Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

It was only with the 2005 launch of the digital tool Cinemetrics that scholars began to realize the potential of a new approach to film studies made possible through the analysis of rate changes within films. Conceived by Yuri Tsivian and housed at the University of Chicago, Cinemetrics is an open-access, interactive website that collects, stores, and processes data about film editing. It has already emerged as an important forum for the world’s leading film scholars, enabling them to share data and ideas about the statistical analysis of cinema.

Scholars interested in the history and aesthetics of film editing have been analyzing average shot lengths for many years. By dividing the total running time of a film by the total number of shots, they have gleaned useful information about the impact of new film technologies, the evolution of directors’ styles, the range of experimentation across geographies and historical periods, and more. But average shot length reveals nothing about a film’s internal dynamics. This is where the project’s collaboration among specialists in film, movement, and statistical technologies has broken new ground, positioning film as a key narrative form for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Cinemetrics Across Boundaries project (2013–2015) began by bringing two Visiting Fellows to campus to collaborate with Tsivian. Daria Khitrova brought the perspective from other similarly meter-driven arts—music, poetry, and dance—to discussion of film, thinking through with Tsivian the shared features of narrative structure and editing techniques and their implications. Michael Baxter, a statistician and quantitative archaeologist, applied statistical methods to early cinema masters D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, and Charlie Chaplin. In this way the project added a critical analytical tool for understanding film’s unique capacity to capture qualities of meter and motion, and reveal the editorial choices that shaped film’s early narratives.

Tsivian, Khitrova, and Baxter coordinated closely as their research progressed, comparing discipline-specific methods and results. This collaboration has borne fruit in multiple forms that continue to progress, including work on a co-authored book. An early conference organized by project leaders historicized the idea behind quantitative measures of film. As part of the project’s goal to share broadly its findings it held a capstone conference in Chicago, bringing together fifteen international leaders for the first-ever international conference of Cinemetrics scholars. (Supplementary support was provided by the Film Studies Center, the Cinema and Media Studies program, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities.) Conference participants included the world’s most expert Cinemetrics users. Renowned film editor Sandra Adair described in her keynote address the unique continuity challenges she faced while editing twelve continuous years of footage for the critically acclaimed film Boyhood (2014), then recently released. Adair’s participation at this key event in the project not only brought together the worlds of scholarship and artistic practice; she also shared her insights with the next generation of film experts. As part of her master class for undergraduates Adair demonstrated the value of Cinemetrics and other analytical tools that can help young filmmakers improve their editing skills in relation to tempo.

In addition to generating new ideas for the film- making process, the project also explored the role of film in revising our historical understanding of human psychology and the senses. Cornell University psychologist James Cutting gave a talk in which he used Cinemetrics analysis to show how Hollywood films have evolved to align better with human perception and cognition. Cutting looked at factors like motion, cutting rate, and color contrast—all of which correlate with increased attention and all of which, according to his research, have increased in popular movies over time.

In the process of examining film editing and its measure from the larger perspective of human history, the Cinemetrics project formed a new community of inquiry. The project brought together for the first time a large and growing international cohort of scholars and practitioners interested in exploring how this analytical tool can lead to a new understanding of film’s relationship to social change. As the impact of the project’s multiple intensive partnerships continues to unfold, we expect to see the emergence of new practices in filmmaking, and deeper understanding of the ways film reflects and shapes the processes of the human mind.

This project used techniques of gaming, mixed reality performance, and networked media culture to create and evaluate an intervention that engaged middle school students in a curriculum about climate change, environmental science, and twenty-first-century skills. This intervention took the form of a transmedia game with live-action networked elements (an “Alternate Reality Game,” or “ARG”). The project leaders secured participation from three public and private schools at the seventh-grade level as research sites. The project generated empirical data via mixed methods research (quantitative and qualitative) on using game-based learning to educate students about one of the most urgent and complex problems of our time. The grounding hypothesis is that humanistic knowledge—especially linked to storytelling, games, and media—can be used to strengthen STEM pathways. The timing of this project, amid the COVID-19 transition, was especially important, given the search across educational institutions for effective hybrid learning methods. The project aimed to achieve a completed game and a replicable remote learning structure that, in future iterations, can scale to the level of Chicago Public Schools in a citywide game.

Learn more about the research team's Fourcast Lab here.

