Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 10.0, Robert O. Duncan, Grace Axler-Diperte, Joe Bisz, Christina Boyle, Devorah Kletenik, Carolyn Stallard

Publications and Research

The ten-year anniversary (!) of the CUNY Games Conference combines workshops, idea exchanges, interactive participant presentations, playtesting, and playing tabletop games into a two-day hybrid event to promote and discuss game-based learning. The conference focuses on creative pedagogy, such as playful learning activities or games, that teachers can use in the classroom every day. Day 1 featured interactive presentations by attendees, informal idea exchange sessions, and workshops by the conference organizers. Day 2 featured select presentations and workshops, poster sessions, playtesting and game modding, and casual play of tabletop games.

Computer Ethics In Curriculum, Tiya Williams

Publications and Research

Ethics specifically in Computer Curriculum is a growing problem that has yet to be widely addressed. Although, start of computer ethics being taught has been traced back to the early 1940’s it has not been standardized or implemented in all computer curriculum. The objective of this research is to diagnose the reasons why ethics is so crucial in computer curriculum at all levels. I used surveys to investigate whether students were taught ethics in their computer curriculum. I also conducted surveys for professors at universities and colleges if they were taught ethics while obtaining their degree, as well as if …

Logic, Co-Ordination And The Envelope Of Our Beliefs, Rohit J. Parikh

Publications and Research

Each of us has a story which we can think of as a set of beliefs, hopefully consistent. We make our decisions in view of our beliefs which may be probabilistic, in the general case, but simple yes or no as in this paper. Our beliefs are our envelope just as the shell of a tortoise is its envelope.

Decision theory - or single agent game theory tells us when to make the best choice in a game of us against nature. But nature has no desire to further or frustrate our efforts. Nature is mysterious but not malign.

Things …

Student Self-Grading Form, Brett Whysel

Open Educational Resources

This is a word document that students use at the beginning, midpoint, and end of a semester to set relevant goals, measure progress towards goals, and self-grade. It is intended to build motivation, metacognition, and accountability. Instructors may use it on its own or to supplement other assessment tools, and improve the accuracy, validity, and fairness of final grades.

A Call For The Library Community To Deploy Best Practices Toward A Database For Biocultural Knowledge Relating To Climate Change, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Abstract

Purpose – In this paper, a call to the library and information science community to support documentation and conservation of cultural and biocultural heritage has been presented.

Design/methodology/approach – Based in existing Literature, this proposal is generative and descriptive— rather than prescriptive—regarding precisely how libraries should collaborate to employ technical and ethical best practices to provide access to vital data, research and cultural narratives relating to climate.

Findings – COVID-19 and climate destruction signal urgent global challenges. Library best practices are positioned to respond to climate change. Literature indicates how libraries preserve, share and cross-link cultural and scientific knowledge. …

Exploratory Programming In The Arts And Humanities [Book Review], Kelly Hammond

Publications and Research

Exploratory Programming is a testament to what open-access can mean, especially in an e-learning environment. Used in full, it is a free course (that relies on free and open software) from a gifted MIT professor whose pedagogy is clear in structure and tone. He scaffolds, promotes predictive thinking, lauds collaborative learning, and urges readers to do not just to read. Used in part, it can be equally powerful.

21st Century Ecopoetics And Ecotheory, Robert Balun

Open Educational Resources

Ecopoetics is the study of literature that is concerned with ecology and nature. However, beyond just literature about nature, this course will examine how ecology and nature have become complicated in the 21st century, the age of the Anthropocene, the age of the climate crisis and the 6th mass extinction (don’t worry, we will define these and other key terms).

In the 21st century, humans are now confronted with a growing awareness of their destructive impact on the earth, its environments, and its human and non-human inhabitants. In this class we will examine how ecology and nature have become complicated …

My Interdisciplinary Perspective On Climate Change [Natural Sciences], Richa Gupta, Tuli Chatterji, Tao Chen, Rebecca Schwartz

Open Educational Resources

This assignment titled “My Interdisciplinary Perspective on Climate Change” was developed in Fall 2020 as the signature assignment of the STEM Learning Community LC50 for students enrolled in the Biology program of the Natural Sciences department, at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. The assignment targets Integrative Learning and Global Learning Core Competencies, and Digital/Oral Communication Abilities.

For this STEM Cluster, “Climate Change” is the shared theme that connects learning from the different disciplines and helps build students’ overall knowledge on an imperative issue that our planet currently faces. Work on this assignment entails a narrated digital student presentation on the various …

Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …

Accessibility: Disabilities Treasure Hunt, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

This is a treasure hunt game that simulates various disabilities and gives a sense of how frustrating non-accessible content can be for people with disabilities. Suitable for a general audience, no programming experience necessary.

An editable copy is also given, along with ideas about how to make it more accessible.

