 All right. Well, hello, and welcome to the ADHD talks. I'm your host, Sarah Whitford, and I'm so happy that y'all have chosen to join me today. The ADHD talks is a video podcast hosted by the Alabama Digital Humanity Center. It is live streamed and recorded on zoom and then it's captioned and posted on YouTube and it lives on our ADHD website. This is our fourth and final episode of the semester fall 2023. Our guests today are Sarah Bryant and David Allen. Sarah Bryant is assistant professor for the MFA book arts program at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. She's produced an artist book, she produced has produced artist books and prints under the name Big Jump Press. Since 2005. That's a weird way to say that. For work can be found in dozens of libraries and private collections in the United States and abroad, including my home. And the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library and the Darling Biological Biomedical Library Center at UCLA and Yale Arts Library. Dave Allen is associate professor of biology at Middlebury College, where he studies the ecology of ticks and tick-borne diseases. Dr. Allen has published his work in numerous journals, including the Journal of Medical Entomology, Biological Conservation, Emerging Infectious Disease and Northeastern Naturalist. His research on ticks and tick-borne pathologians is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. During our podcast, I'll be asking a set of questions which have already been shared with our guests and I've invited them to prepare any visuals that they want to share during our talk. Our conversation will be guided by these questions, but we're always welcome to follow the conversation wherever it takes us. So, Sarah and Dave, I'm going to ask my first question, and this is always my favorite question. Tell me about your research, and the thing that I am most interested in is what makes you feel nerdy and excited? I will start. And I will say that, so my research is printing and designing and binding artist books. I'm a printer, I'm an artist, I'm a teacher, and I get into the tall grass and into the weeds about things like inking and impression and all that kind of physical production side stuff. But also, I spend a lot of time researching and designing these book projects. So talking to people who know a lot more than I do about certain things or reading around certain subjects. And then all of my projects end up hopefully being quite different from one another. They might be about, for example, a book that Dave and I have done together was about world populations a few years ago. Another project is about archives. Another project is about the biological composition of our bodies. So I'm kind of trying to do a lot of different things at once. And it basically means that given the year or whatever project I'm working on, I'm a big dork about one particular thing. Great, I'm an ecologist, so I study the interactions between organisms and different species of organisms, and then also the organisms and their environment. And so I'm interested in how those interactions determine why we find lots of or some species in some places and not other places or why there's lots one year, but then few other years. And so right now I'm applying that work to ticks and tick-borne diseases. And so like Sarah, I also get into the tall grass and the weeds, but literally get into the tall grass and weeds and go out into the field and look for ticks. And then also measure the other aspects of a habitat that would determine how many ticks there are. So how many hosts there are, how many deer there are, how many mice there are, and then do some experiments to sort of understand other aspects of the ticks in the field. Take the ticks back to the lab and test them for tick-borne pathogens with PCR tests, just like the COVID PCR test. And then I'm also really interested then in sort of trying to understand how can we make sense of all that because there are these like huge web of ecological complexity. And I use mathematical and computational models to help me make understand that. And so definitely what I nerd out about is, one, just like how do you understand the world around you? And for me, that's about the ecological world. And then, but I'm also very secretly a math nerd. And at some points, I just try to, I want to use the math because I like math. So that's where I'm nerdy about. I love that. So I was actually showing the tick edition of the Acts of Translation to a librarian friend the other day and she started squealing. She was like, that's R! So exciting to her. She's like the person in our library who is in charge of all things R studio. And she was so excited to see it in there. I think, Sarah, I think you were there when she was over. Yeah, it was great. And I, you know, I know nothing about R. You know, it's like gibberish, but I was so excited because I was like, yes, this is my project. Well, but I think that that is, that's a really common aspect of digital humanities collaboration is often there is a sub like a subject or some sort of functional, you know, everybody has their own role and not everybody knows all of the different programming languages or the platforms or the processes, but together you're able to use these mixed methodologies and these mixed technologies that you couldn't use on your own to produce something that you're unable to produce without that collaboration. And I think, I think that that's something that one of the reasons why I do this podcast is because I want new DH scholars to be able to understand how collaborations are developed and how they are, how you can get a project together and executed when you find people who can partner with you. Yeah, it might be helpful if I can share my screen and show the sort of collaborations that Dave and I have done in the past, and the project that I've been working on now with multiple collaborators and then it can be a little bit more clear how we can bring our weird nerdiness sort of together. I find my PowerPoint. Okay, and I'm going to go to the beginning and start it. This is from a talk I recently gave for Carrie which is