MIDAS Agenda Setting Workshop 1 (7 February 2014)

This MIDAS Agenda Setting Workshop 1 was the first event in a series of four. This event took place on the 7th February 2014 in the London Knowledge Lab. It included two group activities to explore the synergies, challenges, and potentials for new interdisciplinary insights into the digital and embodiment.

Workshop focus and participants

MIDAS aims to map, exploit and extend the synergies between the digital arts and social sciences to develop an innovative methodological framework capable of capturing a more holistic understanding of embodiment. The first MIDAS Agenda Setting Workshop (ASW1) took place in early February. Drawing on fieldwork to date, its purpose was to:

  • Explore synergies across the multidisciplinary terrain of the arts and social sciences.
  • Identify points of methodological connection.
  • Explore how these might be integrated, combined and exploited.
  • Develop productive themes for analysis.
  • Foster new interdisciplinary insights into the digital and embodiment.
  • Consider the challenges for working across the arts and social sciences.

It brought together around thirty practitioners and researchers from fashion, information experience design, performance and interaction studies, psychology, and education (see our MIDAS blog post Key words: similarities and differences for further information on participants). The majority of participants were connected directly to the project, working within one of the MIDAS case study sites and engaged with one or more of the methods, theories and technologies shown in this MIDAS ASW1 table.

Workshop activities

The workshop used a range of methods to achieve these goals with a focus on experimentation, exploration, hybridizing, borrowing and embracing methods from ‘outside’ of our disciplines.  The workshop focused on two core activities.

Activity 1: Emerging themes

The first activity explored a set of preliminary themes that have been developed from MIDAS case study work to date. The activity enabled the participants to:

  • Explore synergies across the multidisciplinary terrain of the arts and social sciences.
  • Foster new interdisciplinary insights into the digital and embodiment.
  • Interrogate and develop the key themes emerging from MIDAS to inform the next stage of analysis.

The activity focused on four convergent themes that appear across data from the arts and social sciences in relation to methods, the body, and technology: how the digital is conceived; trajectories across the physical and the digital; researcher position; and working with the sensory. An interdisciplinary team spanning a range of arts and social science practices, explored these four themes supported by the use of video data from MIDAS case studies. Using the video data as a concrete anchor for their discussions, each group mapped their ideas on paper (see Figure 1). The discussions highlighted the points of connection across the arts and social sciences using a template designed to unpack the theme in relation to participants situated experiences of the role of research, the body, technologies, and methods. The project team is now using this discussion and continued data analysis to hone the themes: these will be reported on the MIDAS website once developed.

MIDAS ASW1 Emerging themes activity: Closeup of sticky notes from a group discussion.

Figure 1. MIDAS ASW1 Emerging themes activity: Closeup of sticky notes from a group discussion.

Activity 2: ‘Methods in a spin’

This activity employed a speculative imaginative task that played with ideas of randomness and serendipity – concepts that underpin much of how MIDAS participants and others talk about collaborative interdisciplinary work.  Working in small interdisciplinary groups, and using an application called SuperCollider (an environment and programming language for algorithmic composition and real-time audio synthesis, which deals nicely with randomness and aleatory principles), two randomly selected methods were ‘considered for combination’ – one method from the arts and another from the social sciences: each drawn from MIDAS case studies (see Figure 2).

MIDAS ASW1 Methods in a spin activity: Screenshot of the SuperCollider code used for the activity.

Figure 2. MIDAS ASW1 Methods in a spin activity: Screenshot of the SuperCollider code used for the activity.

The group then discussed whether to accept or reject this combination of methods, justified their decision, and explored the potential of using these methods in their own research contexts. This activity engendered conversations from different perspectives and enabled participants to bring together ideas and interrogate their ways of thinking about methods. More specifically, this activity enabled the groups to:

  • Identify points of methodological connection across the arts and social sciences.
  • Explore how these might be integrated, combined and exploited.
  • Consider the challenges for working across the arts and social sciences.

Observations of these sessions enabled MIDAS to gather further data on the possibilities and challenges of research methods across arts and social sciences. This included shared dilemmas such as questions of influence, how to get at participants experiences, and problems associated with generalization; and stark incompatibilities.

Extras

Templates for Activity 1: Digital-physical (PDF, 166 KB) | Digital (PDF, 165 KB) | Researcher position (PDF, 169 KB) | The sensory (PDF, 161 KB)

SuperCollider code for Activity 2: Spinning methods snippet (online TXT/SCD)