Hi, my name is Dr. Robert O’Toole. I am an Associate Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Warwick, and Director of (Digital) Student Experience for the Faculty. I am a philosopher, design researcher, and technologist (including having worked as a programmer and software designer). My role is mostly developmental and futurological – that is to say, I facilitate our collective thinking about what the Arts and Humanities will be like in the future (good and bad), what they should be like (just the good), and how we can steer events away from the bad and towards our envisioned ideal world. I do this with groups of people and individuals. It’s important to work at all scales, helping everyone to make good choices, act to develop positive practices, acquiring knowledge, skills and capabilities, and suistaining the communities and systems that amplify our individual powers. Does that sound useful to you? You’re welcome to chat with me any time for advice. But better still, why not join in with some of our activities and projects. If you’re a Postgraduate Researcher (the people who ultimately will be living our dream), you can go further and follow the 10 week certificate course designed specifically for you. If you ‘re an undergraduate or member of staff, you can access our DAHL Shorts sessions and DAHL Workshops (more on that below).
But first, some thoughts on the future and the present from which we hope to build that better world. Other than the usual certainties (death, taxes, increasingly bad pop music), what will it be like? One way to answer this, pulling a trick out of the futurologists tool box, is to look into the past, and identify challenges that were present then and are still present today, despite technological advances – or even ones that have been accentuated as a consequence of new tech. And then look at what smart people do to cope with those challenges. Here’s an example that should be close to all our hearts:
Today I had a conversation with a couple of local entrepreneurs who are developing a psycho therapeautic Virtual Reality app. They have already made amazing progress, but are now encountering an almost wicked combination of practical, ethical, and theoretical issues. Even though I’m not an expert in all of these areas, I was able to provide valuable guidance – drawing upon knowledge from multiple academic disciplines and interdisciplinary research in the Faculty and its wider community (in the field of VR we are at the centre of a wider network). In return, I can feed this back to my academic contacts in ways that may enrich existing research and possibly inspire new research. What was the challenge then? It was that ever present question of how to know who knows when you don’t even know what it is you need to know – especially when that knowledge comes from many different specialisms and those specialisms all have their own modes of organisation. And the answer to the challenge: the University. It’s the place where all of that complexity is collected and made accessible and usable – so long as we organise to make it accessible and usable. That challenge has always been there. And our solution, the University, has evolved ways to address it and to cope with ever changing conditions – especially in the use of digital tools and techniques. The University seems to be the natural form of organisation for doing this. And the 21st Century academic is a key agent in the process. But, and here comes the futurology bit, what if Artificial Intelligence has a greater role in managing and using the knowledge that we develop? That looks likely, for good or bad. So we need to prepare for that future and take interventions now so that we steer it (and our individual fate within it) towards the good and away from the bad. That’s a key concern for the DAHL. We need to understand how knowledge is created, organised, accessed, used, and changed, so that we can understand how new tools and techniques, such as AI, can help us to do it better. Join us in the DAHL as we learn about digital tools now and envision how they will evolve in the future.
In the past I’ve seen several attempts to codify, structure, and systematise the process of knowledge creation, organisation, access, and application in the University. Libraries are obviously an early such attempt. But pretty clearly the Library does not in any way replace the hive of experience and interaction that is live academic activity, especially in the Arts. Much of what we do is hard to capture, even digitally. It’s a multimedia multisensory complexity of actions and thoughts. True, if we have the resources and the ingenuity we can use digital capture tools (such as 360 video) to record, classify, and make available more of it. But there hasn’t been quite the mass digitisation many people expected – maybe because more does not necessarily equal better. We might also move our activity into digital platforms, so that actions are captured by default. This has obvious benefits. Digital by default makes things accessible at a distance in time and space; allows us to start, stop, and restart activity when needed; makes actions traceable, reversible (hit the undo button), and clonable; allows us to search and make connections with everything and anything; and enables “intelligence” (contested term) and agency in algorithms. This is all of great importance, and central to the concerns of the DAHL. But there’s also another factor: the human factor. Let’s think more about this, why it matters to the DAHL, and what we are going to do about it (beginning our Summer 2023 work with a focus on neurodiversity).
For the DAHL Shorts Summer 2023 programme we are going to start with a type of software application that some people, when they first encounter it, love and some hate: mind mapping (using the MindomoA sophisticated browser-based application for rapidly recording information and ideas (text, links, images, audio, video, files etc.) and organising it into either a spider-diagram layout with a central topic (mind map) or an interconnected web of topics (concept map). Large amounts of information m... More web-based application). This is not to be confused with the hand-drawn visual thinking approach promoted in the 70s and 80s by Tony Buzan, although the software can be used for that. The digital version is more often used to organise (and swiftly reorganise) large amounts of unstructured information. A hierarchical tree-like structure is used, with higher levels in the tree (close to the trunk, or central topic) being more general, and lower levels (branches and braches of branches) going into ever more detail. Good versions of this software allow for diverse data types and ways of connecting up topics across separate branches. Many people use this software effectively. Some people claim that it radically enhances their data management, creativity, and/or analytic skills. The latest software has added a collaborative dimension to it. That’s all good, and we will explore thoroughly the possibilities. But it also raises another pressing issue for DAHL: different researchers seem to gain benefit from it in different ways, and focus on different features and techniques. Personally, I have trouble remembering large amounts of information. The tree structure helps. Hiding detail helps. But the ability to rapidly create the structure, then stand back, reflect, rethink, and create a new structure in response, makes it even more memorable and meaningful to me. It sticks in my mind as a mental map, but only if I have worked carefully at getting the structure right. My mind works through structure first, detail second. That makes it sound more rational than it is. In reality my thinking is ragged, a bit chaotic, and a lot creative – often as a result of errors. But that’s just me. You are probably different. Knowing ourselves is so important to understanding how we use technologies, and how we work together forming the kind of richly creative organisation that my entrepreneur friends (described above) find so useful.
So, there you have an introduction to the mission and methods of the DAHL – explore technologies and ourselves as researchers, so as to build the understanding and take the actions needed to be the kinds of 21st Centure Academics in the kind of 21st Century University that we want.
In the next chapter of this exciting journey we will use mind mapping software and techniques to get to know ourselves better, creating a map of our interests, capabilities and needs, to enable a planning process that will inform what we do in the sessions and projects we undertake together.
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