the collaborative arts research initiative that funded a lot of the work that Dave and I have recently done and I've been doing recently, and it's a great sort of community building fellowship that I had with Carrie over the last two years that sponsors. If any of our viewers who have watched our other video podcasts if you've seen Rebecca Salthers or Amanda Coase they were also part of the Carrie group. So you are our third Carrie fellow to be on the podcast. I think that's, I mean it's, it's natural because of the way that Carrie is kind of encouraging folks to cross disciplines and work together to create work that they wouldn't be able to do on their own, and that's certainly what happens with me and Dave. We have very different skill sets and very different interests, but they align in certain ways and then we can make these projects that would be impossible for either of us on our own. And we've been working together for a long time I actually think our first project that we made together was in 2013. Wow. So 10 years. And we had been kind of trying to do things earlier than that and I should say I want to do full disclosure now and say that Dave and I are cousins we have known each other for our entire lives. Full disclosure and I don't only collaborate because but Dave and I we also went to college together as undergraduates so we just have had a lot of time to talk and kind of get interested in what each other are doing. So that's kind of, you know, how, how we started and, and years and years ago maybe as early as 2008 or 2009, we started kind of getting together and I would get Dave on the press and he would talk to me about. At the time, his dissertation research, which was on which Hazel. So we've just been talking for a long, long time. I'm going to switch the slide, just to show the kind of work that I do and in fact, if you can see does my arrow show up hovering around. This was our first project here in our first like full finished project, which I can't link to because this is a screenshot but it was a project where I just used it was more of a me stealing Dave's language and making my own project than anything else but I took language from his dissertation and put it into an artist book project. Because of an exhibition invitation that required collaboration I didn't use to collaborate and I kind of like resisted collaboration and a lot of I was kind of like horrified at the idea. So my world has changed a lot in the last 10 years I collaborate all the time, but just to say very briefly that the research that I do this is what it looks like these are these artists books I produce them in small editions I do most of that work by hand, I'm working on operating printing press or handbook binding. The design is all mine, and often in collaboration though with other artists or with people who are in other disciplines like Dave. The acts of translation project that I've been working on now currently has five collaborators and I'm kind of winding it down I really hoped to incorporate additional folks. One of the people who did one of these lectures, or these talks with you Sarah was initially part of this list and it kind of breaks my heart that that my deadline sort of made it impossible for me to continue with everybody. But at the moment, these are the folks who are a part of this project. And the way that this project works is that I spoke with each of these folks, starting with a kind of standard interview. And then branching out into larger conversations which I recorded, asking them questions about how they define the word translation in their work, if there is a definition of translation in their work how they imagine themselves to be engaged in acts of translation in their daily life or in their kind of work. And then, with each of them I identified a kind of particular act of translation and we defined that pretty broadly to say, you know, any kind of transmission, like conversion and transmission of information. So for Dave, who is one of the first folks that I was really working with about this, we were talking about how Dave uses his skills and interests and, you know, his world to translate an ecological system Dave you're going to have to like totally translate all the stuff that I'm saying but translates an ecological system which in his case is a tick population into a mathematical model. So what that process is for him, and also what the importance of that process is. I think I'll just stop talking there, and I'll let Dave talk a little about what that is, what that means and how he, you know, experienced this process of discussion. Go. So, yeah, I love this idea of translation. And for me, you know, the one of the first things that came to mind was how do I translate an ecological system into a mathematical model, and why would I want to do that or the steps to do that. And so the upshot for me is you can use a mathematical model. Well, what you want to do is this model is an abstraction or a simplification of the very messy complicated world that, you know, we can't totally understand, but if we can pare down to the things that we think are the, you know, salient drivers in this case of a tick population. Part of that is just interesting because it forces you to to think about like what do you think is what drives a tick population how much of it is the dear population versus the temperature versus the structure of the leafletter that they live in. And then, can we then encode that into some simple rules that, again, just like forces you to put your thoughts in a more very formal structure. So that is the like the part of modeling that I find very interesting and rewarding and helps then just like shows you what you do or you don't know about the system to begin with. And that like sort of active translation or what it was very interesting to me. And then obviously if you have a model, then it can be very helpful in, you know, projecting, you know, if, as long as the model is does a good job of like how many ticks will there be next year how will there be under different climate change scenarios or what if we were able to vaccinate half of the mice in the field then how