Making Interdisciplinary Inquiry Visible: The Role of Artist-Researchers in a Ten-Year Community-University Research Alliance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For the last 10 years, we've been exploring the notion of artistic research. This exploration began with the formation of a Community - University Research Alliance, or CURA (2001-2012) - a collaboration with Thompson Rivers University and the City of Kamloops, British Columbia, and focusing on issues of cultural sustainability and quality of life in a small city setting. In particular, the researchers (drawn primarily from the social sciences and humanities: English, education, film studies, geography, history, social work, sociology, philosophy, political science, rhetoric, theatre studies and the visual arts) have been exploring notions of social capital and community asset building in communities 100,000 and smaller. This paper will consider the impact of the artists contributing to this research initiative, documenting how collectively we have refined the roles of artist-researchers, with the artists now following one of three inquiry models: (1) Affinity - where the artist matches existing work with issues under exploration by a particular research group; (2) Response - where the artist creates new work responding directly to the particular research group's project; and, most importantly, (3) Integration-where the artist works with a particular research group, becoming in effect a co-researcher by committing skills, insights, vocabulary, qualitative problem solving methods, and art production to the research process and findings. Integrated research initiatives, we've found, put increased demands on artists to explore and create both visually and verbally; in addition, we've begun to understand better how the university research emphasis (replete with its entrenched expectations for traditional publication and exhibition outcomes) distinguishes the work of artist-researchers from those working exclusively in the realm of public art and community advocacy. For the artist-researchers working within the community - university alliance, their practice necessarily involves attention to place, audience, object, interdisciplinarity and research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.215 | 0.195 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.091 | 0.098 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.070 | 0.035 |
| Open science | 0.011 | 0.084 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.029 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".