Fi-Sci Pattern Mapping
System
Destination
Science Communication
Cognitive Maneuver:
Pattern Mapping
Instrument:
Fictionality
Framework:
Fi-Sci
Perspective-taking
Multiliteracy
InterdisciplinaryFluency
New Avenues in Narrative Studies
Contextualization
Abstraction
Vehicle:
Jigsaw Module
Curricular Innovation
Translation
Creativity
Integrative Thinking
Instrument:
Fictionality
Rhetoric is the art of using words as a means to an end—to inspire and convince; to provoke and beguile.
At times, the words we use are fictions: we invent something to get our audience to consider nonactual states or events, to imagine things that are not real.
Picture Adam and Anton, hiking in a redwood forest. Adam points to a tree and says, "Once the squirrels arrive at the top it'll just be a couple of hops to their fluffy cloud beds."
Adam is using fictionality as a means to an end: he invents a scenario to convey the tree's extraordinary height—and perhaps to make Anton smile at the absurdity of squirrels sleeping in clouds. In short, Adam uses fictionality rhetorically.
Fictionality is an instrument—a tool, a device—used for a particular purpose.
Cognitive Maneuver:
Pattern Mapping
Identifying commonalities between two concepts entails recognizing they share a pattern.
Consider the first column in the left-hand image. Blood vessels, tree branches, and river deltas vary greatly in scale and function, but they have something in common: all three systems take an arborescent form.
Pattern recognition is also at play when we use the language of one discipline or domain to describe another. For example, we talk about recombinant DNA and genetic engineering with words that typically characterize linguistics and text, such as code, alphabet, phrase, editing, instructions, transcription, translation.
The wave is another reappearing pattern. Around 250 B.C.E., the philosopher Chrysippus considered the possibility that sound is a sort of wave. Two centuries later, the architect Vitruvius likened the way sound waves spread to the way ripples move on water. Soon, scientists made the leap from sound to light, and concepts like interference, refraction, transverse, and wavelength could be used to describe a pattern across three media.
Pattern mapping involves recognizing that disparate phenomena correspond in form or structure.
Framework:
Fi-Sci
Thought is a function of analogy. Faced with a novel concept, we reason about it by comparing it to something already familiar. In order to conceptualize our world, we map patterns from one domain onto another.
Let's borrow language from the domain of fiction to elucidate patterns in the domain of science.
Astrobiologists do this when they refer to a circumstellar habitable area as the Goldilocks Zone. It works because the science and the fairy tale share a pattern: they both describe conditions that are "just right."
When a concept in fiction is thus analogous to—that is, shares a pattern with—a concept in science, we can leverage the former to reflect upon the latter.
Click here to see an example of a fi-sci analogy at the intersection of interactive fiction and genetics.
Drawing on fiction to reason about a similarly shaped phenomenon in science is fiction→science (or, fi-sci) pattern mapping.
Vehicle:
Jigsaw Module
The jigsaw module (JM) is a portable, stand-alone set of lessons that can be slotted among the other modules of an existing course—like a puzzle piece. The subject of each JM is a particular fi-sci analogy whereby a pattern in a work of fiction is mapped onto a science process or phenomenon.
JMs function as adaptable templates that every instructor can adjust and rearrange per a course's requirements and modality, and scale to cover less or more time.
Though customizable, the JMs are bookended by three features that are identical across all all such modules:
- A standard module launch pad (home page) that includes a brief introduction to fi-sci pattern mapping and two student learning outcomes, which align with two assignments:
- First, a reflection on a common prompt that all students complete at the module’s conclusion, and
- Second, an activity for which each student develops an original fi-sci analogy.
JMs are collected in an open education resource (OER) digital library. This repository is a crowdsourced (or, facultysourced), living collection of course components available to instructors across disciplines. Once an instructor selects a module they wish to adopt, the fully-formed yet customizable JM is exported into the host course.
Jigsaw modules are "plug-and-play," configurable teaching units that convey fi-sci pattern mapping into courses across the curriculum.
New Avenues in Narrative Studies
The fi-sci method of using fiction to access science may seem similar to but is actually distinct from the ways fiction has typically been used to clarify or teach science. The prevailing uses focus on two types of narrative: science fiction, long wielded as a vehicle for envisioning alternate worlds and futures, like Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland (1884), Octavia Butler's Dawn (1987), and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and fiction that does not present as science fiction, but that still explicitly deals with or references science, like Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries (1997) and Richard Powers’ Orfeo (2014). These uses depend on the overt, because the connections between fiction and science are right there in plain sight. Fi-sci, on the other hand, turns on latency: the potential for a connection is present in the narrative, but must be excavated with pattern mapping.
