7,306 research outputs found

    Taking the mystery away from shared intentionality: The straightforward view and its empirical implications

    Get PDF
    Ordinary language in Western and non-Western cultures individuates shared mental states or experiences as unitary interpersonal events that belong to more than one individual. However, a default assumption in modern Western thought is that, in this regard, ordinary language is either illusory or merely metaphorical: a mental state or experience can belong to only one person. This assumption is called Cartesian eliminativism and is often taken to be foundational in psychology. It follows that any view that contradicts Cartesian eliminativism is a priori suspected of being “mysterious,” i.e., of not meeting scientific standards. This paper suggests that the very opposite may be the case. The straightforward view explains how individuals assemble and experience a shared mental state as a unitary whole whose components are distributed among the participants. The naturalistic advantages of such a view are brought to light by focusing on developmental science. Since it explains early shared emotions, goals, and attention merely by relying on domain-general, associative processes, the straightforward view is more parsimonious than current psychological theories. Indeed, it abandons the cumbersome postulates of (i) multi-level recursive mindreading and (ii) a special, conceptually elusive phenomenal quality. I outline the distinctive developmental predictions of the view and discuss how it accounts for the functions of shared mental states. As a reductionist, non-eliminativist approach, the straightforward view promises to be viable also for cognitive scientists who have so far worked within the Cartesian framework due to a lack of a rigorous and sufficiently developed alternative

    A Connected World. Social Networks and Organizations

    Get PDF
    This is the submitted version. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this recordThis Element synthesizes the current state of research on organizational social networks from its early foundations to contemporary debates. It highlights the characteristics that make the social network perspective distinctive in the organizational research landscape, including its emphasis on structure and outcomes. It covers the main theoretical developments and summarizes the research design questions that organizational researchers face when collecting and analyzing network data. Then, it discusses current debates ranging from agency and structure to network volatility and personality. Finally, the Element envisages future research directions on the role of brokerage for individuals and communities, network cognition, and the importance of past ties. Overall, the Element provides an innovative angle for understanding organizational social networks, engaging in empirical network research, and nurturing further theoretical development on the role of social interactions and connectedness in modern organizations

    Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined

    Get PDF
    Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders

    ENABLING KNOWLEDGE SHARING BY MANAGING DEPENDENCIES AND INTEROPERABILITY BETWEEN INTERLINKED SPATIAL KNOWLEDGE GRAPHS

    Get PDF
    Knowledge sharing is increasingly being recognized as necessary to address societal, economic, environmental, and public health challenges. This often requires collaboration between federal, local, and tribal governments along with the private sector, nonprofit organizations, and institutions of higher education. To achieve this, there needs to be a move away from data-centric to knowledge sharing architectures, such as a Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure (GKI). Data from multiple organizations need to be properly contextualized in both space and time to support geographically based planning, decision making, cooperation and coordination. A spatial knowledge graph (SKG) is a useful paradigm for facilitating knowledge sharing and collaboration. However, interoperability between independently developed SKGs from different organizations that reference the same geographies is often not automated in a machine-readable way due to a lack of standardization. This paper outlines an architecture that automates interoperability and dependency management between SKGs as they are formally published by version and period of validity. We are calling this approach a spatial knowledge mesh (SKM), as it is a specialization of the data mesh architecture along with the concept of a common geo-registry to facilitate knowledge sharing more easily. The initial implementation, called GeoPrism Registry, is being developed as an open-source spatial knowledge infrastructure as a platform to help countries meet their NSDI and GKI objectives. It was fist funded and deployed to support ministries of health and is more recently being utilized in GeoPlatform.gov

    IMAGINING, GUIDING, PLAYING INTIMACY: - A Theory of Character Intimacy Games -

    Get PDF
    Within the landscape of Japanese media production, and video game production in particular, there is a niche comprising video games centered around establishing, developing, and fulfilling imagined intimate relationships with anime-manga characters. Such niche, although very significant in production volume and lifespan, is left unexplored or underexplored. When it is not, it is subsumed within the scope of wider anime-manga media. This obscures the nature of such video games, alternatively identified with descriptors including but not limited to ‘visual novel’, ‘dating simulator’ and ‘adult computer game’. As games centered around developing intimacy with characters, they present specific ensembles of narrative content, aesthetics and software mechanics. These ensembles are aimed at eliciting in users what are, by all intents and purposes, parasocial phenomena towards the game’s characters. In other words, these software products encourage players to develop affective and bodily responses towards characters. They are set in a way that is coherent with shared, circulating scripts for sexual and intimate interaction to guide player imaginative action. This study defines games such as the above as ‘character intimacy games’, video game software where traversal is contingent on players knowingly establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate bonds with fictional characters. To do so, however, player must recognize themselves as playing that type of game, and to be looking to develop that kind of response towards the game’s characters. Character Intimacy Games are contingent upon player developing affective and bodily responses, and thus presume that players are, at the very least, non-hostile towards their development. This study approaches Japanese character intimacy games as its corpus, and operates at the intersection of studies of communication, AMO studies and games studies. The study articulates a research approach based on the double need of approaching single works of significance amidst a general scarcity of scholarly background on the subject. It juxtaposes data-driven approaches derived from fan-curated databases – The Visual Novel Database and Erogescape -Erogē Hyōron Kūkan – with a purpose-created ludo-hermeneutic process. By deploying an observation of character intimacy games through fan-curated data and building ludo-hermeneutics on the resulting ontology, this study argues that character intimacy games are video games where traversal is contingent on players knowingly establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate bonds with fictional characters and recognizing themselves as doing so. To produce such conditions, the assemblage of software mechanics and narrative content in such games facilitates intimacy between player and characters. This is, ultimately, conductive to the emergence of parasocial phenomena. Parasocial phenomena, in turn, are deployed as an integral assumption regarding player activity within the game’s wider assemblage of narrative content and software mechanics

