Dr. Herdman is pleased to be a collaborator on a recently awarded SSHRC Connections Grant which will be used to support an interdisciplinary project on “Eye Tracking, Disability, and Mind Art Creation”. This humanities-oriented project is led by Dr. Christian Riegel who is a Professor of English at the University of Regina.
Description: “Eye Tracking, Disability, and Mind Art Creation” will assemble a multidisciplinary team of researchers, students, and community members to a) examine the hardware and software potential for eye tracking devices to produce tangible creative outputs (visual art, musical composition & performance, and creative writing); b) develop, following a “hackathon” model, functional eye tracking modes that produce creative outputs using existing commercial eye trackers (Tobii XT 60, Oculus VR, Eye Tribe). In a humanities context, the notion of a hackathon emphasizes software and hardware contexts and marries them with humanities concerns relating to theories of culture, cultural history and production; c) assemble easily available and low-cost microcomputers and other hardware pieces (e.g., Arduino), write suitable code, and produce functional prototypes for common use. Related goals will be to create linkages with researchers and their students at two universities and with community groups that deal with disability (University of Regina, Carleton University, George Reed Foundation, Neil Squires Society) with the goal to develop future research in the humanities, social sciences, and technology fields to redefine tools to increase accessibility for including, but not limited to, people with limited mobility or mobility impairment.