Our agenda of work is being developed with our network of academic and non-academic partners and our projects are growing.
2023
Unmapped Strands. The pedestrianization of the Strand/Aldwych area around King’s was inaugurated on 7th December 2022. It challenges us to rethink the social and cultural potential of the Strand as a space. The initiative’s website describes its ambition to “bring the inside out”, to make it a place of interaction, relaxation, play and cultural benefit. With footfall in the space now unconstrained by vehicular traffic, the pathways which have been laid out, the ingress and egress routes, street furniture and installations such as the “Voiceline” now enable a more a social and discursive experience of the Strand. It is no longer a route to travel east, west and back again, subject to the flow and contraflow of vehicular traffic, with the ever-present physical dangers this presents, inhibiting and restricting one’s movement. It is a space for new and imaginative possibilities.
Unmapped Strands, led by Stuart Dunn, is working with daily pedestrian users of the Strand to gain an understanding of the project’s impact on their experience of the space and its environment. We seek to look beyond much of the previous research on walking and pedestrianism in urban environments, which largely focuses on travel between A and B, and theories of efficiency, cost-benefit and function. Rather we ask what is now causing people to stop in the space, whether their daily experience of it is being, or might be, enriched, and to collect views on how it might evolve. We are undertaking this by tracking pedestrian journeys through the space and thus mapping quantitative perspectives such as footfall and trajectory. We are also exploring the subject qualitatively through interviews. The main output will be a report capturing a snapshot of the initial impact of pedestrianization. We will examine the benefits it has already bought, and those it might bring, improvements to the environment, health and wellbeing, and we will sketch out creative and cultural possibilities. We are also evaluating possible challenges, such as potential risks of marginalization of those less able to walk.
Forestscapes. How can soundscapes be used as a way to attend to forest life and the many different ways of narrating and relating to forests, forest issues and forest protection and restoration efforts? The forestscapes project aims to explore and document generative arts-based methods for recomposing collections of sound materials to support “collective inquiry” into forests as living cultural landscapes. A collaboration with the Centre for Attention Studies at King’s (ASK) in 2022-2023 engaged artists to support the development of participatory approaches to soundscape composition and collective listening, including collaborations with forest restoration practitioners and a pilot listening booth at re:publica in Berlin.
Living Well with Email. The Digital Futures Institute‘s Centre for Attention Studies and Centre for Technology and the Body are jointly conducting a pilot study on Living Well with Email. This research aims to understand better how we might live well with email at King’s, including how Microsoft’s ‘Schedule Send’ function might be used within a broader analysis of email and communication practice within the University and externally. This study will provide contextualised data that will contribute to the detailed mapping of email practice at King’s, and identify potential areas where further investment and research are needed.
Measuring Effects of Spatial Visualization and Domain on Visualization Task Performance: a Comparative Study. Tandon, Sara, Abdul-Rahman, Alfie, and Borgo, Rita, ‘Measuring Effects of Spatial Visualization and Domain on Visualization Task Performance: a Comparative Study’, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 29:1 (2023): 668-678. DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2022.3209491.
This article was an output from Sara Tandon’s Attention Studies Small Project Grant Award, ‘Effects of level of spatial ability affects perception and recall of data visualization’ (2021; see below for further information).
Close Reading as Attention Practice: Habit, Bias, Change. Marion Thain and Ewan Jones are leading a set of projects exploring techniques of close reading (which lie at the heart of literary studies) as practices and methodologies of attention. Together they are working on a project provisionally titled Close Reading as Attention Practice: Habit, Bias, Change. They are also leading a series of events based around this work, details of which are forthcoming. Over the academic year 2021/22, Ewan Jones will also conduct a research project entitled ‘Close Reading as Attentional Practice: 1860–1920’, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
2022
The Centre for Attention Studies at King’s (ASK) conducted a major study on public opinion on attention and distraction, conducted through a collaboration with the renowned Policy Institute at King’s. You can read more about this study on the King’s website. A short piece responding to the results can be found in the Independent. Another piece can be read in the Conversation.
