Empirical poetics is the study of poetics through scientific research rather than theory. For example, the field of cognitive poetics, which addresses the neuroscience of the reader’s response, would fall under this definition. Our project will collect such research with two goals: the first is to defend the immanence, the existence, of poetry’s power through its basis in scientific fact, and the second is to collect prominent empirical poetics research for the benefit of likeminded people. The method of this project will be to survey the current research on psychological and physiological responses in poetry readers, then use these studies as evidence for a defense of the medium. We will collect and annotated research that addresses questions such as: how the body responds to or creates emotions, how/whether these responses are provoked during reading, how word-images are created in the brain, how sensations are understood, the role of metaphor in the creation of meaning, the emotional impression produced by different patterns of linguistic sound effects, and more. The resultant thesis paper will summarize the current trends in the empirical research of poetics, cross reference their results in hopes of forming an argument for the immanence of poetry, and finally, offer tentative predictions for future investigations into empirical poetics. Behind this project lies the belief that art is not the estranged bedfellow of science; the evidence of science proves the power of art.

In 2006, six plant scientists proposed a subdiscipline called plant neurobiology that would examine how plants respond to signals from their environment by comparing the animal nervous system to the plant signaling system via analogy. Their paper, “Plant neurobiology: an integrated view of plant signaling” by Brenner et al., was accepted and published in the peer-reviewed journal Trends in Plant Science. Although Brenner et al. were respected scientists from recognized universities, their proposal was rejected by the plant science community. Pivotal to this rejection was the publication of “Plant neurobiology: no brain, no gain?” by Alpi et al., a paper coauthored by 36 scientists that criticized the concept of plant neurobiology. Why was Alpi et al.’s argument against plant neurobiology so successful? Their paper is representative of strategies that scientists use to persuade other scientists to reject a call for the development of a new subfield. This rhetorical analysis focuses on Alpi et al.’s interpretation of the concept of plant neurobiology and their use of scientific topoi, or commonplaces. Their argument effectively undermined plant neurobiology and its proponents by misrepresenting the plant neurobiology analogy as a literal argument and appealing to scientific topoi held by their audience, namely, the topoi of corroboration, explanatory power, observational competence, and parsimony. This analysis of the successful obstruction of a nascent subfield suggests that rhetoric plays a major role in the outcome of scientific debate by influencing the scientific community’s perception of a proposed idea.

What happens when the form in which whales communicate, locate food and find each other, is clouded by large ships, sonar technology and increased ice cracking noise in their environments? This presentation considers what the world of whales looks like beneath the ocean. I address this by taking a closer look at the auditory world of whales as a direct result of the lack of visual abilities due to limited light. I have focused on the chaos whales feel as a result of noise inserted within the depths of the ocean. With an increase in technological advances we see an increase in the number of ships and consequently of noise in the ocean. Underwater noise pollution is also attributed to ice fractures and collisions. These events do not occur at one singular time, they occur simultaneously for unknown periods of time and unpredictable areas. Understanding how animals feel and what they think is a difficult task, but we can better understand them by taking a closer look at their behaviors as the noise in the ocean becomes more abundant. My intention is that I will be able to formulate the chaos heard underwater into a humanized perspective and begin to understand these creatures as the hearing, feeling mammals they are.

Being excited is commonly perceived as a positive feeling, however, excitations are not always positive. In "On Techno-Aesthetics", Gilbert Simondon discusses the "technical individual." A point that the author makes is that technology is changing the world and humans adapt to that. For my research, I explored the problematic of a person's physiological responses as a result to their emotional arousal. I met with five unique individuals and measured the electrical conductance of their skin by using a galvanic skin response (GSR). A GSR is a very sensitive device that can be used to measure emotional arousal by reading their levels of sweat secretion. Although sweat secretion is commonly used to analyze thermoregulation, changes in this area are also greatly triggered by emotional stimulation. The human body has the highest amount of sweat glands in their hand and foot regions which is why the measuring device is placed on the person's fingertips. When people are overcome by a strong emotion - positive or negative - they secret more sweat through the sweat glands in these areas. By attaching two sock-like electrodes to the participants' fingers, I was able to detect the levels of excitement evoked by different factors. Skin conductance is not in the person's control, but instead, occurs on a subconscious level. I took my research to the UW Makerspace lab in order to create a tangible record of the participants' physiological responses. By connecting the GSR system to an Arduino board, I was able to give the participants an artistic display of their responses in the form of a butterfly. The butterfly represents the visceral feelings that is common to individuals when they are excited. I call this artistic project, "To Swallow a Butterfly."

I view energy as strongly intertwined with emotions, and that they are powerful forces that fluctuate and influence decisions. Thus, I chose to track instances where I felt a change in emotion in conjunction with its duration, what thought caused it to emerge, and if there was an attempt to deliberately shift moods. By developing my own codes and keys, I was able to monitor these fairly accurately on paper. However, I wanted to present this data in ways that differed from “traditional” portrayals of information. Hence, I used yarn and glitter in glass bottles to mimic bar graphs and liquid samples, respectively. These materials also served to emphasize the therapeutic nature within my project. The ideas of tracking something and its presentation were heavily inspired by duration exercises, which were done as assignments for the Summer Institute in the Arts & Humanities 2016, as well as Dear Data. The former required us to keep track of the passage of time for a minute, an hour, and 24 hours; the latter was a collaboration between Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec where they exchanged weekly postcards over the course of one year. Each week’s postcard included a theme of what they would both monitor in their daily life, a visual representation of the data they collected, and a key to decipher the image. Initially, my desire for this project was to encourage others to engage in mindful practices in order to experience the benefits it may have in their everyday life. However, by making this project deeply intertwined with something so personal as emotions, I also hope to challenge people to contemplate the relationship between emotions and data and the emphasis placed on pursuing objective results.

This presentation focuses on the question of how mythic vengeful mothers in Medieval Europe were percieved with special attention paid to Grendel's Mother from Beowulf. The first portion of the presentation will be dedicated to a historiography of Grendel's mother, including articles from scholars such as JRR Tolkien, Jane Chance, and Christine Alfano. This provides context for the body of the presentation, which focuses on the question of why Grendel's mother is percieved as so terrifying to both the author of Beowulf, and Beowulf scholars. In order to answer this questions, Grendel's mother is analyzed next to other revenge-seeking women in Icelandic epics in order to demonstrate how unusual she is. Using these works, we can see that ultimately Grendel's mother is terrifying not because she is a monster, but because she posses and uses a kind of power that cannot be mascuinized: the power that comes from maternal love. Unlike other Valkyrie figures, Grendel's mother cannot be temporarily made masculine in order to enact vengence, because she is already defined by motherhood, which is inherenly feminine, while other more accepted Valkyrie tend to be young maidens, who then return to womanhood by getting married when their task is complete. Grendel's mother assumes a power which is inherently feminine, which directly threatans the assumption on which patriarchal society is based: power is masculine. It is for this reason that she is portrayed and considered to be so frightening by scholars and the author alike.