New book – Relational and multimodal higher education: Digital, social and environmental perspectives
The new book by Dr. Natasa Lackovic (Lancaster University) and c:o/re team member Dr. Alin Olteanu has just been published in the book series Routledge Studies in Multimodality, managed by Professor Kay O’Halloran.
The book Relational and Multimodal Higher Education: Digital, Social and Environmental Perspectives proposes a relational turn by conceptualizing knowledge and pedagogy as relational and multimodal, analyzed through three dimensions of relationality: social, technological, and environmental.
The volume draws on interdisciplinary approaches that make a case for integrating these interconnected and distinct dimensions in higher education theory and practice. Its novelty lies in combining such a variety of perspectives with Peircean semiotics to explore what it means to learn and live relationally. It emphasizes the importance of critical reflection, rooted in an environmental understanding of knowledge and digital media. This approach integrates materiality, place, and space in higher education, positioning caring, critically reflective and imaginative interactions and interpretations as central for knowledge growth. The volume features practical case studies of relational pedagogy through dialogues with diverse higher education practitioners, which embrace expression and creation through more than one dominant modality of communication and being. The book envisions students and educators as relational agents, with relational awareness and responsibility, aware of their multimodal identities. It highlights how a relational multimodal paradigm can serve as a way forward for universities to address global challenges concerning social, (post)digital, and environmental futures.
This innovative book should be of interest to scholars, students, teachers, and policymakers in higher education, semiotics and multimodality, as well as postdigital, sociomaterial and futures studies.
Lecture Series Winter 2023/24: Lifelikeness
We are happy to announce the program for our Lecture Series during the winter 2023/24. The topic of this semester’s series of lectures is Lifelikeness.
Our invited speakers will explore Lifelikeness through different disciplinary perspectives, such as life and technical sciences, humanities, art history and science journalism.
Please find an overview of the dates and speakers in the program.
The lecture series takes place in presence and online from October 25h, 2023 to February 7th, 2024, Wednesdays from 5 to 6.30 pm. Please register with events@test.khk.rwth-aachen.de.
| 25.10.2023 Gabriele Gramelsberger (RWTH Aachen University): Life from scratch | ||
| 08.11.2023 Andrei Korbut (University of Bremen, c:o/re Fellow): Robot, a Laboratory “Animal”: Producing Knowledge through and about Human-Robot Interaction | ||
| 22.11.2023 Emre Neftci (Forschungszentrum Jülich): Neuromorphic Computing: Inspiration from the Brain for Future AI Technologies | ||
| 06.12.2023 Esther Leslie (Birkbeck, University of London): Art’s Mediation as Remediation: On Some Artworks and their reuses of Toxic Materials | ||
| 10.01.2024 Massimiliano Simons (Maastricht University): Towards an Ecology of Technoscience | ||
| 24.01.2024 Ben Woodard (ICI Berlin): Flowers for Agouti: Epigenetics and the Genealogy of Uplift | ||
| 07.02.2024 Michael Friedman (Tel Aviv University, c:o/re Fellow): Bio-inspired Materials and Dreams of Inspiration |
Lecture and discussion with Phil MacNaghten: The knowledge politics of making anticipatory knowledge
On October 12, Phil Macnaghten will give a talk at c:o/re about The knowledge politics of making anticipatory knowledge. This event is part of the 5th STS-Forum at RWTH Aachen University.
Tagung: Briefe des 15. Jahrhunderts als Quellen für interkulturelle Kontakte zwischen Italien und dem Osmanischen Reich
From the 19th to 20th October 2023, a conference on “Briefe des 15. Jahrhunderts als Quellen für interkulturelle Kontakte zwischen Italien und dem Osmanischen Reich” will take place at c:o/re, organized by Florian Hartmann.
Coming up: Lecture Series on Lifelikeness
The lecture series of the winter term 2023/24 will revolve around the topic of Lifelikeness.
Lifelikeness is one of the big challenges of the natural and social sciences, but also of the humanities. The term refers to representations or imitations of life in its many forms. It is so challenging because it questions the limits between life and the inorganic. Lifelikeness also posits questions, such as: can we reproduce the origins of life? Would this tell us anything about what life is? Can we create new forms of life? How are we to relate to technology if it appears to us as if it were alive?
The talks of this lecture series will explore lifelikeness through different disciplinary perspectives: natural, life and technical sciences (e.g., robotics); humanities (anthropology; questions on meaning-making, as stemming from biosemiotics); the arts and art history; science journalism and scientific illustration, as loci of mediation and representation of lifelikeness.
Our invited speakers are Emre Neftci of Forschungszentrum Jülich, Esther Leslie of Birkbeck, University of London, Massimiliano Simons of Maastricht University, Ben Woodard of ICI Berlin, and researchers and c:o/re Fellows Andrei Korbut and Michael Friedman.
Please find the detailed program here.
EASST Review on STS Hub
If you are interested in Science and Technology Studies, we recommend the insightful report on the STS Hub 2023 that our colleague Mareike Smolka co-authored in the EASST Review, here. You can also read about this event on the khk blog.
