Perceiving Nature Digitally

by Md Safiqul Islam & Alexander E. Hausmann

Supervisor: Dr. Ursula Münster

How & why we chose this format

Since our project is evolving around the effects of the digital world on the perception of nature, it seemed interesting to us to choose a digital format to present our work. The topic itself is quite accessible and understandable to everyone and touches on several problems that should concern us all. Therefore, we wished to select a mean of digital presentation that would allow us to reach a big audience. Blog entry/-ies seemed to be just the right medium for that. Our evaluation of the topic turned out to become one continuous train of thought where one idea inevitably built upon the previous which made it hard for us to split the outcome into smaller chunks (i.e. several shorter blog entries). Therefore we finally decided to present our work in one long blog entry.

Interdisciplinary Perspective

We are both trained biologists that joined the Rachel Carson Center to get a different (less quantitative, but more qualitative) perspective on nature. Our final project is bringing together our quantitative skills with a humanitarian perspective which we acquired during the course of the Certificate Program. While the digital world is on one hand a world of numbers and big data, it is on the other hand also a world of opinions, subtle manipulations and emotions. Numbers and data are something where a biologist feels home, but the effect of them on the human perception and on society is something that is usually not really thought of in our field of research. Nevertheless, both qualities of the digital world are of extreme relevance to our modern society, which is also why we see every member of the digital world as part of our target group.
Visiting the Lunchtime Colloquia where we experienced how research on/with nature can be done in a completely different, but complementary way to what we learned during our Master’s especially helped us to get out of our biologist comfort zone. The discussions in smaller groups (composed of people with various backgrounds) after the talks were helping us to not feel like being thrown into the cold (humanities) water, but to be among people that all have different strengths and understandings of things and where there is no clear right or wrong. These discussions, but of course also the discussions in the reading course and the Final Projects Colloquium were helping us to open up our horizon to lands beyond numbers & stats.

Challenges

Our main challenge was clearly working together over long distances. Since we couldn’t finish the Certificate Program during our Master’s, we both were starting our PhDs before the next chance of finishing the program came up. We are not only working on our PhDs in different cities but even on different continents. The digital world, once again, helped a lot to overcome this.

Furthermore, we both have to say that the faculty of biology offers very few possibilities of interdisciplinary courses (meaning courses that bring together science and humanities). Two years of RCC certainly opened up such opportunities for us, but we still found ourselves throughout the process of working on our final project being drifting into a mindset of science rather than humanities. Especially Ursula helped us very much to not discuss things too one-sided and to overcome our biologist predisposition.