The claim that fiction can illuminate science ascribes to fiction a remarkable power. This power is described with a rhetorical approach to fictionality, which “entails assuming that it is a means to an end” (Nielsen et al. 63). The rhetorical approach views generic fictions such as the novel, the short story, and the fiction film as subsets of a larger mode of fictive discourse, which James Phelan characterizes as “intentionally communicated invention, projection, or other means of directing an audience to consider nonactual states or events” (Gammelgaard et al. 7).
The fiction part of fi-sci pattern mapping functions as a means to direct an audience to consider nonactual states or events specifically for the purpose of enhancing their comprehension of scientific concepts. With this framework, fi-sci pattern mapping adds to narratologists’ examination of what “rhetorical theorizing about fictionality can do for our understanding of literature” (Gammelgaard et al. 2), an exploration of what rhetorical theorizing about fictionality can do for our understanding of science.
Access to science phenomena turns on the same mechanism that grants access to all concepts: analogy. The fi-sci framework's move is to posit science as the target domain and fiction as the source domain. Here, fictionality is conceived as an instrument, and pattern mapping is the cognitive resource through which we wield it.
References: Gammelgaard, Lasse R., et al. Fictionality in Literature: Core Concepts Revisited. Ohio State UP, 2022. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, et al. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative, vol. 23, no. 1, 2015, pp. 61-73.
Curricular Innovation
Since its inception in 2021, the Science & Fiction Lab has organized three professional development institutes during which faculty fellows worked in interdisciplinary duos to design jigsaw modules. The topic of each JM would correspond to the expertise of the faculty that develop it.
Then, duos would build jigsaw modules around their fi-sci analogies, consisting of learning outcomes, recommendations for assignments, and suggestions for outcome assessment. Fellows individually implemented their JMs into their own courses, and also contributed them to the open-access digital library so that they would be available for other faculty to adapt and adopt.
Duos began by deriving a fi-sci analogy that links both professors' specializations. Fi-sci pairings developed across the three institutes include:
- History + computing and information sciences
- Religious studies + astronomy
- Portuguese literature + cellular biology
- Network aesthetics + network science
- Italian literature + biophysics
- Disability studies + engineering
Visit the Fi-Sci Gallery and scroll down to the last section to peruse fi-sci curricula developed by faculty fellows.
Fi-sci pattern mapping bakes interdisciplinarity into the undergraduate curriculum. Students gain exposure to concepts and methods they would have otherwise not encountered in the siloed university structure. In doing so they see their own subject in a new light and observe how it intersects with other fields—what it can offer to the understanding of other subjects. This enables them to discover novel applications for their skills, which can translate into innovative job opportunities.
Whether humanities or STEM majors, students who map fi-sci patterns are studying the subject matter they were already set to cover, but doing something more. Recognizing the contours of a science phenomenon in a process that takes place as far afield as literature encourages integrative thinking, leading to a more holistic understanding. Moreover, the novelty of such an unusual connection engages students’ creativity and critical thinking, which entrenches long-term knowledge retention. In all, students charting such interdisciplinary patterns engage in multiliteracies: they gain a broader perspective on the very expertise they're cultivating.
Students who experience fi-sci JMs gain cross-disciplinary proficiency—the ability to convey a complex process to a nonspecialist audience by way of analogy. Over the long term, open access to this perspective-widening pedagogical intervention has the potential to enhance the infrastructure of postsecondary curricula, paving the way for truly integrated multiliteracy. Broader impacts include boosts to the public's understanding of science, humanities, and the myriad connections between them.
Interactive Fiction || Genetic Engineering
Choose-your-own adventure stories (fi) share a pattern with genetic engineering (sci): both involve rearranging building blocks—whether text segments or genes—that spotlight the reader’s or engineer’s permutative agency. By altering the sequence of nucleobase pairs, geneticists can convey different information. We locate this pattern whereby an actor rearranges an entity’s elemental units in the aptly named genre of interactive fiction—such as choose-your-own-adventure stories—the salient feature of which is the reader’s permutative agency. A classic example of an interactive narrative is Julio Cortázar’s 1963 novel Hopscotch. The author encourages the reader to read the novel’s chapters—the building blocks of the narrative—in different configurations. Hopscotch’s setup foregrounds the notion that sequence matters. As with nucleobase pairs, there exists a limited number of building blocks (the novel’s 155 micro chapters) that can be recombined, and each combination yields a different building. The rearrangement of chapters shares the conceptual contours of gene permutation, correlating the literary genre of interactive fiction with the science process of genetic engineering. In both cases, resequencing an entity’s elemental units results in different “versions” of this entity.
