Salford postgraduate annual research conference (SPARC) 2012 proceedings

These proceedings bring together a selection of papers from the 2012 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC). They reflect the breadth and diversity of research interests showcased at the conference, at which over 130 researchers from Salford, the North West and other UK universities presented their work. 21 papers are collated here from the humanities, arts, social sciences, health, engineering, environment and life sciences, built environment and business

The Inhuman Overhang: On Differential Heterogenesis and Multi-Scalar Modeling

As a philosophical paradigm, differential heterogenesis offers us a novel descriptive vantage with which to inscribe Deleuze’s virtuality within the terrain of “differential becoming,” conjugating “pure saliences” so as to parse economies, microhistories, insurgencies, and epistemological evolutionary processes that can be conceived of independently from their representational form. Unlike Gestalt theory’s oppositional constructions, the advantage of this aperture is that it posits a dynamic context to both media and its analysis, rendering them functionally tractable and set in relation to other objects, rather than as sedentary identities. Surveying the genealogy of differential heterogenesis with particular interest in the legacy of Lautman’s dialectic, I make the case for a reading of the Deleuzean virtual that departs from an event-oriented approach, galvanizing Sarti and Citti’s dynamic a priori vis-à-vis Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. Specifically, I posit differential heterogenesis as frame with which to examine our contemporaneous epistemic shift as it relates to multi-scalar computational modeling while paying particular attention to neuro-inferential modes of inductive learning and homologous cognitive architecture. Carving a bricolage between Mark Wilson’s work on the “greediness of scales” and Deleuze’s “scales of reality”, this project threads between static ecologies and active externalism vis-à-vis endocentric frames of reference and syntactical scaffolding

Exploring ‘events’ as an information systems research methodology

This paper builds upon existing research and commentary from a variety of disciplinary sources including Information Systems, Organisational and Management Studies, and the Social Sciences that focus upon the meaning, significance and impact of ‘events’ in both an organisational and a social sense. The aim of this paper is to define how the examination of the event is an appropriate, viable and useful Information Systems methodology. Our argument is that focusing on the ‘event’ enables the researcher to more clearly observe and capture the complexity, multiplicity and mundaneity of everyday lived experience. The use and notion of ‘event’ has the potential to reduce the methodological dilemmas associated with the micromanagement of the research process – an inherent danger of traditional and ‘virtual' ethnographic approaches. Similarly, this paper addresses the over-emphasis upon managerialist, structured and time-fixated praxis that is currently symptomatic of Information Systems research. All of these concerns are pivotal points of critique found within eventoriented literature. An examination of event-related theory within interpretative disciplines directs the focus of this paper towards the more specific realm of the ‘event scene’. The notion of the ‘event scene’ originated in the action based (and anti-academy) imperatives of the Situationists and emerged in an academic sense as critical situational analysis. Event scenes are a focus for contemporary critical theory where they are utilised as a means of representing theoried inquiry in order to loosen the restrictions that historical and temporally bound analysis imposes upon most interpretative approaches. The use of event scenes as the framework for critiquing established conceptual assumptions is exemplified by their use in CTheory. In this journal's version and articulation of the event scene poetry, commentary, multi-vocal narrative and other techniques are legitimated as academic forms. These various forms of multi-dimensional expression are drawn upon to enrich the understandings of the ‘event’, to extricate its meaning and to provide a sense of the moment from which the point of analysis stems. The objective of this paper is to advocate how Information Systems research can (or should) utilize an event scene oriented methodology

Autopoiesis: scaffolding the reflective practitioner toward employability

Sign language interpreters confront a diversity of complex situations in their everyday work. To be able to consider and appropriately respond to such situations, interpreters need robust cognitive reflective frameworks to support them. Since 1993, the University of Wolverhampton’s BA (honors) Interpreting British Sign Language/English course has delivered undergraduate training to aspiring sign language interpreters. The end product has been high levels of “appropriate” graduate employability success, in part due to the strong correlation between what employers regard as essential and desirable in an employee, and the attributes demonstrated by the reflective practitioners created by the program. In this article, the author looks at a range of perspectives in relation to reflective learning, discusses its application in interpreter training, and argues that reflection is one of the essential skills required for effective practice. In order to achieve this skill, however, interpreter educators must establish robust scaffolding frameworks during training. The author provides examples of methods used to build these cognitive frameworks during placement learning modules. It is in part the building of interpreting students’ cognitive reflective framework during training that will provide them with the necessary key tools for professional practice and lifelong learning

Thinking with Groundwater from Chennai: Materials, Processes, Experimental Knowledge

The (under)ground or (sub)terranean environment is a thick, complex, three-dimensional space of ‘nothing but change’ whose utility is essential to sustaining urban life above it. Living with these grounds is living in conditions of unstable hydrogeological emergence. This thesis looks at the multiple, specific, and contradictory ways in which the materiality of groundwater is understood and intervened in: different knowledges and knowledge practices as ways of knowing groundwater in Chennai, South India. First, I ask what groundwater is, and how I might approach it. Through a series of case studies, I develop a methodology for researching groundwater, confronting the problem of how to research and write something that I cannot access. This means talking to different people who access groundwater in different ways, assembling multiple and contradictory accounts in a way that acknowledges and keeps hold of the intra-active tension between materiality and representation. My means of access are the multiple ways that different people, professions, and institutions get at groundwater, as well my own representational practices as further means of grasping at something always at a distance. Through this I ask, what knowledges exist? How are these different knowledges coproduced, and how are they enacted or re-inscribed through scientific, professional, and everyday practices? How, therefore, can thinking with groundwater from Chennai help to read changing city and changing climate together? The format is processual and iterative: I do not set out to clean up the steps by which research methods, analysis, and theory coevolve. Each chapter is an experiment with ways of knowing groundwater. Throughout these different points of view, it is impossible to say quite what groundwater is, other than a set of relations that move in and between the urban climate. These relations appear and are drawn into focus as registers through which to bring together accounts of diverse phenomena. Instead of as a discernible object, I begin to make sense of groundwater as a relational substance, one which is not background to the city’s ongoing reproduction, but is both substantially altered by and co-constitutive of lively urban assemblages

Parametric tools and creativity in architectural practice

This paper empirically tested the relationship between creativity and computing tools in two different architectural practice settings: one that extensively uses parametric tools for design and fabrication and another that predominantly uses conventional CAD tools in design. The paper surveyed 14 parametric practices and 17 non parametric practices from the UK. The results were statistically analysed using IBM_SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences). The analysis of variance between the 2 groups revealed significant differences on the four domains of creativity. Statistical variance between the two groups on originality was big. Also the length of time subjects used parametric tools correlated significantly with three measures of creativity (fluency, variety and elaboration). Cluster analysis on design cognition of the two groups showed significant pattern differences on how each group structures the design process

Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets

This paper discusses the scientific methods that guided the economic research of Simon Kuznets, with particular stress on his approach to measurement and theory. The paper closes with the transcription of a brief autobiographical talk by Kuznets at a dinner in honor of his eightieth birthday.

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal