ART Attention & Reflection Tracker

Hello everybody and thank you all for being here today. My name is Spyridon (Spyros) Simotas and I am a PhD candidate in the Department of French. I am pleased and honored –and nervous– to present in front of such a distinguished and diverse audience.

Before I start my presentation about a project I have been working on lately, I would like to just briefly mention a few things especially for those among you who haven’t met me before.

I am Digital Humanities scholar writing a dissertation on three contemporary french authors who create and disseminate their work on the web. I argue that these web based projects constantly renegotiate their intentions and reevaluate their processes so much so that there is nothing other than their own perpetual making.

As natively digital, my research draws me to the idea of digital space more broadly. I am interested in distributed networks as spaces of individual and collective growth. But as the networks become increasingly centralized, intellectual growth is pushed out from the equation by the financial interests of the companies who dominate digital space today.

That’s why I also see my work as a form of activism. To give you an example, last year, as part of the Praxis Fellowship, along with 5 other graduate student, we undertook an Augmented Reality project, called UVa Reveal.

By using augmented reality techniques to connect various library documents to specific locations on Grounds we wanted to bring awareness to controversial social justice issues and to underrepresented cultural spaces such as the French Department.

Besides being a proud member of the larger DH network at UVA, I am also grateful and consider myself lucky to have found a wonderful yoga practice and community here on Grounds, thanks to Contemplative Sciences Center! As a matter of fact I am a daily yoga practitioner, studying asana practice with John Bultman. As a side note, I am also practicing Transcendental Meditation which I also learned with a teacher in Charlottesville after I moved here.

Now for those who may doubt the compatibility between Digital Humanities and Contemplative practices, let me just paraphrase André Van Lysebeth –the Belgian author and one of the first yoga instructors in the west–, who wrote in 1969 that the 20th century will be remembered for two discoveries, that of computers and the re-discovery of yoga. I think it is fair to say that the reason we are here today is because of how they have both proliferated so far, and are continuing to shape our culture.

About A.R.T

The project I wanted to present you today is called A.R.T. (Attention & Reflexion Tracker) SLIDE. As you will see A.R.T is very much related to mindfulness approaches to learning and it is relying on methods such as tracking and visualization that the digital technologies have made available and wide spread.

A.R.T’s objective is twofold:

1. To foster healthier studying habits, allowing students to optimize the conditions for concentration and, consequently, of their learning.
2. To provide them with an aesthetic provocation of their own flourishing.

A.R.T. did not emerge out of nowhere and does not exist in a vacuum. It rather builds upon and extends the work that has been done so far with the e-portfolios. It is in fact conceived as an important constitutive component of an e-portfolio.

There is no need for me here to praise the merits of an e-portfolio that can be summarized with these three attributes :

• Agency and self-authorship,
• Evidence-based learning,
• Reflection,

Only, I see in A.R.T the evidence gathered materials to be of a more granular level, what one might call “personal analytics”.

Before I delve further into the project, I would like to give you a fair warning. This is not a full fledged project but still pretty much on the drawing board. I am happy to share it with you though –even at this early stage– to get your feedback and discuss with you areas of improvement and potential avenues of growth.

Before I begin a very brief demonstration let me just explain the rationale behind A.R.T.

What is A.R.T?

A.R.T. is a self-tracker and visualization tool of students progress over time. It is based on two key concepts Attention and Reflection, two foundational blocks of mindfulness and success.

One thing about Attention and Reflection is that they always function in the background of our minds without us necessarily being aware of them. Actually our attention, because it is hardwired to our survival skills, it is much easier captured by instantaneous noises, and flashes perceived as dangers. This basic mechanism is what the psycho-technological industries are exploiting, by creating in forms of false alerts all sorts of distractions draining our attention to the point of exhaustion. That’s because we give our attention to the object we attend to. Attention and Reflection are like fuel. They burn along the way while they are taking us to a destination.

Another thing about Attention and Reflection is that because of their elusive nature they can’t be taught. It is impossible to teach something that doesn’t have an object of a specific content. But since we can’t teach our students Attention or Reflection, maybe we can train them to regularly go back to them. That’s the purpose of A.R.T. Attend to Attention so we can become more protective of it.

Here are 3 axioms about Attention:

• Attention is the ability to turn your mind in a particular direction.
• Every activity provides an opportunity to express your true nature through wholehearted care and attention.
• Attention cultivates the ability to turn any activity into an artistic and spiritual experience.

Now let me focus for a moment on the third component of A.R.T. the tracker philosophy.

Tracker philosophy

Trackers are everywhere in the digital space. Websites use cookies to track our behaviors and customize the experience of our next visit. Browsers keep the history of all the websites we visit. With a smartphone in our pocket, as we walk, as we run, as we listen to music we throw off metadata to the cloud. What if we changed this relationship? Instead of passively letting companies create our consumerists portraits by scatter plotting the information they generate by our online presence, we could actively and deliberately use the same tools to gather the information that we care the most about.

Kenneth Goldsmith, author among other books, of Uncreative Writing, and Wasting Time on the Internet finds these automatically generated language of the web, timestamped and stored in log files, as source of insight and creative intervention. He writes: SLIDE

“Buddhist meditators use a technique that they call mental noting. As each emotion arises, they give it a name: fear, excitement, sadness. They also assign names to sensations: coolness, warmth, pressure. They feel that naming things anchors the emotions, keeping the meditator in the present. It also helps distance themselves from the pull of those emotions so that they don’t take on too much power, overwhelming the placidness of meditation. Noting is a way of making visible what is normally invisible, making something ephemeral concrete. Our browser history is doing exactly that and going further by not only naming, but also time-stamping and archiving these fleeting traces of data.”

There is a commonly shared belief from Socrates to Buddhist philosophy that the unexamined life is not worth living. There is no arguing about that. But in order to have an informed examination one must observe take notes, keep records, that is to say gather information. But the fruit of the examination is more often than not a narrative, a story, either written or one we say to ourselves. We have become historians of ourselves but is this the only way have to examine our lives?

Roland Barthes in the last seminar he gave at the Collège de France, Preparation of the Novel he spends a lot of time developing the idea that in order to write one has to collect. But he struggles to find the nuance in subtle mood changes in the prose writing. That’s why he spends a considerable amount of time studying haikus, the extremely short poetic form originated in Japan. What he realizes then is that along with the personal scoop, –the satori, the epiphany– the haiku poet conveys information about the weather: a subtle note of the background that completes the picture.

How can we become more than historians and journalists but also meteorologists of our lives?

My answer to the question is the fine grain tracking mechanisms that we can conceive for record keeping. Mechanisms with which we can notice not only what’s going on in the foreground (the items on the calendar that we have to check off the list) but also what is going on in the background (i.e. what is our emotional and mental state).

With the granular information we generate there is a paradigm shift. From journalists we can become meteorologists of the self. We can correlate emotions to places, we can correlate feelings to actions, and to be more pragmatic here: correlate time spent studying to grades and learning outcomes. On top of that, we can also generate visualizations that will not only provoke an aesthetic pleasure about our accomplishments but help us better understand ourselves. What if at the end of an academic training we didn’t only have a degree and a transcript but also a full documentation of the trajectory of the student.

A.R.T, a closer look

A.R.T. Walkthrough with the audience.

• If you have your laptop or your cellphone with you I would like to ask you to follow this link [https://bit.ly/2OZQ72F]

• As I walk you through I will ask you to participate by entering your data. At the end we will take a moment to assess the date generated and hopefully that will lead us to a discussion.

• The power of A.R.T is that it’s small, it doesn’t require any specific digital skills. It can be easily applied by anyone. Teachers are able to tweak the questions to their liking, depending on how specific or how open-ended they want them to be.

• A.R.T can also be built as an overlay on course websites and e-portfolios and it can be as restrictive or as open as we want.

• A.R.T is user-friendly because one of the keys to data collection is to make the process easy and to intertwine it with daily activities.

Conclusion

To conclude let me just repeat that A.R.T is only a work in progress. Something that I have only recently started to work on, as I believe it has the potential to enhance self-discovery, to train students to be more effective with their time and train them in self-discipline. And as they are doing so, through visualizations, they learn to see themselves in new uncharted but aesthetically pleasing ways.

But before we go any further with this, I would like to submit it under your scrutiny because any attentional methodology should be considered with the greatest suspicion.