Cultural Shifts
Building a Pedagogical XR Campus Boosting Collective Creativity and Social Interactions
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jung Choi
Since the pandemic, extended or cross reality (XR) technologies have received much-renewed attention and excitement, along with the notion of the metaverse. However, the technological experiences are often limited to entertaining or commercial sectors, and they often create tensions rather than congruities between the virtual body and the real one, a distinction that underpins the social norms and digital divides that alienate certain bodies. In this study, navigating the gaps between the myth (the imagined reality that animates and drives technology forward) and the mess (the practical reality of technology in everyday use), the author explores a sustainable and educational approach to XR by analyzing her own digital humanities project entitled DKU AR Campus. By implementing embodied narratives and story designs and strengthening the relationship between experiencing bodies and environments through the AR program, the project is designed to help students engage better with their educational settings and enhance the sense of self-empowerment by building healthy social relationships with their cohorts. In particular, by implementing the co-creation function, the project encourages students to collectively construct an imagined XR campus that would bring a sense of ownership to the campus. Incorporating the artistic engagement that brings imaginative and creative experiential encounters, the project further suggests XR as a pedagogical interface in digital humanities that asks the fundamental question of how digitality can enhance and augment our humanistic experience in an educational setting, not just reproduce humanities research in digital formats.
Comprehending Economics as a Narrative Form: The Role of Historically-based Storytelling in the Epistemology of Economics View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael H. Turk
As an intellectual discipline economics appears caught in a tension between its affinity with mathematics and physics, on the one hand, and its presentation, even framework, often set in a narrative form, on the other. In the latter case the literary aspects of economics occupy a central place, understood as a matter of rhetoric, whether one traces this approach back to the focus upon persuasion in the writings of Adam Smith or sees it updated in the late twentieth century by economists like Deirdre McCloskey. Critical thinkers about the philosophy of economics like Mary Morgan have extended this treatment of economics to a grounding in storytelling, that might be seen as informing the construction of models or underlying the choice of analogies that shape economic theories. Can economics then be comprehended fundamentally as a matter of narratology? In this paper I shall make the case that narratology does offer significant insights into what informs our understanding of economics, but only if these narratives are grounded in historical experiences, events, and moments. Moreover, efforts to move beyond the oft-cited dichotomy in economic methodology between deduction and induction by explaining how general economic laws or rules may be derived from case studies reinforces the notion that such studies, effectively a form of storytelling in economics, ought to be based upon historical evidence of some sort.
Forming Knowledge: An Aesthetic Approach to Data-driven Thinking View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maja Bak Herrie
Why do some ideas endure, while others end up nearly forgotten? Why do some models resonate and intuitively explain, while others leave us perplexed and puzzled? In the history of statistics, entities such as the Gauss distribution—also known as the ‘normal’ distribution—have been introduced and discussed in technical and mathematical ways, but also used to describe general connections and patterns related to demography, criminology, medicine, and more. When Carl Friedrich Gauss introduced his famous distribution in the beginning of the 19th century, it was used to measure the precision of astronomical observations. However, the intuitive elegance of the bell-shaped curve soon found its way into other disciplines, marking not only a central development in statistics, but also an entirely new way of seeing and thinking about the world through data: a world where measurements of different sorts and from a variety of contexts cluster tightly around a mean, with a rapidly decaying minority of outliers extending along the tails. Yet, what kind of formation of knowledge does a bell curve represent, and why did it seem to offer such a persuasive description of contexts as different as, e.g., average human height, poverty records, or inherited physical and psychological attributes? This paper engages with the aesthetic dimensions of data-driven knowledge production. Using the idea of the ‘normal’ distribution as starting point, it asks how knowledge is produced based on data, and how it manifests itself as knowledge through the means of persuasive diagrams.
