Interdisciplinarity

Back in 2012, I published what has become my (by far) most-read blog post: Disciplinarities: intra, cross, multi, inter, trans. There I introduced a figure that I regularly receive permission requests to republish (which I always give, in the spirit of open research). The challenge with the previous blog post has been that I based my figure on a combination of a textual description by Stember and a more limited figure by Zeigler....

At the NordicSMC conference last week, I was part of a panel discussing the topic Rigorous Empirical Evaluation of SMC Research. This was the original description of the session: The goal of this session is to share, discuss, and appraise the topic of evaluation in the context of SMC research and development. Evaluation is a cornerstone of every scientific research domain, but is a complex subject in our context due to the interdisciplinary nature of SMC coupled with the subjectivity involved in assessing creative endeavours....

For some papers I am currently working on, I have taken up my interest in definitions of different types of disciplinarities (see blog post from a couple of years ago). Since that time, I think talking about the need for working interdisciplinary has only increased, but still there seem to be no real incentives for actually making it possible to work genuinely interdisciplinary. This holds when working within an academic setting, and it is even more complicated when trying to bridge academic and artistic disciplines....

I am happy to see that the first point in the new UiO strategy plan is interdisciplinarity, or more specifically: “Et grensesprengende universitet”. Interdisciplinarity is always easier in theory than in practice, and this is something I am debating in a feature article in the latest volume (pages 32-33) of Forskerforum, the journal of the The Norwegian Association of Researchers (Forskerforbundet). I have written about interdisciplinarity on this blog several times before (here, here and here)....

While reading in The biophysical foundations of human movement, I came across a nice illustration (adapted from Zeigler 1990) of the relationships between multi-, cross- and interdisciplinarity. These terms are often used, and I think it helps to have a visual guide for separating them. The idea of the model is that when a field becomes more multidisciplinary it can eventually move towards becoming more cross-disciplinary and finally interdisciplinary. Thinking about the two fields that I feel the mostly associated with myself, i....

It is always difficult to categorise things, since it is always possible to think of other ways of doing it. But here I have tried to include some of the various fields that my work touch upon in my two-axes sketch: The idea is to include this in the introduction of my dissertation.

I am working on the introduction to my dissertation, and am trying to place my work in a context. Officially, I’m in a musicology program (Norwegian musicology ≈ science of music) in the Faculty of Humanities, but most of my interests are probably closer to psychology and computer science. Quite a lot of what I have been doing has also been used creatively (concerts and installations) although that is not really the focus of my current research....