we will detail the reasons for the object of study (books) in the experimental approach of the B.o.B. project and have a discussion on fractality and spreading activation in connection to complex networks. Finally, preliminary steps, methods, and results will be detailed, along with a discussion on the potential steps to come.
The pandemic moved us to virtual world and video meetings changed the way to interact with each other. The O.A.S.E.S (Our Art Science Experimental Seminars), previously called Watering Hole’s conducted by ArtSciLab also moved to hybrid format and it was great opportunity to analyze the meetings using recordings from a data perspective. This white paper summarizes the step-by-step procedure to visualize these seminars right from collecting data to creating visualizations.
We explore techniques based on natural language processing to pass conversations through data pipeline along with creating word cloud visualizations and analyzing sentiment of the text. We also discuss the ways to extend this idea to create time-varying word clouds and video recordings of the meetings.
This project aims to assist users during the sudoku-solving process, which could help users know if they are solving the puzzle correctly. The user needs to input an image of a 9×9 Sudoku grid which the model will use to solve the puzzle. The model is developed in Python using image processing, optical character recognition, and a backtracking algorithm. These techniques are used in cutting edge technologies like the autonomous vehicle for parking assistant, detecting lanes enabling security, enabling virtual advertisement in sports, etc.
This Esports Cyberathlete Development (ECD) project launched by the University of Texas at Dallas’ ArtSciLab aims to contribute to design one of the first new sports of the 21st century.
Our efforts aim to:
(1) Promote positive values obtained from participating on an Esports team;
a. Investigate the enhanced cognitive abilities through the strategically-complex gameplay of Esports
b. Investigate the positive social developments that occur in and out of the Esports environment
(2) Focus on relieving the stigmatized universe of Esports concerning gender stereotypes and effects on intellectual performance;
a. Our research aims to increase overall inclusivity among various demographics and how its benefits are not discriminatory towards any gender
(3) Help to integrate the skills learned by the Esports players into their lives during and after their Esports careers;
a. Analysis of cognitive skills acquired by gamers during their gameplay, how such skills can generally transfer to real-world application, and to increase their executive longevity.
Tale of Two Thinking Systems (ToTTS) WHAT is ToTTS? • ToTTs is an initiative to teach and learn art and science in the ways that brains work. • Art-based teaching of science or science-based teaching of art can encourage multi-layered thinking systems in our brains. • Examples: Activating multi-modal sensory systems, engaging attention using novel and incongruent concepts or learning to take divergent paths of cognitive processing. • This transdisciplinary teaching will bring more fruitful learning outcomes because it helps facilitate the way that our brains work. WHY ToTTS? • Previous studies suggest different ways of “thinking,” for example, one is fast, intuitive and implicit thinking and another is slow, reason based and explicit thinking • Traditionally, teaching science mainly focuses on slow, reason-based, and explicit thinking, while teaching art usually encourages fast, intuitive, and implicit thinking. • This traditional pedagogical approach might not optimize the utility of how our brains actually work according to contemporary cognitive science. HOW does ToTTS work? • We have been developing and implementing programs, courses, and studies to pursue this transdisciplinary teaching and learning. • Each program has or is developing an evaluation plan, and a large-scale evaluation will be developed also. • We are currently planning to launch a large-scale initiative throughout the campus and toward extended communities.
In common parlance, scholars often talk about the ‘tree of knowledge’, a metaphor that is reflected in the way that institutions (such as universities, funding agencies, and assessment units) structure their organizations. Art-science & humanities education that seeks to bridge usefully between different disciplines often runs into many obstacles, both intellectual and institutional. In a tree of knowledge metaphor, the branches grow apart and don’t reconnect. In addition, art-science-humanities education draws on disciplinary, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary methodologies; as a result it is often not useful to talk of ‘best practices’ that standardize methodologies, but rather of ‘good practices that enable non-disciplinary approaches. The CDASH cloud curriculum seeks to map the various pedagogical approaches being used by educators internationally, but also to help make the community of practice visible to itself. As an astrophysicist teaching in a school of art and technology, I have been labelled unqualified to teach in this area as I don’t have a degree in art or in technology. Through the CDASH cloud curriculum project we hope to develop approaches in education that fit into an ecology of knowledge incompatible with institutions in a tree structure.
In common parlance, scholars often talk about the ‘tree of knowledge’, a metaphor that is reflected in the way that institutions (such as universities, funding agencies, and assessment units) structure their organizations. Art-science & humanities education that seeks to bridge usefully between different disciplines often runs into many obstacles, both intellectual and institutional. In a tree of knowledge metaphor, the branches grow apart and don’t reconnect. In addition art-science-humanities education draws on disciplinary, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary methodologies; as a result it is often not useful to talk of ‘best practices’ that standardize methodologies, but rather of ‘good practices that enable non-disciplinary approaches. The CDASH cloud curriculum seeks to map the various pedagogical approaches being used by educators internationally, but also to help make the community of practice visible to itself. As an astrophysicist teaching in a school of art and technology, I have been labelled unqualified to teach in this area as I don’t have a degree in art or in technology. Through the CDASH cloud curriculum project we hope to develop approaches in education that fit into an ecology of knowledge incompatible with institutions in a tree structure.