many, how many ticks would be infected, and you can sort of interrogate those more applied questions with the model. I don't know if that answers the question but that's sort of just like why I think that modeling is interesting and then, but the key part is this sort of like, how do you translate the world into a system of mathematical equations. One thing that I think was interesting about this whole process working with Dave but also working with Allison Grant who's a photographer here at the University of Alabama, Louveta Harrison she's also at the University of Alabama. And through the carry fellowship Louveta is a soprano performer and an educator, and then Ben Mitchell who's a type designer in the UK, and Sonya to pray who's a elementary Spanish teacher. One of the things that was interesting is that there's also this active translation and sort of like outside of the subject matter which is that, first of all, I'm having to ask these folks to translate their experience to me so they have to explain what they're talking about. And this image that I popped up is something I asked Dave to do while he was here was to draw this kind of flow diagram or flow chart of the kind of life cycle of these ticks, as he was, you know, as to explain how he would begin the model process would be happening with me for Allison Grant talking to her about what how she selected these images. So there's, there's this active translation that I'm doing as an artist, trying to first of all kind of synthesize all of these different voices to think about how each of their stories can be in parallel to one another but also how, because I am editing the text from the interviews that I'm doing with these folks. It's actually my voice. Also, that's a part of the language of the book so each of the, I should show. In fact, let me stop sharing my, well actually maybe I can. So I'm going to stop sharing for a moment. And I'm going to show a copy of this finished version of the book, each of these books I'm going to do something weird and run away and run back each of these books in like two ways. I know, I know it wouldn't be funny if I just never came back. They, they first, I have been issuing them individually. So this is Ben Mitchell, the type designer. This is Dave Allen, who we are talking to right now, and Allison Grant. And over there I'm currently binding the subsequent two components of the book. Now that they're all finished, I'm creating an addition where they all go together in this kind of format, that what I like about this format is that you can look at all of them at once, and read across, or you can look at any two of them together. So here I can look at Dave Allen, and Louveta A. Harrison, and see how their texts might echo each other. And so there's something kind of this is I've only just finished the first copy or two of the way these books all go together and it's been very rewarding, because I can see how those texts have these unexpected connections. Dave, of course, is speaking about climate change, Allison Grant's photography is also related to a climate crisis. I'm not saying that these things are all, you know, really simple and that they dovetail perfectly but there are these themes that are kind of overlapping even as we're talking about translation or communication we're also talking about what it is we're communicating and why. I kind of see myself in this role of I'm also this I'm kind of just like translator standing on top of all of this material, trying to kind of fit it all together and weave these stories together in certain ways. So one last thing and then I'll let Dave speak because I feel like I'm being a bit over the top talking here but I in each of the pastimes for the book I've got language from all of those collaborators. I'm kind of woven together that you can maybe see or not see where some of the things that people were you know, Dave would be speaking about the dirt and the leaf litter, and Allison Grant be speaking about the earth and the soil and it's just this kind of beautiful way that these things can go together. I'll go back to my screen and then would answer more questions. I think I would like to dive into the next question, which I think is a really interesting question for this particular conversation because neither of you traditionally consider yourselves digital humanists. What is your history with digital humanities, how much have you considered it in the past. And I consider this collaboration, a lot to do with what we do in the digital humanities. And I'm wondering, sort of, you've already answered the question of how you arrived at this project but I'm interested to hear from you. You can conceptualize yourself within that sort of sphere of what we call digital humanities. So that is my question. Dave, do you have an answer first. No, I think you should go first. To be honest, you know I don't really think about the digital humanities. I mean I feel like it's something I'm engaged with but it's not something that I'm really interrogating or thinking much about. I am a person who's working with my hands quite a bit but I'm using a lot of digital tools. I'm working between and concurrently you know so I, I'm making these projects that in the end they do exist primarily as a physical object, but I'm also documenting them pretty consistently putting up videos of them and the subject matter is often related to things that require, you know, a lot of different digital tools. I think that's, I guess maybe a sort of vague answer to the question. I also think that I'm in this discipline that collaboration is sort of at the heart of book arts practice. And historically has been a key part of working within these traditions so usually you've got, you know, book binders and printers and all those kinds of paper makers calligraphers all that all the kind of individual disciplines that merge and overlap. Books are made by people who work together. And so that still remains to be true when you are thinking about books the way I do as an artist I'm, I'm seeking ways to incorporate new things and make new work using tools using people using all kinds of things that I have at