While studies of the psychology of art have focused on individual works and distinctions between representative / non-representative topics, no work has been completed on the aesthetic appreciation of collections or of devotional themes.
In this paper, we report upon the novel insights eye-tracking techniques have provided into the unconscious processes of viewing the unique collection of Zurbarán artworks.
The project brings together established research strengths in Spanish art history, experimental psychology, digital humanities, and museum studies to explore, using eye-tracking techniques, aesthetic reactions to digital representations of the individual Zurbarán artworks as well as the significance of the collection as a whole.
Our experience of art develops from the interaction of several cognitive and affective processes; the beginning of which is a visual scan of the artwork.
The direction of saccades is determined by an interaction between the goals of the observer and the physical properties of the different elements of the scene (e.g. colour, texture, brightness etc).
Importantly, studying eye movements offers an insight that does not depend on the participants’ beliefs, memories or subjective impressions of the artwork.
Previous eye tracking research has highlighted the potential to transform the ways we understand visual processing in the arts (see for example Brieber 2014; Binderman et al., 2005) and at the same time offers a direct way of studying several important factors of a museum visit (Filippini Fantoni et al., 2013; Heidenreich & Turano 2011; Milekic 2010).
It has a long history in scholarship (Baron & Beresford 2014), but many key aspects of its production and significance have not yet been fully understood.
In this study we used eye-tracking in the first stage of exploring audience experience of the extensive Spanish art collections of County Durham, of which the 13 Zurbarán artworks (there are actually only 12 Zurbarán artworks, the 13th Benjamin, is a copy by Arthur Pond) are a key part of, to investigate the ways in which audiences look at Spanish art, how aesthetic experience is evaluated and whether audiences can be encouraged to approach art in different ways.
This pilot project primarily investigated how participants visually explore artworks and provides new insights into the potential eye-tracking has to transform the ways we understand visual processing in arts and culture and at the same time offer a direct way of studying several important factors of a museum visit, namely to assess the effects of label characteristics on visitor visual behaviour.
Tenured and tenure-track university faculty play a special role in determining the speed and direction of scientific progress, both directly through their research and indirectly through their training of new researchers.
Past studies establish that each of these efforts is strongly and positively influenced through various forms of faculty diversity, including ethnic, racial, and gender diversity.
As an example, research shows that greater diversity within a community or group can lead to improved critical thinking [1] and more creative solutions to complex tasks [2, 3] by pairing together individuals with unique skillsets and perspectives that complement and often augment the abilities of their peers.
Additionally, diversity has been shown to produce more supportive social climates and effective learning environments [4], which can facilitate the mentoring of young scientists.
Despite these positive effects, however, quantifying the impact of diversity in science remains exceedingly difficult, due in large part to a lack of comprehensive data about the scientific workforce.
Measuring the composition and dynamics of a scientific workforce, particularly in a rapidly expanding field like computer science, is a crucial first step toward understanding how scholarly research is conducted and how it might be enhanced.
For many scientific fields, however, there is no central listing of all tenure-track faculty, making it difficult to define a rigorous sample frame for analysis.
For instance, gender representation in computing is an important issue with broad implications [5], but without a full census of computing faculty, the degree of inequality and its possible sources are difficult to establish [6].
Most fields, on the other hand, including computer science, lack a single all-encompassing organization and membership information is instead distributed across many disjoint lists, such as web-based faculty directories for individual departments.
Because assembling such a full census is difficult, past studies have tended to avoid this task and have instead used samples of researchers [8 – 11], usually specific to a particular field [12 – 16], and often focused on the scientific elite [17, 18].
One of the largest census efforts to date assembled, by hand, a nearly complete record of three academic fields: computer science, history, and business [19].
But, this data set is only a single snapshot of an evolving and expanding system and hence offers few insights into the changing composition and diversity trends within these academic fields.
In computer science, the Computing Research Association (CRA) documents trends in the employment of PhD recipients through the annual Taulbee survey of computing departments in North America (cra.org/resources/taulbee-survey).
First, surveys are subject to variable response rates and the misinterpretation of questions or sample frames, which can inject bias into fine-grained analyses [21, 22].
For example, differences in recruitment and retention strategies across departments will be washed out by averaging, thereby masking any insights into the efficacy of individual strategies and policies.
Here, we present a novel system, based on a topical web crawler, that can quickly and automatically assemble a full census of an academic field using digital data available on the public World Wide Web.
The system is capable of collecting census data for an entire academic field in just a few hours using off-the-shelf computing hardware, a vast improvement over the roughly 1600 hours required to do this task by hand [19].
By assembling an accurate census of an entire field from online information alone, this system will facilitate new research on the composition of academic fields by providing access to complete faculty listings, without having to rely on surveys or professional societies.
This system can also be used longitudinally to study how the workforce’s composition changes over time, which is particularly valuable for evaluating the effectiveness of policies meant to broaden participation or improve retention of faculty.
Finally, applied to many academic fields in parallel, the system can elucidate scientists’ movement between different disciplines and relate those labor flows to scientific advances.
The first demonstrates the validity and utility of the crawler by collecting census data for the field of computer science and comparing it to a hand-curated census, collected in 2011 [19].
The second provides an example of the type of research enabled by our system and uses the 2011 and 2017 censuses to investigate the “leaky pipeline” problem in faculty retention.
The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to its main representatives (Douglass North, Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, and Elinor Ostrom) has contributed to its greater recognition.
For its part, North defined the institutions as the “rules of the game”: they determine the structure of the economy, establish incentives for economic behavior, and affect social interaction [12].
Achieving these objectives requires the creation of inclusive institutions, which guarantee the right to private property, incorporate an impartial legal system, and promote a society based on equality of conditions [16].
In governments with extractive policies, the group in power usually extracts resources from the rest of the population for its own enrichment and well-being.
Another feature of this type of government is that powerful interest groups oppose increased pluralism because it typically results in the loss of their privileges.
Those in power have little interest in their power devolving to a greater number of agents, as would occur under political institutions that were more pluralistic [16].
The institutional structure of a state and its constitution are responsible for restricting predatory action—even by the state itself—and for creating rules that benefit the community [18].
If the decisions taken by the state are not based on the general interest and, in their execution, do not respect property rights, the number of transactions will be reduced, which will result in unfavorable economic performance.
In a scenario with insecure property rights, asymmetric information, and a judicial system that acts as a lax enforcement mechanism, as discussed in the following sections, the FDI is difficult to attract.