ASU Scholarship Showcase

Introduction: The Arizona State University (ASU) Library chose to particulate in the Ithaka S+R research study on Asian Studies faculty’s research practices and needs. The rationale for the study was as follows:

Asian Studies covers a diverse and vital world region that in recent decades has had major centers of both development and conflict. Although different from one another, these fields indicate the importance we place not only in traditional arts and sciences fields but also in the sciences, professions, and area studies that will continue to be important for our society and our universities. This study will generate a richly illustrated description of the field’s practices and needs and make actionable recommendations for how libraries (and others) can best support their research going forward.

The ASU Library is one of 19 university libraries selected to participate in the study. Among the selected libraries were Harvard University, Indiana University, UCLA University, University of Washington, Colorado University, University of Maryland, and University of Texas. Each university was responsible for interviewing 15 scholars involved in Asian Studies using a set of semi-structured interview questions. The identity of the scholars was kept anonymous. Each interview was recorded and transcribed. Each institution will write a report (to be placed in their university repositories) which will be passed up to the Ithaka S+R team who will write a report summarizing the entire project.

This local research project was implemented by a researcher at ASU with guidance on the research methodology and data analysis provided by Ithaka S+R. The ASU researcher participated in an Ithaka S+R training session which encouraged consistency across all the participating institutions. This report is organized This report is organized into seven sections providing an overview of Asian Studies at ASU and a discussions of the issues resulting from this study. Lastly, recommendations for the ASU Library to support Asian Studies.

Arizona State University is embracing new ways of thinking about how open stacks can make books active objects of engagement for a new generation of students, rather than risk becoming mere backdrops for study spaces. By taking a deliberate design approach to answering the question of which books and where, ASU Library seeks to position print collections as an engagement mechanism. This chapter presents the transformative potential of open stacks, along with planning for access, assessment and inclusive engagement. The authors describe how ASU Library is using a major library renovation project as a catalyst to explore these ideas, and propose a pathway to developing shared solutions for more effective use of library collections.

Human team members show a remarkable ability to infer the state of their partners and anticipate their needs and actions. Prior research demonstrates that an artificial system can make some predictions accurately concerning artificial agents. This study investigated whether an artificial system could generate a robust Theory of Mind of human teammates. An urban search and rescue (USAR) task environment was developed to elicit human teamwork and evaluate inference and prediction about team members by software agents and humans. The task varied team members’ roles and skills, types of task synchronization and interdependence, task risk and reward, completeness of mission planning, and information asymmetry. The task was implemented in MinecraftTM and applied in a study of 64 teams, each with three remotely distributed members. An evaluation of six Artificial Social Intelligences (ASI) and several human observers addressed the accuracy with which each predicted team performance, inferred experimentally manipulated knowledge of team members, and predicted member actions. All agents performed above chance; humans slightly outperformed ASI agents on some tasks and significantly outperformed ASI agents on others; no one ASI agent reliably outperformed the others; and the accuracy of ASI agents and human observers improved rapidly though modestly during the brief trials.

The central objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the validity of the Hughes and Coakley (H&C) model of deviance in sport is context specific and depends on the time, place, social groups involved, and the relative power of the audience and deviant(s). H&C argued that performance enhancing substance (PES) use constituted a single type of deviant behavior among athletes (i.e., positive deviance). The Heckert and Heckert (H&H) deviance framework made it possible to theorize performance-enhancing substances and methods (PESM) use as four ideal types of deviant behavior among athletes and in sports collectives. Given the variability in the historical and social contexts where PESM use has occurred in sport, a comprehensive explanatory framework is needed to understand a full range of PESM behaviors. This paper demonstrates that the H&H framework has a clear explanatory advantage over the H&C model.