Fi-Sci Institute '23
Fi-Sci Institute Pilot '22
FIU+UoB Fi-Sci Institute '24
Fi-Sci Pattern Mapping
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Transcript
Fi-Sci Pattern Mapping
System
Destination
Science Communication
Cognitive Maneuver:
Pattern Mapping
Instrument:
Fictionality
Framework:
Fi-Sci
Perspective-taking
Multiliteracy
InterdisciplinaryFluency
New Avenues in Narrative Studies
Contextualization
Abstraction
Vehicle:
Jigsaw Module
Curricular Innovation
Translation
Creativity
Integrative Thinking
Instrument:
Fictionality
Rhetoric is the art of using words as a means to an end—to inspire and convince; to provoke and beguile.
At times, the words we use are fictions: we invent something to get our audience to consider nonactual states or events, to imagine things that are not real.
Picture Adam and Anton, hiking in a redwood forest. Adam points to a tree and says, "Once the squirrels arrive at the top it'll just be a couple of hops to their fluffy cloud beds."
Adam is using fictionality as a means to an end: he invents a scenario to convey the tree's extraordinary height—and perhaps to make Anton smile at the absurdity of squirrels sleeping in clouds. In short, Adam uses fictionality rhetorically.
Fictionality is an instrument—a tool, a device—used for a particular purpose.
Cognitive Maneuver:
Pattern Mapping
Identifying commonalities between two concepts entails recognizing they share a pattern.
Consider the first column in the left-hand image. Blood vessels, tree branches, and river deltas vary greatly in scale and function, but they have something in common: all three systems take an arborescent form.
Pattern recognition is also at play when we use the language of one discipline or domain to describe another. For example, we talk about recombinant DNA and genetic engineering with words that typically characterize linguistics and text, such as code, alphabet, phrase, editing, instructions, transcription, translation.
The wave is another reappearing pattern. Around 250 B.C.E., the philosopher Chrysippus considered the possibility that sound is a sort of wave. Two centuries later, the architect Vitruvius likened the way sound waves spread to the way ripples move on water. Soon, scientists made the leap from sound to light, and concepts like interference, refraction, transverse, and wavelength could be used to describe a pattern across three media.
Pattern mapping involves recognizing that disparate phenomena correspond in form or structure.
Framework:
Fi-Sci
Thought is a function of analogy. Faced with a novel concept, we reason about it by comparing it to something already familiar. In order to conceptualize our world, we map patterns from one domain onto another.
Let's borrow language from the domain of fiction to elucidate patterns in the domain of science.
Astrobiologists do this when they refer to a circumstellar habitable area as the Goldilocks Zone. It works because the science and the fairy tale share a pattern: they both describe conditions that are "just right."
When a concept in fiction is thus analogous to—that is, shares a pattern with—a concept in science, we can leverage the former to reflect upon the latter.
Click here to see an example of a fi-sci analogy at the intersection of interactive fiction and genetics.
Drawing on fiction to reason about a similarly shaped phenomenon in science is fiction→science (or, fi-sci) pattern mapping.
Vehicle:
Jigsaw Module
The jigsaw module (JM) is a portable, stand-alone set of lessons that can be slotted among the other modules of an existing course—like a puzzle piece. The subject of each JM is a particular fi-sci analogy whereby a pattern in a work of fiction is mapped onto a science process or phenomenon.
JMs function as adaptable templates that every instructor can adjust and rearrange per a course's requirements and modality, and scale to cover less or more time.
Though customizable, the JMs are bookended by three features that are identical across all all such modules:
JMs are collected in an open education resource (OER) digital library. This repository is a crowdsourced (or, facultysourced), living collection of course components available to instructors across disciplines. Once an instructor selects a module they wish to adopt, the fully-formed yet customizable JM is exported into the host course.
Jigsaw modules are "plug-and-play," configurable teaching units that convey fi-sci pattern mapping into courses across the curriculum.
New Avenues in Narrative Studies
The fi-sci method of using fiction to access science may seem similar to but is actually distinct from the ways fiction has typically been used to clarify or teach science. The prevailing uses focus on two types of narrative: science fiction, long wielded as a vehicle for envisioning alternate worlds and futures, like Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland (1884), Octavia Butler's Dawn (1987), and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and fiction that does not present as science fiction, but that still explicitly deals with or references science, like Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries (1997) and Richard Powers’ Orfeo (2014). These uses depend on the overt, because the connections between fiction and science are right there in plain sight. Fi-sci, on the other hand, turns on latency: the potential for a connection is present in the narrative, but must be excavated with pattern mapping.