Philosophical Perspectives, Jochen Albrecht

Publications and Research

This entry follows in the footsteps of Anselin’s famous 1989 NCGIA working paper entitled “What is special about spatial?” (a report that is very timely again in an age when non-spatial data scientists are ignorant of the special characteristics of spatial data), where he outlines three unrelated but fundamental characteristics of spatial data. In a similar vein, I am going to discuss some philosophical perspectives that are internally unrelated to each other and could warrant individual entries in this Body of Knowledge. The first one is the notions of space and time and how they have evolved in …

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 6.0, Robert O. Duncan, Joseph Bisz, Christina Boyle, Kathleen Offenholley, Maura A. Smale, Carolyn Stallard, Deborah Sturm

Publications and Research

The CUNY Games Network is an organization dedicated to encouraging research, scholarship and teaching in the developing field of games-based learning. We connect educators from every campus and discipline at CUNY and beyond who are interested in digital and non-digital games, simulations, and other forms of interactive teaching and inquiry-based learning. These proceedings summarize the CUNY Games Conference 6.0, where scholars shared research findings at a three-day event to promote and discuss game-based pedagogy in higher education. Presenters could share findings in oral presentations, posters, demos, or play testing sessions. The conference also included workshops on how to modify existing …

Enhancing The Study Of Art History Utilizing Computational Thinking: Focus, Abstraction In Art (Modern), Douglas L. Moody, Sandra Cheng

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Mapping In The Humanities: Gis Lessons For Poets, Historians, And Scientists, Emily W. Fairey

Open Educational Resources

User-friendly Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is the common thread of this collection of presentations, and activities with full lesson plans. The first section of the site contains an overview of cartography, the art of creating maps, and then looks at historical mapping platforms like Hypercities and Donald Rumsey Historical Mapping Project. In the next section Google Earth Desktop Pro is introduced, with lessons and activities on the basics of GE such as pins, paths, and kml files, as well as a more complex activity on "georeferencing" an historic map over Google Earth imagery. The final section deals with ARCGIS Online …

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 5.0, Robert O. Duncan, Joe Bisz, Julie Cassidy, Kathleen Offenholley, Carolyn Stallard, Deborah Sturm, Anders A. Wallace

Publications and Research

The CUNY Games Network is an organization dedicated to encouraging research, scholarship and teaching in the developing field of games-based learning. We connect educators from every campus and discipline at CUNY and beyond who are interested in digital and non-digital games, simulations, and other forms of interactive teaching and inquiry-based learning. The CUNY Games Conference distills its best cutting-edge interactive presentations into a two-day event to promote and discuss game-based pedagogies in higher education, focusing particularly on non-digital learning activities that faculty can use in the classroom every day. The conference will include workshops lead by CUNY Games Organizers on …

Teaching With Technology: Using A Virtual Learning Community And Peer Mentoring To Create An Interdisciplinary Intervention, Rebecca Mazumdar, Nadia Benakli, Pamela Brown

Publications and Research

This paper describes the development and implementation of engaging and supportive experiences to promote student engagement, persistence and success at a commuter, open enrollment, public, minority serving institution. Project components included faculty development at the SENCER Summer Institute (SSI) 2016, attended by a team comprised of an academic administrator, full-time faculty from English and math, and part-time faculty in chemistry; creation of a virtual learning community of freshmen enrolled in chemistry, English, and math linked by the specific theme of the environmental impacts of deicing roads with salt and the overarching theme of the impacts of human activities on the …

Historical Effects Of Electronic Interfaces, G James Mitchell

Publications and Research

Electronic interfaces are a primary tool for most professional and personal communication currently happening. Electronics, like the human mind, are limited by the understanding of executing will, or commands. This can be characterized as “interface limitations” of digital technology. Identifying this bottleneck in technological development has been critical in historical changes to both hardware and software technology. Recent medical research examines a novel user interface to reduce task load. I hypothesize, interface developments that take cues from nonverbal human communication enhance and sustain the significance of those technologies in society. By examining pivotal moments of historical technology we can identify …

Women In Science: Why So Few? [Liberal Arts: Math And Science], Reem Jaafar, Benjamin J. Taylor

Open Educational Resources

This assigment was developed in the context of LaGuardia’s Center for Teaching and Learning sponsored Learning Matters mini grant “Connection Between First Year Seminar and Capstone Learning Experiences.” It provides Liberal Arts experience to students across the academic spectrum and is designed for students in LMF 101 (First-Year Seminar for Liberal Arts: Math & Science) and is conducted in conjunction with students from a capstone course, LIB 200 (Science, Technology, and Humanism). The assignment aligns with the Inquiry and Problem-Solving Core Competency and the Written Ability. In this assignment, LMF 101 students research and read several articles centered on the …

On Improvised Music, Computational Creativity And Human-Becoming, Arto Artinian, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

Music improvisation is an act of human-becoming: of self-expression—an articulation of histories and memories that have molded its participants—and of exploration—a search for unimagined structures that break with the stale norms of majoritarian culture. Given that the former objective may inhibit the latter, we propose an integration of human musical improvisers and deliberately flawed creative software agents that are designed to catalyze the development of human-ratified minoritarian musical structures.