2021
The future of attention studies: A bibliometric review, synthesis, and organisation of social science research into attention – Matteo Montecchi and Kirk Plangger Centre for Attention Studies Small Project Grant Award 2021
Despite significant and multidisciplinary research interest, a comprehensive synthesis of the attention literature that clearly delineates the nature and dimensional properties of attention is currently missing (c.f., Hommel et al., 2019). Addressing this deficiency, Matteo Montecchi and Kirk Plangger (both at the at King’s Business School) will develop a study that summarizes and organizes past research on attention in the social sciences by adopting a quantitative science mapping approach (Perianes-Rodriguez, Waltman and Van Eck, 2016; Zupic and Čater, 2015). The project potential insights developed from this quantitative review and synthesis will be combined in an overviewing framework that will organize the attention literature in the social sciences to inform a series of strategic inquiry priorities for advancing the multidisciplinary research on attention.
Testing a new clinical attention switching technique to shift attention away from worry: A proof of concept study – Colette Hirsch Centre for Attention Studies Small Project Grant Award 2021
Uncontrollable worry is a transdiagnostic process evident across almost all psychological disorders. Worry predicts and maintains anxiety and depression. It involves streams of negative thinking about different potential negative outcomes. Clients with anxiety find it very hard to shift attention away from worry. More effective cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) techniques are needed to enable anxious people to shift attention away from worry. Building on our prior research, we have developed a novel technique to help people shift attention away from worry by generating a vivid positive image. The study to determine whether this technique helps those with clinical anxiety and worry shift their attention away from worry and stop worrying in the short term. The present study led by Colette Hirsch will explore whether this technique could be delivered effectively one to one (via video link due to COVID) and also online via a tailored computer programme. This will help determine how the technique could be disseminated in the future.
Mapping Attention Studies – Liliana Bounegru, Jonathan Gray and Tommaso Venturini Centre for Attention Studies Small Project Grant Award 2021
There are many ways of understanding, conceptualising, measuring and “doing” attention. Attention can be considered as a capacity or as a resource. There are many different types of situations in which attention comes to matter, from concerns around attention deficits and attention industries deploying techniques to “capture” attention, to techniques of developing and recovering attention. One might say there are different ways of “attending to attention” in different disciplines and fields of inquiry – or even that attention may be considered “multiple” (Mol, 2003). In order to inform ongoing discussions about how the attention studies initiative might position itself in relation to these different ways of understanding, problematising and studying attention, Liliana Bounegru, Jonathan Gray (both at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London), along with Tommaso Venturini (CNRS) and in collaboration with the Public Data Lab, will conduct a small exploratory research project to explore how attention figures in different bodies of research literature.
Effects of level of spatial ability affects perception and recall of data visualization – Sara Tandon Attention Studies Small Project Grant Award 2021
Attention studies in the field of information visualization are limited and largely unstudied. Sara Tandon‘s study will evaluate how levels of spatial ability affect perception and recall of data visualization and if interventions can be implemented to mitigate differences. In order to empirically validate measures of cognitive effort, capture attention data, and mimic real-world circumstances, Tandon will implement dual task methodologies; these use split attention between a primary and secondary task to stress cognitive effort.
Ways of Listening to Forests – Jonathan Gray, Birgit Schneider, Liliana Bounegru, Natalia Sánchez-Querubín, Maya Livio, Andrés Saenz de Sicilia, Sabine Niederer, Renee-Marie Pizzardi, Kate Donovan, Rina Tsubaki, Marcus Maeder, Liz K. Miller, Martin Howse, Carlo De Gaetano, Sara Lenzi, Ginevra Terenghi, Brian House, Brian Harnetty, Lauren E. Oakes, Nik Sawe
How can we sense and make sense of forests with devices, techniques and our bodies? How might we cultivate an interdisciplinary “arts of noticing” (Tsing) for attending to forests and their role in critical zones? Engaging with themes in the Critical Zones exhibition and catalogue curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, this project explores different ways of listening to forests, drawing on different traditions, techniques, methods, media and approaches – from “Shinrin Yoku” (forest bathing) to sensing devices, data sonification to sound walks and storytelling. The project includes a public workshop with ZKM as part of the Critical Zones exhibition to explore and compare different approaches and the possibilities and limits of forest experiences under current sensing conditions between immediacy and mediation.
Organizations: Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Density Design Lab, European Forest Institute, King’s College London, Stanford University, University of Amsterdam, University of Potsdam, Visual Methodologies Collective, ZKM