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1. How can sharing knowledge better explain land use changes in Ethiopia?

   Cara Steger, Girma Nigussie (February 2022, Environmental science journal for teens)

   Allison Gamzon and Alexandra Appleton (Ed.)

   When you think about environmental issues, you probably think about science. How does science explain the problem? How can we use science to create a solution? Yet if we only think like scientists, we may miss important details. That is why we need to share knowledge with people who have different perspectives. We shared knowledge with local residents near the Guassa grassland in Ethiopia to discuss how land use had changed over time. They described how they use the land and the benefits it provides. Using satellite technology, we created maps of the area. We then shared these maps with the people of Guassa. Together, we found a link between soil problems and land use changes. We also determined how different management strategies affect land use. Because we shared knowledge with the local residents, we created a more complete picture of what is happening in Guassa. 

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2. p5.fab: Direct Control of Digital Fabrication Machines from a Creative Coding Environment

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533496  

   Subbaraman, Blair; Peek, Nadya (June 2022, p5.fab: Direct Control of Digital Fabrication Machines from a Creative Coding Environment)

   Machine settings and tuning are critical for digital fabrication outcomes. However, exploring these parameters is non-trivial. We seek to enable exploration of the full design space of digital fabrication. To identify where we might intervene, we studied how practitioners approach 3D printing. We found that beyond using CAD/CAM, they create bespoke routines and workflows to explore interdependent material and machine settings. We seek to provide a system that supports this workflow development. We identified design goals around material exploration, fine-tuned control, and iteration. Based on these, we present p5.fab, a system for controlling digital fabrication machines from the creative coding environment p5.js. We demonstrate p5.fab with examples of 3D prints that cannot be made with traditional 3D printing software. We evaluate p5.fab in workshops and find that it encourages novel printing workflows and artifacts. Finally, we discuss implications for future digital fabrication systems. 

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3. Pathways and Structures: Evaluating Systems Changes in an NSF INCLUDES Alliance

   https://doi.org/10.1177/10982140211041606  

   Howley, Caitlin; Campbell, Johnavae; Cowley, Kimberly; Cook, Kimberly (January 2022, American Journal of Evaluation)

   In this article, we reflect on our experience applying a framework for evaluating systems change to an evaluation of a statewide West Virginia alliance funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve the early persistence of rural, first-generation, and other underrepresented minority science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students in their programs of study. We begin with a description of the project and then discuss the two pillars around which we have built our evaluation of this project. Next, we present the challenge we confronted (despite the utility of our two pillars) in identifying and analyzing systems change, as well as the literature we consulted as we considered how to address this difficulty. Finally, we describe the framework we applied and examine how it helped us and where we still faced quandaries. Ultimately, this reflection serves two key purposes: 1) to consider a few of the challenges of measuring changes in systems and 2) to discuss our experience applying one framework to address these issues. 

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4. Mobile brain imaging in butoh dancers: from rehearsals to public performance

   https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.02.26.530087  

   Theofanopoulou, Constantina; Paez, Sadye; Huber, Derek; Todd, Eric; Ramírez-Moreno, Mauricio A; Khaleghian, Badie; Sánchez, Alberto Muñoz; Barceló, Leah; Gand, Vangeline; Contreras-Vidal, José L (February 2023, bioRxiv)

   Abstract Dissecting the neurobiology of dance would shed light on a complex, yet ubiquitous, form of human communication. In this experiment, we sought to study, via mobile electroencephalography (EEG), the brain activity of five experienced dancers while dancing butoh, a postmodern dance that originated in Japan. We report the experimental design, methods, and practical execution of a highly interdisciplinary project that required the collaboration of dancers, engineers, neuroscientists, musicians, and multimedia artists, among others. We explain in detail how we technically validated all our EEG procedures (e.g., via impedance value monitoring) and how we minimized potential artifacts in our recordings (e.g., via electrooculography and inertial measurement units). We also describe the engineering details and hardware that enabled us to achieve synchronization between signals recorded in different sampling frequencies, and a signal preprocessing and denoising pipeline that we have used to re-sample our data and remove power line noise. As our experiment culminated in a live performance, where we generated a real-time visualization of the dancers’ interbrain synchrony on a screen via an artistic brain-computer interface, we outline all the methodology (e.g., filtering, time-windows, equation) we used for online bispectrum estimations. We also share all the raw EEG data and codes we used in our recordings. We, lastly, describe how we envision that the data could be used to address several hypotheses, such as that of interbrain synchrony or the motor theory of vocal learning. Being, to our knowledge, the first study to report synchronous and simultaneous recording from five dancers, we expect that our findings will inform future art-science collaborations, as well as dance-movement therapies. 

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5. Introduction: Caring for Equitable Relations in Interdisciplinary Collaborations

   https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i2.41070  

   Carrigan, Coleen; Wylie, Caitlin D (November 2023, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience)

   Collaborative research between scholars of science and technology studies (STS)and scholars of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is a growing trend. The papers assembled in thisSpecial Section offer both embodied and empirical knowledge on how ethnographers negotiate our roles in integrative research when constrained by what our technoscientific collaborators value, what funders demand, what our home institutions expect, what we want to learn from the worlds we study, and the social transformations we envision in science and society. We grapple with how we as ethnographers can best balance caring for the communities we study, the ones we serve, and the ones we identify with. We take care that knowledge making is political. Race, gender, class, and ability status of scholars intersect with the organizational, institutional, and cultural contexts in which we practice science to shape and be shaped by entrenched power relations.Through a feminist politics of care, this collection transforms tensions in interdisciplinary collaborations into resources that enlarge our understandings of what these collaborations are like for STS ethnographers, make visible certain labors within them and, crucially, enrich our vision for what we want these collaborations to be. 

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