End Note
The ArtSciLab has over the last ten years carried out a number of projects in ‘experimental publishing’. This included a multilingual podcast platform (Virtual Africa) and the ARTECA multimedia aggregator with MIT press.
This book project arose because of discussions about archiving as publishing and how to ensure that audiences far in the future would be able to know about what we have done. It is now apparent that most digital media will not be readily available 100 years from now without large expenses in re-archiving as software and IT evolve; only governments and large corporations will be in a position to keep migrating the files in the ‘cloud’.
Swati Anwesha joined the ArtSciLab a couple of years ago. She is doing a PhD in literature focused on how culture is transmitted through the South Asian diasporas. When she started in the Lab she had the idea of a book modelled on the works of Charles Dickens during the industrial revolution. She compared the social stress of the COVID pandemic to the stress in London in Dicken’s time. In addition, Anwesha has spent part of the pandemic in India and part in Texas and she had rich comparisons of human experiences of the same pandemic in different places.
Initially, I thought book publishing didn’t make sense as part of the lab’s methodologies. This provides some background about what you have read. Prior to the evolution of the printing press, each document, often in the form of a scroll, was a unique handcrafted valuable article, personalized through the design features incorporated by the scribe, owner, bookbinder and others. This has been re-invented recently by the NY Times with the practice of ‘scrolly-telling”; when you scroll on a cell phone page numbers are of no use. So, the idea emerged of printing a book that could be available to readers a few hundred years from now. Acid-free paper and leatherbound and distributed to several libraries around the planet. This would be a simple Rosetta stone immune to climate change.
Artist Jean-Marc Philippe, in 1996 planned a project for an archive to be launched into orbit that would re-enter in 50,000 years. It hasn’t been launched yet, but this book could be launched into orbit from audiences 50,000 years from now when libraries and the internet no longer exist on earth. I served as an advisor.
Misal Shah, Finance Manager of the ArtScilab, will contribute to the next edition his white paper ‘I Cube (I3)’ which stands for Interesting Incomplete Ideas. He has been documenting projects that were started in the lab, but were never finished or documented because the student graduated or dropped out. He has discovered that some of these I3s are still interesting and could be restarted by current lab members. But if there is no trace of the project it becomes an oral history project with mis-remembrances. This has led to the lab strategy that all projects must “leave a trace’ through the process of documentation and iterative white paper publishing.
Finally, almost, digital technologies have enabled cheap and quick re-issuing of a book, new editions. This as part of experimental publishing we term ‘iterative publishing’ We successfully tried this out on Amazon a number of e-books that changed through updated content frequently; if you bought the first edition, you had access to the numerous next editions for free. The book you have just read is not a complete set of everything the ArtSciLab has documented and shared, but when the lab closes in a decade it will be complete.
In addition, the books will be leather bound. The history of book covers is more interesting than you think: check out https://www.leatherboundtreasure.com/p/history-of-book-binding.html . Oops, it’s hard to click on URLs in books. We will deposit the leather-bound book in the UTDallas Treasures Archive, https://utd-ir.tdl.org/ , managed by Matthew Makowka for the Bass School. Leather bound books will be less damaged by humidity and climate change.
The ArtSciLab does not seek to be innovative but rather to be ingenuous. Sometimes ideas from the past are more appropriate than new innovations, and the transfer of old ideas from place to place is often much cheaper than expensive innovations.
Dr. Roger Malina
Co-Director, ArtSciLab
I have been a member of the ArtSciLab since its inception in 2013 and have been present on and off over those 10 years. I recently became the co-director of the Lab, and, in that context, I have had the chance to work more closely with the faculty and students who inhabit the lab, working on various projects and publications.
The diversity of this group is quite astonishing. In 2015, I wrote a paper about “Bridging the Silos” (in fact, I wanted to title it “Breaking Down the Silos” but that seemed unlikely) that explored curriculum that crossed the traditional boundaries that are prevalent in modern universities. That project CDASH (Curriculum Development in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities) is now 10 years old and we intend to relaunch the project to look for changes over the last decade.
It is clear that large problems require large solutions that involve more than one of the silos. It is heartening to see that in the ArtSciLab, we are bridging those silos on a daily basis, with students from the arts, humanities and the sciences, but also the business, computer science and electrical engineering fields. The synergy this creates leads to project that may never have arisen without this facilitating environment.
A survey of the publications over the last 10 years further bears out this synergy. These papers document the work of our students and faculty in art and domestic violence, the textile industry and the environment, hybrid humans, collaboration techniques, AI, digital games, hiring practices, big data, Reddit, health-assisting robots, cybersports and cross-disciplinary curriculum. It’s hard to imagine a single department that would foster these kinds of publications – and this kind of thinking.
It may seem overly optimistic to think that Universities will begin to see that silos are useful in an administrative sense, but don’t encourage the cross-disciplinary thinking that is needed in the 21st century. This compilation of publications in just 10 short years (primarily by both undergraduate and graduate students) demonstrates that the next generation understands that a wider path of scholarship is possible – and even beneficial. The future of scholarship and research is very bright – and our ArtSciLab students, having had the experience of interfacing with other students from other departments and majors – will create research that will go a long way to solving those “large problems” in a way that a silo-driven approach never can. I look forward to reading the publications from the next 10 years.
Kathryn Evans
Co-Director, ArtSciLab
