The paper reflects on the working of an interdisciplinary team consisting of researchers and activists from the field of computer science and social sciences involved in developing a user-facing, browser plug-in to detect and moderate instances of online gender-based violence, hate speech and harassment in Hindi, Indian English, and Tamil. There have been multiple calls within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to include qualitative methods in one’s research design. These calls, while attuned to the importance of qualitative methods for HCI, ignore the intercurrent nature of different research methods, disciplines and practices. The paper borrows the concept of intercurrence from Orren & Skowronek (1996) and reorients it to explicate the practice of interdisciplinary research. It argues that intercurrence i.e. (in between, an occurrence within an occurrence) is a useful image to perceive interdisciplinarity wherein we argue that at any given point, an interdisciplinary team navigates multiple, yet simultaneously occurring temporal dimensions of differently disciplined bodies. An awareness of these multiple temporalities adds another dimension to thinking about conflicts and possibilities emerging from interdisciplinary practices and reorients interdisciplinary research towards unexpected outcomes.
The explosion of scientific publications overloads researchers with information. This is even more dramatic for interdisciplinary studies, where several fields need to be explored. A tool to help researchers overcome this is Natural Language Processing (NLP): a machine-learning (ML) technique that allows scientists to automatically synthesize information from many articles. As a practical example, we have used NLP to conduct an interdisciplinary search for compounds that could be carriers for Diffuse Interstellar Bands (DIBs), a long-standing open question in astrophysics. We have trained a NLP model on a corpus of 1.5 million cross-domain articles in open access, and fine-tuned this model with a corpus of astrophysical publications about DIBs. Our analysis points us toward several molecules, studied primarily in biology, having transitions at the wavelengths of several DIBs and composed of abundant interstellar atoms. Several of these molecules contain chromophores, small molecular groups responsible for the molecule's colour, could be promising candidate carriers. Identifying viable carriers demonstrates the value of using NLP to tackle open scientific questions, in an interdisciplinary manner.
The objective of this paper is to explain autopraxeography and to show how this method uses interdisciplinarity to understand lived situations in a complex way. This method is based on the human experience of at least one of the co-researchers. It is situated in a pragmatic co-constructivist epistemological paradigm. It uses a wide range of theories, regardless of their original disciplines, to step back from the lived experience. It is a dialogue between the lived experience and each point of view that can be found through multidisciplinary scientific writings, co-researchers, reviewers, etc. The fact of digging into one's own experiences without being locked into a discipline can allow one to answer disciplinary questions in a way that accepts the complexity of the lived reality. Furthermore, this method, when used by students in a continuing education, process can facilitate their opportunity to become reflective practitioners aware of the need to break down disciplinary barriers.
Ce texte constitue le prologue du numéro 11 du Journal on Interdisciplinary Methodologies and Issues in Science : Penser l'interdisciplinarité en pratique. L'ensemble des 10 contributions est brièvement présenté à partir des fondements qui font l'interdisciplinarité en pratique : les dispositions des chercheurs, leur posture indisciplinaire et le contexte complexe dans lequel s'opère l'interdisciplinarité.
Data lakes appeared a few years ago, introduced in particular to meet the challenges of storing and exploiting IoT data. They were first considered as a new technical and commercial tool, sold by the main database software editors. More recently, they have become the subject of research, in particular to define what a data lake should be, what it should provide in terms of services, and how it should be built. In this work, we have tried to return to the origins of data lakes, starting from the name “lake”. We present here how we worked, between biologists and computer scientists, to understand the links between natural and data lakes. In this article, we first explore the links between the disciplines of biology and computer science before declining these links for the particular theme of lakes. This could appear as a work of transferring knowledge from biology to computer science, and a “simple” application of the concepts. However, we had to interact and understand each other’s concepts and issues to align a possible comparison between the disciplines, for example to determine at what scale to establish the biological comparison, from DNA to the more macro system of the animal and plant ecosystem present in a natural lake. For this reason, we are inspired by a hybrid method based on ecological and logistical network topology to propose the resilient structure for the data lake. Thus, we use the Ecological Network Analysis (ENA) as a bio-inspired method and Graph […]
Since 2019, at the Institut de Recherche sur l'Enseignement des Sciences in Aix-Marseille Université, we have been running a workshop aimed at exploring solutions to the difficulties regularly encountered in interdisciplinary teaching. At regular intervals, this workshop brings together six teachers from different disciplines - from university and high school - who are simply given the time to present and explain to each other the specificities of the discipline they teach, using a basic categorial grid to guide analysis and enable comparison. However, our initial findings indicate that the primary beneficiary of these interdisciplinary encounters is disciplinary teaching itself. In fact, this introspective and collective work has brought to light fundamental implicits, specific or common, to these disciplines that teachers were unaware of; that they had never shared with their students; and that they identified as the source of hitherto unspeakable difficulties encountered by many of them. The hypothesis defended here is therefore that - through an effect of analogies and contrasts - interdisciplinary dialogue can be a formidable tool for reinforcing and clarifying disciplinary teaching, and could play a key role in teacher training.