Toward The Eco-Narrative: Rethinking The Role Of Conflict In Storytelling, Corinne Donly

Publications and Research

Offered as a response to the increasingly popular call within the eco-humanities for stories that will help humankind adapt to catastrophic planetary conditions, this article proposes “the eco-narrative”—an approach to storytelling that strives to compose with, not for, its nonhuman characters. An extension of eco-critical projects that analyze stories for their depictions of nonhumanity, the theoretical research herein brings ecological analysis of narrative to the level of structure. In particular, it problematizes the dominant plot model of conflict/climax/resolution, suggesting that stories motivated by conflict reinforce dualistic and anthropocentric habits for approaching the animal other. Evaluating two narratives concerning the human …

Records Of The Brooklyn College Mathematics Department, Brooklyn College

Finding Aids

This collection consists largely of handwritten grade books from Brooklyn College’s earliest years. Much of it also relates to the Math Department’s extracurricular activities such as contests. There are only two Subgroups in the collection: Notebooks: Records of Classes in Mathematics 1926 – 1976, and Department of Mathematics General Information.

Factororacle: An Extensible Max External For Investigating Applications Of The Factor Oracle Automaton In Real-Time Music Improvisation, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

There are several extant software systems designed to generate music in real-time using a factor oracle automaton constructed from the musical input of a human improvisor. The impetus for the design of the factorOracle external is neither a desire to supersede these systems nor introduce novel algorithms for traversing the oracle, but rather to provide a fast, canonical interface for the automaton in Cycling74’s Max and, in future iterations, the Pure Data programming environment. Technical features of the factorOracle software are introduced here.

The Mathematics And Applications Behind Image Warping And Morphing, Tanvir Prince, Maria Malik, Ildefonso Salva, Ariel Mazor, Sakhr Aldaylam

Publications and Research

This research is conducted in the summer of 2015 and is possible by the support of various agency, in particular, by the grant of Prof. Angulo Nieves and the New York City Research Initiative.

The purpose of this research is to reveal the mathematics and applications of the computer animation techniques of warping and morphing. A warp is a twist or distortion in the form of an object in an image while a morph is the smooth and gradual transformation of an object in one image into the object in another image. Linear algebra makes these computer animation techniques possible; …

What You Gotta Know To Play Good In The Iterated Prisoner’S Dilemma, Ethan Akin

Publications and Research

For the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma there exist good strategies which solve the problem when we restrict attention to the long term average payoff. When used by both players, these assure the cooperative payoff for each of them. Neither player can benefit by moving unilaterally to any other strategy, i.e., these provide Nash equilibria. In addition, if a player uses instead an alternative which decreases the opponent’s payoff below the cooperative level, then his own payoff is decreased as well. Thus, if we limit attention to the long term payoff, these strategies effectively stabilize cooperative behavior. The existence of such strategies …

Decoding Quantitative Language, Steven Cosares, Evelyn Burg

Open Educational Resources

We all need some “quantitative literacy” in order to communicate effectively. This means being able to read, write or speak intelligently in a medium where some quantitative information is a part the discussion, proof, or argument. The readers of these materials are expected to have sufficient wherewithal to understand this language so as to draw appropriate conclusions. Developing this type of literacy requires practice. It means using everyday language to describe the ways in which quantities relate to one another.

An African-Centered Approach To Land Education, Salvotore Engel-Dimauro, Karanja Keita Carroll

Publications and Research

Approaches to environmental education which are engaging with place and critical pedagogy have not yet broadly engaged with the African world and insights from Africana Studies and Geography. An African-centered approach facilitates people's reconnection to places and ecosystems in ways that do not reduce places to objects of conquest and things to be exploited for profitability and individual gain. Such an approach offers effective critiques of settler coloniser perspectives on the environment and deeper understandings of the relationship between worldview and ecologically sensitised education. Through examples from Africana Studies and Geography, this article provides an introduction to how an African-centered …

Cross-Talk: A Shared Parameter Space For Gesturally Extended Human/Machine Improvisation, William Brent, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

This paper describes Cross-talk, a piece of music and performance system for two instruments augmented with infrared motion-tracking capability, and an artificial software improviser. Cross-talk was commissioned by the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College, for the 13th Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology. The work is part of an ongoing collaboration focused on developing integrated hardware and software performance systems to extend the timbral and expressive capabilities of traditional musical instruments and to generate musical structure in response to information retrieved from human performers in real-time. Artistic motivations and prior related work are presented here, along …

Mount Graham, Janet Butler Munch

Publications and Research

Mount Graham, in southern Arizona, is considered a sacred location by the Apaches. The remoteness and high elevation of the mountain makes it an ideal location for astronomical research. After protracted litigation suits, the University of Arizona prevailed and was allowed to establish the Mount Graham International Observatory on the site.

Arabic For Designers By Mourad Boutros, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

A Symbolic Sonification Of L-Systems, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

This paper describes a simple technique for the sonification of branching structures in plants. The example is intended to illustrate a qualitative definition of best practices for sonification aimed at the production of musical material. Visually manifest results of tree growth are modelled and subsequently mapped to pitch, time, and amplitude. Sample results are provided in symbolic music notation.