Hybrids Are Hubs: Transdisciplinarity, the Two Cultures and the Special Status of

Artscientists
Author(s): François-Joseph Lapointe
Source: Leonardo, Vol. 47, No. 3 (2014), p. 277
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43834196
Accessed: 05-02-2020 16:26 UTC

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Hybrids Are Hubs: Transdisciplinarity, scientists (black) should be more densely connected within
the Two Cultures and the Special each category than among categories. Moreover, the
Status of Artscientists artscientists (grey) should be equally connected to nodes rep-
resenting either one of the other two categories.
François- Joseph Lapointe, Département de sciences biolo-
Results of all pairwise Mann- Whitney tests were not signifi-
giques, Université de Montréal, Québec, Canada.
cant, but examination of actual values indicates higher degree,
E-mail: <francois-joseph.lapointe@umontreal.ca>.
clustering coefficient, and density values as well as a smaller
See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/47/3>for supplemental files
associated with this issue.
diameter for papers assigned to the artscientist category with
respect to the artist and scientist categories. When these test
Abstract statistics were compared to those obtained from 1000 random
Much has been said and written about the two-culture paradigm separating the graphs, the artscientist was the only category with observed
values more extreme than those expected by chance alone. In
world between artists and scientists. On one side of this debate are those who
accept this cultural art/science divide. On the other side are those who reject it
other words, whereas all network indices could not discrimi-
altogether to promote a better integration of artscience practices. In this paper,
the author presents a network analysis of 40 papers submitted to the SEAD nate between texts authored by artists or by scientists , the pa-
Network for Science, Engineering, Arts and Design and tests the hypothesis pers
that authored by artscientists were clearly more clustered and
the papers submitted by artists and scientists are disconnected in the corre-
connected to each other, as well as the other two categories.
sponding graph, as predicted by the art/science separation. Rejecting this hy-
pothesis will provide support for the alternative artscience integration. The White Papers have spoken: contrary to Snow's para-
digm [5] artists and scientists are not distinguishable, but
In this meta-analysis of the 40 White Papers submitted to the artscientists are a different breed - individuals who thrive in
SEAD Network, I relied on network analysis, employing atransdisciplinary contexts. This is, of course, what the SEAD
wide range of statistical and graph-theoretical approaches simi-
Network is all about, but this meta-analysis provides statistical
lar to those I use routinely for the analysis of gene similarity
support for promoting such collaborative endeavors.
data [1]. I intended to look at the two cultures from an objec-
Fig. 1. Joint representation of the clustering and network analysis
tive standpoint, testing the corresponding hypothesis that texts
of the 40 White Papers submitted to the SEAD Network based on
authored by artists/scientists would be separated in a network intertextual distances. The different colors associated with the
representation of intertextual distances. In other words, if it is clusters defined on the dendrogram are used to identify the
four
true that artists and scientists think differently, the papers au-
corresponding nodes in the network. The three categories of pa-
pers are also identified on the graph by nodes with white (artists),
thored by artists and scientists should fall in different clusters
in the network, with papers co-authored by both artists and black (scientists) or hatched (artscientists) labels. (©François-
Joseph Lapointe)
scientists falling in between.

Materials and Methods

Pairwise intertextual (lexicometric) distances [2] were comput-
ed among all papers based on presence/absence data of words.
The 40x40 distance matrix was then submitted to a hierarchical
clustering algorithm to identify relevant groups in the dataset
using Ward's criterion [3], and the resulting dendrogram was
used as a template to identify significant clusters. A network
was also built from the distance matrix converted into an adja-
cency matrix using a 10% resemblance threshold as a cutoff
value for building the graph.
The nodes were colored in the final graph with respect to the
three different categories of papers. The texts were coded as
either " artisť or " scientist depending of the self-proclaimed
status of the authors, or as " artscientisť for texts with authors
with a dual status.
A statistical evaluation of network indices (degree distribu-
References and Notes
tion, clustering coefficient, diameter, and density) associated
*This paper was presented as a contributed talk at Arts, Humanities, and Com-
with each category of papers was performed, and significance
plex Networks - 4th Leonardo satellite symposium at NetSci2013. See
of the corresponding statistics was assessed with pairwise
<http ://artshumanities .netsci20 1 3 .net>.
Mann- Whitney tests among the various categories. These val-
1. J. Beauregard-Racine, C. Bicep, K. Schliep, P. Lopez, F.-J. Lapointe and E.
ues were also evaluated with respect to a random graphBapteste,
model "Of woods and webs: Possible alternatives to the tree of life for
[4] in which all nodes have the same probability of being con- genomic fluidity in E. coli" Biology Direct 6 (201 1) p. 39.
studying
nected. 2. C. Labbé and D. Labbé, "Inter-textual distance and authorship attribution
Corneille and Molière," Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 8 (2001) pp. 213-
231.
Results and Discussion
3. J.
The hierarchical classification of intertextual distances is H. Ward,
pre- Jr, "Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function,"
Journal of the American Statistical Association 58 (1963) pp. 236-244.
sented alongside the network analysis of the 40 White Papers
4. P. Erdös
in Figure 1. That joint representation identifies four clusters in and A Rényi, "On random graphs," Publicationes Mathematicae 6
(1959) pp. 290-297.
the dendrogram corresponding to partly overlapping subgraphs
5. C. P. Snow. The Two Cultures: And a Second Look. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cam-
in the associated network. More interestingly for the purpose
bridge Univ. Press, 1964).
of this meta-analysis is the clustering of nodes representing the
three different categories of papers. Under the art/science sepa-
ration hypothesis, nodes associated with artists (white) and

©2014 ISAST doi:10.1162/LEON_a_00780 LEONARDO, Vol. 47, No. 3, p. 277, 2014 277

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