my disposal. So now it's your turn Dave. Yeah, you know, I, I, I don't 100% know what digital humanities means. So maybe that I guess I didn't do enough reading the questions before but I definitely am sort of like think of myself as, you know, a scientist and am in my silo of like the classes that I teach are. Science classes and you know the my research that I do is science and so what I've really appreciated with Sarah is just thinking about this sort of like arts humanities collaboration with science and I think our first project was a little bit more. We're going to use the tool to like show you something and so it was I was a little bit more sort of like science communication through art, which I, which I loved and and I think that, you know, and maybe there was definitely digital methods quite, even though we printed them with analog. There was like intense digital methods to go through those data. And so I mean I think that that probably would be digital humanities. 100% methods are methodology, you know, within the digital humanities. And I think that the, the conception that in order to be a part of digital humanities you have to have, like, your presentation has to have like, purely digital. Like manifestation is, it's a misconception. Because a lot of digital humanities work ultimately gets published like any other scholarship gets published in that it turns into a journal article, which is text based. So I think one of the things that that happens at the nexus of these collaborations and specifically this one that that you all have done both the the figures and the tick project, the the the intense computational components of it being translated through art is is such a core humanist act. Right. Because art is is a fundamental discipline within the humanities. And it, it works to explore what it means to be human in so many different ways. And the tick project, I think also explores sort of those ideas of post humanism. We're still talking about entities, and we're still talking about populations and growth send all kinds of different things but we're also exploring like how that bumps into the human experience. I'm particularly interested for a moment to talk a little bit about. So Sarah is thinking about putting together a website that has all all of the recorded interviews of the collaborations and a lot of process video and some really fun stuff which I also think you know that idea of documentation is also very important to. The interdisciplinary digital humanities. World. Right. So, I thought maybe maybe what I can do is show I know I've been zipping the slides around and I want to touch back to the population book which we sort of briefly mentioned without explaining. Maybe we can do that in a minute but I want to show the book that Dave and I have made which is a component of this larger book so I have the book in my hands and I have the video here which I will try to play it's also on my website, which is big jump press. com you can find all kinds of, you know, projects there, including acts of translation, and I'm on the way to putting new images up of the whole completed project. But I thought I would play this video and perhaps read a portion of the text. So that I'll see if we can get this going. There we go. So, and these are Dave's words, but I have quite aggressively edited them. Sometimes. Well, we'll talk about it in a minute I guess but some so a model has to be wrong. Why is the tick population changing. It is embedded in a complicated ecological system, a system which has also changed. Dear populations are different forest structures different. The question can be hard to tease apart. I am an ecologist. I try to understand and describe the vast complexity of these biological processes. I want to predict the future with a nice neat equation. A model is an abstracted generalized expression of what we know about a system. If it is too complex, it will not be useful. Even a flow diagram as a model drawing one helps me translate a messy lifecycle into something simple enough to communicate pools of populations and between each flow or flux a transition from one life stage to another. What we see now is going to be so different in 50 years. Let's stop there for now. Oops. Get out of there. There we go. And so Dave's book, as I mentioned, it sits next to these others that while the text is different, I think the tone is similar, because it is me who's kind of editing them and putting them together. I did a project several years ago about where I combined language from Plato's Republic and the Corbusier's Radiant City. It was a totally different project. But one thing I realized was that the language fit together really nicely and I have this suspicion, this is a real digression, but I had the suspicion that it's because of the time period of the translations that the translations were done around the same time and that the language fit together. And I think about that as I'm translating as I'm kind of editing these different interviews, you know, I have hours of interviews, and then I have these text documents that are just, you know, vast. And I'm going through physically with a highlighter and a pair of scissors and digitally with a lot of copy and pasting and all kinds of different things are happening and so that intervention that I'm doing is certainly I'm creating a text that has my voice out of the language from these other folks and sometimes I do it and I think it works well. Other times, you know, I made this one edit to Dave's that it's so funny it came up a family reunion because as I mentioned, we're cousins but where we were talking about this project to folks and there's a moment where a moment that I really liked where Dave was talking about that some things are very difficult. I'll just read this passage and then we can talk about how I'm a criminal for what I did today but parts of the life cycle are easy to observe but other parts are like dark matter, they are hidden. I never find any engorged ticks and I don't know exactly why some things are very difficult to measure. I think that's so interesting, but it's also not entirely true because Dave does