The claim that fiction can illuminate science ascribes to fiction a remarkable power. This power is described with a rhetorical approach to fictionality, which “entails assuming that it is a means to an end” (Nielsen et al. 63). The rhetorical approach views generic fictions such as the novel, the short story, and the fiction film as subsets of a larger mode of fictive discourse, which James Phelan characterizes as “intentionally communicated invention, projection, or other means of directing an audience to consider nonactual states or events” (Gammelgaard et al. 7).
The fiction part of fi-sci pattern mapping functions as a means to direct an audience to consider nonactual states or events specifically for the purpose of enhancing their comprehension of scientific concepts. With this framework, fi-sci pattern mapping adds to narratologists’ examination of what “rhetorical theorizing about fictionality can do for our understanding of literature” (Gammelgaard et al. 2), an exploration of what rhetorical theorizing about fictionality can do for our understanding of science.
Access to science phenomena turns on the same mechanism that grants access to all concepts: analogy. The fi-sci framework's move is to posit science as the target domain and fiction as the source domain. Here, fictionality is conceived as an instrument, and pattern mapping is the cognitive resource through which we wield it.
References: Gammelgaard, Lasse R., et al. Fictionality in Literature: Core Concepts Revisited. Ohio State UP, 2022. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, et al. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative, vol. 23, no. 1, 2015, pp. 61-73.
Curricular Innovation
Since its inception in 2021, the Science & Fiction Lab has organized three professional development institutes during which faculty fellows worked in interdisciplinary duos to design jigsaw modules. The topic of each JM would correspond to the expertise of the faculty that develop it.
Then, duos would build jigsaw modules around their fi-sci analogies, consisting of learning outcomes, recommendations for assignments, and suggestions for outcome assessment. Fellows individually implemented their JMs into their own courses, and also contributed them to the open-access digital library so that they would be available for other faculty to adapt and adopt.
Duos began by deriving a fi-sci analogy that links both professors' specializations. Fi-sci pairings developed across the three institutes include:
Visit the Fi-Sci Gallery and scroll down to the last section to peruse fi-sci curricula developed by faculty fellows.
Fi-sci pattern mapping bakes interdisciplinarity into the undergraduate curriculum. Students gain exposure to concepts and methods they would have otherwise not encountered in the siloed university structure. In doing so they see their own subject in a new light and observe how it intersects with other fields—what it can offer to the understanding of other subjects. This enables them to discover novel applications for their skills, which can translate into innovative job opportunities.
Whether humanities or STEM majors, students who map fi-sci patterns are studying the subject matter they were already set to cover, but doing something more. Recognizing the contours of a science phenomenon in a process that takes place as far afield as literature encourages integrative thinking, leading to a more holistic understanding. Moreover, the novelty of such an unusual connection engages students’ creativity and critical thinking, which entrenches long-term knowledge retention. In all, students charting such interdisciplinary patterns engage in multiliteracies: they gain a broader perspective on the very expertise they're cultivating.
Students who experience fi-sci JMs gain cross-disciplinary proficiency—the ability to convey a complex process to a nonspecialist audience by way of analogy. Over the long term, open access to this perspective-widening pedagogical intervention has the potential to enhance the infrastructure of postsecondary curricula, paving the way for truly integrated multiliteracy. Broader impacts include boosts to the public's understanding of science, humanities, and the myriad connections between them.
Interactive Fiction || Genetic Engineering
Choose-your-own adventure stories (fi) share a pattern with genetic engineering (sci): both involve rearranging building blocks—whether text segments or genes—that spotlight the reader’s or engineer’s permutative agency. By altering the sequence of nucleobase pairs, geneticists can convey different information. We locate this pattern whereby an actor rearranges an entity’s elemental units in the aptly named genre of interactive fiction—such as choose-your-own-adventure stories—the salient feature of which is the reader’s permutative agency. A classic example of an interactive narrative is Julio Cortázar’s 1963 novel Hopscotch. The author encourages the reader to read the novel’s chapters—the building blocks of the narrative—in different configurations. Hopscotch’s setup foregrounds the notion that sequence matters. As with nucleobase pairs, there exists a limited number of building blocks (the novel’s 155 micro chapters) that can be recombined, and each combination yields a different building. The rearrangement of chapters shares the conceptual contours of gene permutation, correlating the literary genre of interactive fiction with the science process of genetic engineering. In both cases, resequencing an entity’s elemental units results in different “versions” of this entity.
Fi-Sci Institute '23
Fi-Sci Institute Pilot '22
FIU+UoB Fi-Sci Institute '24