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....

Update 1 December 2022: You may want to check out a newer version of this figure that I made for my latest book. 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....

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)....

Update 1 December 2022: You may want to check out a newer version of this figure that I made for my latest book. 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....

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....