finding gorgeous ticks he just doesn't find them what in the leafletters Yeah, you only find them on an animal yeah on an animal and so it was an it was an edit and I don't know usually I feel like I run that stuff by or maybe even out, but I, but in the end though I like it better this way. And that is interesting, like it's not entirely true, but it's doing something that I wanted it to do, which is to say, echo this idea that a model has to be wrong that things are. It serves a higher truth. Right, you're making it. It's funny too because this had this I had a conversation with the type of the type designer, where I was trying to set up the design working on the mock up with him was very difficult in a great way because he's so invested in the way that the letter forms look and the design looks. So it was a very different process because he was very deeply involved, as far as even things like I don't like that ligature that the type which is a joint letter like an FT is a ligature. Most people maybe don't even see them but we're all using them all the time. It's one letter form designed together so they would be or not so I then would be looking very closely and he'd say no I don't like that ligature let's get rid of it. And he told me you know we were I was trying to set up a system for the design of the book and it was about a line break where can I break this line and there's one way to break it. Where the line would kind of consistently work with the design principles that we kind of set up and there was another way to break the line that was totally different but it broke for meaning. And so we had a big conversation about breaking for meaning, and how that was more important in that instance, and I feel like the same thing sort of is happening here, where we're editing for meaning, but not truth, or the opposite. You know, I don't know. There's just some interesting things that I think that what I'm experiencing which people won't necessarily experience when they look at the book is this sort of all inclusive experience of talking deeply about translation with all of these folks, I feel like I've lived inside this project for years now it's been almost three years I think. So I think for the website getting back to the website, I feel like it's a possibility where I can put out there, some of those experiences that I am having that could not possibly land in the books, because these books are not. They have to be small, they have to be short to do the job that they're doing. It's also very interesting. I just love talking to you about this stuff. I think one of the things that we talked a lot about is your process and sort of what your goals are with this. And I have an interesting question that is that is more for me than anything and that is, when you're making something like this and when you're collaborating with someone, how do you conceptualize audience. This project specifically and more broadly when you're, when you're putting something like this together, because audience changes a lot of the decisions that you're making. Right. So I guess, that's an interesting question for me, my background as rhetoric and audience is something that we talk a lot about so I think it's interesting maybe just to look at our other project and talk about it, because I think that's one of the times when Dave and I both had to think carefully about like this one is a little bit more subjective. But the, and I Dave I want you to speak about this one I feel like I'm talking maybe a little too much but the, I'll give the broad strokes of this. And then I'll ask you a question Dave, and then I'll let you take it away does that sound okay. This project is a book we did in 2015 so it was a while ago now. And the book is about world populations and also about how we describe world populations. So what we did, and I could not possibly have done this project without Dave is that we went to the State Department, international database, which has figures population figures for every country on earth. Country or region they call they say region, and not all regions are countries, and we just took every region that they described. And Dave created with that data population pyramids which I have here, kind of a, we did a Kickstarter for this project so we have lots of kind of goofy images of it. This is like the simplest and obviously a deeply flawed way of looking at a population. It relies on a pretty serious gender binding, but it is kind of a classic population data visualization kind of thing super simple way of seeing a population at a glance so you've got men on one side women on the other side, age going up. And what we did was that we took all of that data or Dave took all of that data and Dave created these population pyramids, and we made, I guess there were 228 regions. So Dave made 228 pyramids and then we joined them to make them look sort of like human figures. So here, here's some hope here's some serious digital humanities action. And so we talked a lot about what what the shape the kind of width of those figures would be I mean Dave did a lot of kind of sculpting to make sure that we had kind of proportionally something that would fit well with a book form. So there's lots of discussions about that. And we started to layer all these figures played around with our ideas, and in the end printed all of that material on drafting film and created an enclosure where the drafting film could be laid down upon a grid and interpreted, but also layered, and sort of played with and you can see you can compare and contrast. But one of the things about this is that the project is the it is even though this is data data is subjective and I feel like I had a lot of very interesting conversations with Dave about what that means how we were we were incapable of interpreting this data because it was a snapshot, not, you know, a time. And if we did this book every year we might be able to interpret what the data was saying but at this stage, all we could do is kind of look at what was there. Speaking about audience. I know this is what we're getting to here. I also know that it was very important to Dave that we describe