    Interdisciplinarity in the Scholarly Life Cycle

    Get PDF
    This open access book illustrates how interdisciplinary research develops over the lifetime of a scholar: not in a single project, but as an attitude that trickles down, or spirals up, into research. This book presents how interdisciplinary work has inspired shifts in how the contributors read, value concepts, critically combine methods, cope with knowledge hierarchies, write in style, and collaborate. Drawing on extensive examples from the humanities and social sciences, the editors and chapter authors show how they started, tried to open up, dealt with inconsistencies, had to adapt, and ultimately learned and grew as researchers. The book offers valuable insights into the conditions and complexities present for interdisciplinary research to be successful in an academic setting. This is an open access book

    Voicing Kinship with Machines: Diffractive Empathetic Listening to Synthetic Voices in Performance.

    Get PDF
    This thesis contributes to the field of voice studies by analyzing the design and production of synthetic voices in performance. The work explores six case studies, consisting of different performative experiences of the last decade (2010- 2020) that featured synthetic voice design. It focusses on the political and social impact of synthetic voices, starting from yet challenging the concepts of voice in the machine and voice of the machine. The synthetic voices explored are often playing the role of simulated artificial intelligences, therefore this thesis expands its questions towards technology at large. The analysis of the case studies follows new materialist and posthumanist premises, yet it tries to confute the patriarchal and neoliberal approach towards technological development through feminist and de-colonial approaches, developing a taxonomy for synthetic voices in performance. Chapter 1 introduces terms and explains the taxonomy. Chapter 2 looks at familiar representations of fictional AI. Chapter 3 introduces headphone theatre exploring immersive practices. Chapters 4 and 5 engage with chatbots. Chapter 6 goes in depth exploring Human and Artificial Intelligence interaction, whereas chapter 7 moves slightly towards music production and live art. The body of the thesis includes the work of Pipeline Theatre, Rimini Protokoll, Annie Dorsen, Begüm Erciyas, and Holly Herndon. The analysis is informed by posthumanism, feminism, and performance studies, starting from my own practice as sound designer and singer, looking at aesthetics of reproduction, audience engagement, and voice composition. This thesis has been designed to inspire and provoke practitioners and scholars to explore synthetic voices further, question predominant biases of binarism and acknowledge their importance in redefining technology

    Expectations and expertise in artificial intelligence: specialist views and historical perspectives on conceptualisation, promise, and funding

    Get PDF
    Artificial intelligence’s (AI) distinctiveness as a technoscientific field that imitates the ability to think went through a resurgence of interest post-2010, attracting a flood of scientific and popular expectations as to its utopian or dystopian transformative consequences. This thesis offers observations about the formation and dynamics of expectations based on documentary material from the previous periods of perceived AI hype (1960-1975 and 1980-1990, including in-between periods of perceived dormancy), and 25 interviews with UK-based AI specialists, directly involved with its development, who commented on the issues during the crucial period of uncertainty (2017-2019) and intense negotiation through which AI gained momentum prior to its regulation and relatively stabilised new rounds of long-term investment (2020-2021). This examination applies and contributes to longitudinal studies in the sociology of expectations (SoE) and studies of experience and expertise (SEE) frameworks, proposing a historical sociology of expertise and expectations framework. The research questions, focusing on the interplay between hype mobilisation and governance, are: (1) What is the relationship between AI practical development and the broader expectational environment, in terms of funding and conceptualisation of AI? (2) To what extent does informal and non-developer assessment of expectations influence formal articulations of foresight? (3) What can historical examinations of AI’s conceptual and promissory settings tell about the current rebranding of AI? The following contributions are made: (1) I extend SEE by paying greater attention to the interplay between technoscientific experts and wider collective arenas of discourse amongst non-specialists and showing how AI’s contemporary research cultures are overwhelmingly influenced by the hype environment but also contribute to it. This further highlights the interaction between competing rationales focusing on exploratory, curiosity-driven scientific research against exploitation-oriented strategies at formal and informal levels. (2) I suggest benefits of examining promissory environments in AI and related technoscientific fields longitudinally, treating contemporary expectations as historical products of sociotechnical trajectories through an authoritative historical reading of AI’s shifting conceptualisation and attached expectations as a response to availability of funding and broader national imaginaries. This comes with the benefit of better perceiving technological hype as migrating from social group to social group instead of fading through reductionist cycles of disillusionment; either by rebranding of technical operations, or by the investigation of a given field by non-technical practitioners. It also sensitises to critically examine broader social expectations as factors for shifts in perception about theoretical/basic science research transforming into applied technological fields. Finally, (3) I offer a model for understanding the significance of interplay between conceptualisations, promising, and motivations across groups within competing dynamics of collective and individual expectations and diverse sources of expertise
    corecore