The boundary between fact and fiction is a contested site in contemporary culture. On the one hand, a familiar set of binaries opposes fiction to its various others: the fiction/nonfiction divide that structures the literary market (in the United States and elsewhere); fiction film versus documentary film; fictional versus “reality” television. On the other hand, the proliferation of generic hybrids (docudrama, literary journalism, nonfiction novels, autofiction) increasingly calls these demarcations into question. The current taste for reality simultaneously undermines the creation of autonomous fictional worlds, and provokes suspicion of the fictionalization of everyday life in the form of the simulacrum, the spectacle, and the false image. The resulting conceptual confusion both expands and erodes the concept of fiction.

Fiction is, in fact, not a literary genre but an operative category in various media, disciplines, and discourses, and designates a range of functions and relationships to reality—from the pragmatic uses of legal fictions to the fictionalization of the profilmic referent in cinema. Any investigation into factuality and fictionality demands both disciplinary expertise, to enable the adequate analysis of specific forms of representation, and the articulation of common ground between different academic disciplines and artistic media. Indeed, the divide between the factual and the fictional raises fundamental questions for humanistic inquiry. Why do human beings create fictions, and what kinds of truths can these fictions convey? Conversely, how are facts established? How do we distinguish factual from fictional representations, and what is at stake in this separation?

The project brought a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach to these questions. It had two main components: first, the appointment of Françoise Lavocat, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris 3, and a leading scholar of theories of fiction, as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow in Spring 2017. The second element was the formation of a working group composed of University of Chicago faculty from a number of departments and divisions. The core group held monthly meetings to discuss participants’ ongoing research, arranged visits by invited outside speakers, and organized public symposia. This close collaboration ultimately aimed to engage students and faculty in campus-wide conversations, while building connections between Chicago researchers and an international network of scholars.

Game Changer Chicago (GCC) Design Lab is an initiative of the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3) at the University of Chicago. Co-founded by Drs. Patrick Jagoda (Assistant Professor of English) and Melissa Gilliam (Professor of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Pediatrics), the GCC Design Lab created workshops in which high school aged youth – recruited primarily from underserved schools on Chicago’s South Side – collaborated with faculty, staff and fellows (undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities and arts) on digital stories, transmedia games and new media art projects. The GCC Design Lab is both a maker-space and a research lab. As a maker-space, we have a strong commitment to developing youth-led products, running game design workshops, and creating games for national and transnational dissemination. As a research lab, we promoted continued work at the intersection of art, narrative, health, and technology with an eye to critical thinking and healthy social and emotional outcomes.

The Gaming Orientation project (2016–2019) transformed the University of Chicago’s 2017 college orientation into an immersive, alternate-reality game (ARG) called The Parasite. Incoming students were invited to collaborate on nine challenges, each of which helped them get acclimated to campus and prepared for college life. As they banded together in search of clues to solve a central mystery—Where is the room that a secret society of masked monks seems to be guarding?—they became acquainted with each other and with key sites on and near campus. Innovative participatory-learning activities throughout the week prompted them to confront questions about their own identity, the identity of others, and presumptions about each. Whether they realized it or not—the game was not announced as a game, intentionally blurring the border between fiction and reality—the students were being primed for valuable lessons about collaboration, leadership, inclusivity, and digital media literacy. They were also helping the research team test the effectiveness of ARGs as tools for twenty-first-century education.

Preliminary research suggests that ARGs and related forms of transmedia storytelling and gameplay can be a useful platform for collaborative learning. Participants report that gameplay improves critical thinking and problem-solving skills and strengthens social bonds. Pervasive games that involve role-playing and a mix of challenges are increasingly common in areas as diverse as business, marketing, education, and personal leisure. But with one exception (an ARG focused on the technical skills that incoming students needed at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts), large-scale gaming had not been attempted in a higher education environment prior to this project. Its impact has never before been rigorously studied. The Parasite was the first ARG that aimed to shape the culture of a specific university cohort. The Gaming Orientation project will assess whether it succeeded. With more than 600 players online, a robust Facebook following, and live play that included roughly half the incoming class of 1,750 students, it was arguably the largest educational transmedia game ever created.

Designing, preparing, running, and evaluating a production at this scale required collaboration. The project included an interdisciplinary team of scholars with expertise in sociology, new media studies, digital game theory and design, theater and performance, and visual art. The team developed and coordinated plans in close partnership with academic and administrative leaders on campus and solicited contributions from creative professionals and institutions around Chicago. Current students were partners at every stage, from conception to live performance. Kristen Schilt worked with a group of undergraduates to gather ethnographic data on the 2016 orientation, which helped the team plan for the 2017 event. An interdisciplinary “Big Problems” course, co-taught by Patrick Jagoda and Heidi Coleman in the 2016 Fall Quarter, introduced students to ARG theory and production while helping the research team tailor the game’s design for its intended audience.