the methods, the sources and all that kind of material, because this is this I feel like was a project. These two projects are different in that the acts of translation project, I was kind of guiding it, because, you know, of the nature of this project. This project relied very, very heavily on Dave's areas of Dave's like abilities and skills. And so maybe do you feel comfortable talking about audience for this book and your comfort level with making a work of art out of this data and I'd be so interested to hear you speak about it. Yeah, definitely. And some of this, I mean, I'm not a social scientist. And so I also was worried about like, oh, you know, there's definitely different considerations when you're thinking about human populations and not human populations and how do you represent them and how do you do it with like a research integrity integrity. So that I think was was something that I, you know, and I talked to Sarah about and sort of worked through. I really liked this, you know, ability to layer and so that the reader could explore the data to and so that this form that Sarah and I came to together felt very rewarding that we could, you know, that the reader was really engaged with the material in this way that's different for like a standard format of a book. But then again, because we were, you know, making these choices about how do you match up these two different countries and, you know, where are these data come from and, you know, it felt important that we were very, to me like very clear about each of those steps. And so, in that is more of almost like what you would see in a scientific paper of, you know, these were these is where we got the data from these are the limitations of the data this is the, you know, the how they're incomplete or the sort of like political perspective from which they're they're drawn and then these are the steps that we took to, you know, make this smooth line, and these are the, yeah, the technical steps that we did, so that we could just be very transparent about that process, because you wouldn't a scientific paper so that someone else could, you know, interrogate your methods or replicate your methods. And so I don't know if we have we probably don't have a picture but that the part of then there is a little more traditional booklet in there that walks through each of those steps. And then I audience I think is super interesting. We know when I write a scientific paper I have a very like clear sense of who my audience is, and it's this totally narrow field of people who are going to read like the Journal of Medical Entomology. And, you know, maybe like, they're going to skim the abstract and then of that totally narrow field who reads the Journal of Medical Entomology like 5% of them are going to then read my article based on the abstract because they're like tick nerds and not mosquito nerds or whatever. And so this feels like so foreign to me of, you know, like, who is this audience and like. And so, you know, I think some of it is then just like, well, I mean, I think for this one, I, since I was more involved with the process and some of these design choices. I don't know if I still had an audience in mind but it felt like I was thinking about the audience more, even if I didn't have like who that person was in mind. So what I like thinking about with this project, this is so personal not not necessarily about audience but it's about Dave is that when we finished this book, we were a finalist for an award, which was a really nice big book arts award and you have to go and like, there's an envelope and they read a name stuff. I was like, living in England at the time and I was nine months pregnant. Like I was so pregnant and Dave went to this huge book art thing at the Minnesota Center for book arts Dave, I like I always think about how wonderful it is that you went to represent us at this huge book arts event, you know, with all these book arts folks. I wish that we could have gone together but I also often kind of tickled at the idea of you just in this room with all these total, total nerds total book nerds totally not mosquito nerds not tick nerds but artists book nerds. And how what a weird experience that I love that they were very friendly and fun and they were total nerds and it was funny to see this other nerd subculture. I think what I'm hearing. So as you guys talk about this is how much collaboration turns into sort of conceptualizing each other as your audience. And it's really nice way like when you're talking about this, the care that each of you go into to be able to understand and translate and make legible each other's contributions has been. You know, I think, if, if, you know, if a studio artist and an ecologist can find a way to communicate about these things, then perhaps it broadens the audience out to a lot of other people in a way. Catherine's got a question. Hi Catherine. What, what are you, what's up. Hello, can you all hear me okay. Yeah, absolutely. Well, just on that point that Sarah was making there is so interesting this project and is the ability to speak across different disciplines like speaking to each other and finding common ground is in the acts of translation project as a whole. It's an incredibly hopeful project I find like so much about academia is about these academic silos each discipline becomes a silo, and it's very hard to talk across disciplines often for people to communicate with each other. You're making that happen in this book the acts of translation across so many very different disciplines. So I find an incredible sense of hopefulness in that of community. And I was wondering if you could both just speak a little bit about the, the rewards of that type of work but also I seem the challenges it's not easy to to hop from one silo to another to create meaningful communication to the, the active translation is a difficult thing to do. So if you could speak a bit about the challenges and rewards of this type of interdisciplinary communication and community. I'll start and say that. First of all, thank you, Catherine, you know, I think this book has been unexpectedly meaningful for