Nowhere (to) land? Conference @ RRC
The programme of the conference Nowhere(to) to land?, organized by the rhine ruhr center for science communication is now available at this research centre’s website. c:o/re directors Gabriele Gramelsberger and Stefan Böschen will be present at this event, chairing keynotes and workshops.
You can also read more about the mission of the rhine ruhr center for science communication on the c:o/re blog, in Phillip H. Roth’s post.
“The computer is not in itself rigorous” – Professor Øyvind Eide on digital humanities modelling: between the sciences and the history of the humanities
On May 24th, Professor Øyvind Eide delivered a talk at c:o/re on Modelling in digital humanities: between the sciences and the history of the humanities. Øyvind Eide is head of the Institute for Digital Humanities (IDH) at the University to Cologne. The insightful discussion on modelling that he opened revealed not only many common interests between c:o/re and IDH but also how, from the vantage point of digitalization, modelling appears as a key interest in Science and Technology Studies broadly.
Eide’s starting point is that it is misleading to claim a definition of model because anything can be a model of anything else. Efforts to pin it down can only be reductivist to how models are used or irrelevant. Rather, it is insightful to define modelling, as an activity driven by intention. Modelling has a target, namely what is being modelled. This semiotic relation, Eide explains, has to be understood as dynamic. This perspective avoids claims of epistemological objectivity, where represented is deemed unaffected by representation. Eide defines modelling as creative processes of thinking/reasoning that result in meaning, and the negotiation thereof, through the creation and manipulation of external representations. Further, while it escapes definition, a model must always be understood as a media product. Simply, models are mediated.
From this theoretical standpoint, Eide explained the importance and intricacy of numerical mathematics for the digital humanities. This involved a history of the humanities, in reference to notions and means of modelling, that encompassed a broad and illuminating taxonomy. To draw on the role of numerical mathematics in the development of digital humanities modelling, Eide presented the obstacles to be bridged between the scholarly tradition of the humanities and the epistemologies of digital technologies. In brief, the latter are characterised as analogous, continuous, nuanced and hermeneutical, while the latter are formal, rule-based, structured and discrete. This said, Eide further explained that “the computer is not in itself rigorous”.
Any effort to digitalise humanities research, which is a modelling effort, implies a process of intermedial translation. Examples are translating from a paper text page or a paper map page to a scanned text or map page, as a formal model, so to say, in the computer. Of course, from the perspective of the interpreting researcher, the text page is more similar to the scanned text page than to the paper map page. As such, reflection on how models operate at various levels is an analysis of media modalities. Addressing the reduction of complex mathematical models into numerical models, that are computable, then, supposes an intermedial theory of meaning.
These considerations reveal several regards in which a media and semiotic theory of modelling is relevant for contemporary science and technology studies, particularly but not only as an epistemological interest. Having started this dialogue, c:o/re and IDH will now be pursuing ways of collaborating in these directions. We are grateful to Professor Øyvind Eide for this insightful talk.
Professor Klaus Mainzer on Complexity: From Natural and Social Sciences to Artificial Intelligence
On May 17th, we were delighted to host Professor Klaus Mainzer, who delivered a talk on “Complexity From Natural and Social Sciences to Artificial Intelligence”, as part of the the c:o/re Complexity lecture series. Klaus Mainzer is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Philosophy of Science at the Technical University of Munich.
In this talk, he laid a roadmap towards achieving sustainability by starting from theoretical considerations on pattern formation in complex natural systems and moving on to consequences for pattern recognition in complex artificial systems and, then, to discussing complexity in sociotechnical ecosystems.
Recently, results of complexity research have gained salience in machine learning (artificial intelligence) systems (e.g., neural networks, cognitive AI-systems, robots). While complex pattern recognition of AI-systems can and is modelled through statistical learning theory, statistical correlations of data cannot replace causal explanations of events. Mainzer holds that algorithms of causal learning are necessary for the detection of causal models behind the statistical distributions of data. Causal learning, then, would be a first step from weak AI with probabilistic learning to strong AI.
Professor Mainzer explained that the evolution of complex systems demonstrates the critical importance of pattern recognition for learning in general. This is confirmed, as an important example, by results in machine learning, which relies on pattern recognition, as enabled by the mathematical modelling of pattern formation. Shedding light on the importance of human creativity for innovating sustainable development, Mainzer argued that instability and non-linearity are not sufficient for pattern formation. Instead, he pointed to the crucial role of local activity.
In this view, sustainability on a global scale relies on both enhancing machine-to-machine communication, as incarnate in the Internet of Things and progress in the cultural studies, namely the stimulation of human creativity and plurality. Herein it occurs that what may be overlooked as merely theoretical consideration on the mathematics of complexity, actually, has profound implications for human societies, culture, cognition and beyond. The expansion of human societies onto the virtual spaces of the Internet, crossing formerly perceived boundaries and limitations, illustrates the importance of the notion of complexity for understanding contemporary technological, media and cultural processes. As Professor Klaus Mainzer stated, “we cannot programme innovation but we can incentivise it”.
On New Media Imaginaries: Alin Olteanu @ National School of Political and Administrative Studies
Alin Olteanu is a guest speaker at his alma mater College of Communication and Public Relations, on May 10. He will give a talk on the course New Media Imaginaries within the Branding through social media, led by Dr. Bianca Cheregi.
For more information, see here.
