This collection of Digital Scholarship projects is an exploration of theoretical frameworks within Cognitive Science through digital tools and platforms. It is also an inquiry into how digital tools could possibly be integrated into epistemic research and knowledge-making practices.
Educational Psychology
Skills Learned: WordPress, Synthesis of academic and real-world learning experieces, Digital Journaling
Goal: For my Educational Psychology course, I had to document my experiences at Prairie Creek Community School while being intentional about synthesizing the theoretical frameworks about educational and developmental psychology, and my observations of those theories at play in and out of the K-1 classroom.
Process: I used WordPress to document and create a digital archive journal of my experiences at Prairie Creek Community School. I created Blog Posts every week to semi-formally document the observations I made in classroom settings of the critical theory we were learning. The posts included pictures from all of my classroom visits too! This project helped me develop an understanding for how the backend of a popular web content management system, WordPress, worked and use it to present work related to humanistic inquiry in an accessible and understandable manner.
Language and Cognition Research Lab
Skills Learned: Photoshop, Qualtrics, Measurements and Data Analysis, Data Vizualisation
Goal: The research I did for this lab involved researching the illusory truth effect found in participants over repeated exposure to information found on digital platforms like Instagram and Twitter.
Process: I used Photoshop to create simulations of browsing through content on Instagram to see whether the information presented on them were encoded in long-term memory as true or false. Through being in this research lab with Dr. Mija Van Der Wege I learned useful skills like designing empirical studies, recruiting participants for these studies, creating experimental surveys on Qualtrics to collect data, analyzing the data and creating visualizations, and digitally making presentation posters. I presented research conducted by our lab at the Midwestern Psychological Association conference in Chicago as well as at the Minnesota Undergraduate Psychology Conference at Carleton in 2024.
Data Structures
Skills learned: Java, Python, Data Sorting
Goal: Learning Python and Java programming languages
Process: In my Computer Science classes I learned how to program in Java and Python. I learned how to think computationally about storing and sorting through data. I learned about linked and circular lists, stacks and queues, sorting methods, recursion and trees. I used several back-end data sorting techniques in coding projects such as creating mazes, Word Clouds and puzzles that made use of the sorts.
On Epistemic Diversity: The Common Goals between Cognitive Justice and Situated Cognition
Skills Learned: Research and Writing, Defending a thesis, Interdisciplinary argumentation and learning
Goal: This paper is my senior thesis. It is a literature review and investigation of the joint interests between the search for cognitive justice and the move towards the notion of a situated cognition within cognitive science.
Abstract: Cognitive justice has been identified as an epistemic movement for multiple forms of knowledge to be acknowledged and given space to co-exist. Knowledge-making is then redefined as an action that links knowledge created or learned to a socially situated knower. This argument has been used to question existing epistemological practices that perpetuate a dominant knowledge hierarchy leading to cognitive injustice. It prioritizes pluralism and the localization of knowledge.
Digital Arts and Humanities works on the similar praxis of knowledge making as a collaborative venture that is rooted in visualizing humanistic inquiry by contextualizing it to particular digital projects. As a field, it also focuses on the interdisciplinary interaction between multiple academic and non-academic communities and fields to produce accessible knowledge.