‘Beyond Boundaries’ explores the intersection of art, humanities, and science

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How do you teach color theory to visually impaired children? How do you communicate everyday ideas to children who may be deaf or blind? For Stephanie Valencia, a postgraduate associate at the Yale Child Study Center, these are the questions she grapples with on a daily basis.

“The challenge of disabilities is that there are different ways we have to communicate information because not everyone has the same approach to the environment and they have different sensing abilities. And this is important when you’re talking about literature, art, and also inclusion,” she explained.

Valencia was a speaker at the first annual “Beyond Boundaries: A Symposium on Hybrid Scholarship at Yale University” on April 8 hosted by Yale STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) and the Digital Humanities Lab. At the event, undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty and staff presented projects that highlight the questions that can be asked and explored via digital methods and collaborations between the sciences and humanities.

In her presentation, titled “Designing for All Abilities through Art and Engineering,” Valencia showed examples of some of the products she has helped create by combining artistic and engineering principles. To teach visually impaired children about colors, she created a game similar to Bingo. By assigning the three primary colors a simple geometric pattern that children can touch — a wavy line for blue to represent the ocean’s waves, for example — children can learn how secondary and tertiary colors are made by combining the different primary colors.

“We were exploring how to bring colors to the conversation and how to have inclusion in the arts,” she explained. “Color is a very central expression in the arts, and it was nice being able to see people talk about green being a combination of blue and yellow. Although it is a little bit abstract, they can now say something about green and feel more included.”

Other projects presented by students at the symposium included an online database of key terms describing an artwork and generating a visualization of these terms to demonstrate how different artworks are related, an innovation meant to make museums more accessible; another project that explores how coding can help students better understand a medieval manuscript; and a computer that can write poetry.

Roger Pellegrini ’16, who designed the latter, began his presentation by asking the audience if they could distinguish between poetry written by the computer and by a poet.

“The most ‘human’ things are often thought to be the most difficult to encode, but as we just saw, this kind of artistic context can allow for a lot of wiggle room,” he said at the event. “[T]he point of my project isn’t to fool people — though that is fun. I am more interested in investigating where the program does fall short and what makes human-generated content human.”

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