The process of designing the ARG was regarded as practice-based research, an opportunity to develop, test, refine, and transform concepts about performance, digital media culture, and game-based education. Jagoda, Coleman, and other collaborators have already presented and published several scholarly articles exploring various aspects of The Parasite and broader implications for the future of “networked play.” The project has also received significant media attention, including a feature in Wired magazine that offered a nuanced portrait of The Parasite and quoted one first-year student who described it as “the coolest experience of my life.”

Research continues as the scholars focus on measuring the game’s effectiveness. Immediately after the game, they conducted a series of focus groups with approximately thirty first-year students, including those who did and did not participate. Those discussions are being translated into data and analyzed, and may inform the planning process for a proposed larger-scale ARG in 2019. The study’s key indicators of success include improvements in students’ co-curricular participation, mental and physical wellbeing, attitudes about diversity, feelings of integration into the University community, and degree attainment, particularly for under-represented minorities.

If the evidence shows positive results, this innovative approach to student orientation will further establish the University of Chicago as a leader in understanding and addressing issues of diversity and social difference within a community. The Parasite may serve as a model for introducing new forms of participation and networked play into higher education curricula.

In the fall of 2024, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society will present a new moving-image work by the Otolith Group titled Mascon: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy. The exhibition is conceived as a complement to a new mural commissioned for the Art Institute of Chicago’s Griffin Court, on view starting September 26. The images that form the building blocks of the mural are stills from the film.

Both installations are presented as part of a series of exhibitions and events linked to Panafrica: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics, a multi-year research project at the Neubauer Collegium that is exploring the links between Pan-African politics and culture. Together the Otolith Group’s mural and film essay serve as a prelude to Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, a major exhibition opening December 15 at the Art Institute that was informed by the research project and curated by members of the research team.

The artists describe Mascon as an “audiovisual investigation into the gestures, geometries, grammars, and geographies that compose the forms and forces of the films of Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty.” Mascon consists of a mosaic of images extracted from the works of these two Senegalese directors, prominent figures among a generation of African auteurs whose films explored the emancipatory movements that swept across the continent in the late 1950s and early ’60s. According to the Otolith Group, their homage to these filmmakers “summons the borderless imagination of the cine-Sahel,” amplifying and distilling Sembène’s and Mambéty’s favored motifs in order to elicit what American literary scholar Stephen Henderson termed “mascon” (shorthand for “a massive concentration of black experiential energy”).

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete

Research on plant intelligence in recent years has transformed not only how we understand plants but also how we understand memory, perception, sentience, movement, cognition, and intelligence. The absence of familiar physical correlates for plant intelligence has opened a space for speculation on the part of scientists, popular writers, artists, and philosophers. Our research focuses on domains of inquiry that research into plant intelligence has drawn together in unexpected ways: neurosciences, environmental sciences, media studies, and computational sciences. Our research group proposes to build on the links being forged across these domains within plant studies to develop a new conceptual framework suited to the contemporary moment, frequently characterized in terms of environmental disaster, wide-scale species extinction, planetary domestication, climate change, and the Anthropocene. To this end, we are working with key texts, scientific models, and media paradigms that operative within “plant studies” in order to reconsider some of the foundational concepts and frameworks for contemporary thinking about the environment and planetary formations. We have chosen to call our intervention “Phytological Critique,” a rubric chosen for its echoes of “critical inquiry” and “ecological inquiry,” for our project centers on plants not simply as objects or entities to be known but as a kind of intelligence or formation of reason that allows us to grapple with the links arising between previously separated domains of knowledge, which in turn force us to reconsider what critique might do at the current juncture.

This project builds on the intellectual exchanges begun by the Neubauer Collegium project “Fact and Fiction” (2016–17), while orienting them toward new research questions. The first project took the contested border between fact and fiction as the point of departure for a cross-disciplinary dialogue, in a moment where “alternative facts” and “post-truth” politics had become a central preoccupation in public discourse. The project leaders now turn to a different area in the study of fiction and fictionality: that of possibilities and impossibilities in and of fiction. Fiction has long been associated with possibility and plausibility—with the construction of plots that are governed by a certain causal logic. But how exactly does fiction model our understanding of what is possible in the real world? Conversely, how does our sense of what is possible in reality constrain what is perceived to be possible or impossible in fictional worlds? Finally, are certain subjects off-limits to fictional representation? If these questions are not new ones, they have taken on a renewed urgency in the twenty-first century: in a context where our “real-world” conceptions of possibility and predictability are shifting in the face of global crisis, how can (or should) fiction present current or future possibilities?