me. Firstly, because I am having to go outside of my experience and spend a lot of time listening to people about kind of intersecting issues that it. Like I get to inhabit all of these worlds and it gives me this opportunity to, I don't know, think about all these folks in a different way. Also, it's just fun to get to know their, like, I get to know these people more deeply, some of whom I didn't know very well to begin with others like Dave, you know, obviously we've known each other forever. And, but I feel like I know him better now after having completed this book. I'm off the track. I don't even remember what I'm saying anymore except to say that I initially, with each of these components of this book, there was always a moment where I was like, I don't think this is going to work. You know, I don't, this isn't coming together. And then you just have to like buckle up and knuckle down and do whatever, whatever everything makes the most sense and then you find that connecting point. If the connecting point is there, then it just comes really naturally, which isn't to say there isn't tons and tons of work to edit it and agree about it and, you know, make a kind of cohesive thought out of all of these conversations. But with every single one, I thought, I, I'm not sure I can make this work. But once I got over that hurdle. Now I feel like I can make a book with anybody. I can make a book with anybody. Everybody has something to say and everybody has this. I mean, I know I'll move on and I'll do a different project but I feel like I could do this project 100 times. And this project for the rest of my life, and I would be satisfied because it has been so rewarding to spend all of this. I actually feel quite emotional about the project. It's funny because it's coming to a close now and I had to write the call upon, which is normally in a book it's just like this book is made of this and this is my process and this is, you know, the typefaces, 2,000 and something signature here edition one out of 50. And this time I was just like agonizing about what to say, because I wanted to say thank you, because it has meant a lot to me to make this book. So thank you Dave. Thank you very much. Now I've rambled and I've lost. I've lost the track. So that, um, no I'm ready to answer that because I found this. I also was like what is going on here like I don't understand what this is going to be and I think that for me some of the challenges is I want it to be so literal and so I think with the first project it felt more like okay like we're just finding this new way to and we can describe what we're doing versus here like okay I want to tell you about how the model works and I want to be very explicit about like the point of the book is to tell people about my model or to tell me about people about tick populations, because that's what I do I'm a and I'm describing my, and so what I think when Sarah was like no we're interested in the translation we're not actually trying to describe your model and I was like wait no but like that's that's what we're doing we're describing my model and so I think that that was what was challenging for me is just saying like that was that difference. And then obviously the rewards are, I mean, a it's just like super fun to work with Sarah. And so thank you Sarah and be it's, I mean as as a scientist it's just so rewarding to be in it in a different type of creative discipline because I mean the science has creative outlets in the course of design experiments and thinking about the structure of a model but then it, I mean, and I think this is obviously true for Sarah to where there's creative parts and then there's like totally like meticulous fussy rope parts. And I guess I didn't have to do those parts for this project and so just, you know, working with an artist and thinking outside my discipline is is obviously so rewarding and then being forced to describe something in a way that, you know, that that that's more broadly understood is is obviously a very, very important process for any wedding. I think that I had to have a lot of faith in doing this because this project has taken place over a number of years. I identified collaborators and worked with them. I finished Alison Grant. Her component first that obviously helped once one was done I kind of knew the form things were going to take and I, at least in terms of dimensions, you know, and typeface because I'm keeping those things consistent paper. But with each. I had to just move forward with each collaboration, having a belief that they would echo and work together and not worry too much. This book is different from all of my other books because all of my other books I have completely designed it and worked it through before production. This book happened in stages where I would be working on the design of one project while I had already printed another and one of them was already bound and being sold in different places and so it just was kind of almost a little out of my control and I felt a little out of control and it's only now that all the components are done. And I'm binding them over there but they're designed they're printed there isn't any more of that kind of work to be done. Now I can take a step back and look and I'm finding these beautiful things like each of these people is using language, like Dave describes his last words in his book, or my last words that I picked for him, I should say, is that I exist in the middle. I am a flux between the natural world and the code Dave Allen Dave Allen, Ben Mitchell the type designer. He talks about how so he's designing Southeast Asian scripts extensions of fonts. So he'll be designing the Burmese or the Khmer for a digital design that already exists in Latin what we use. So he says, you know, I'm, I'm a link, I can be a link between language communities and the computer. People are using that language like I'm a bridge I'm a link I'm a, I'm a, oh, Lou Veda Harrison Veda. She said something so beautiful about being a connection. I'm using the words I can't remember exactly but a connection between the composer and the audience. And that's her role she's this connection. Everyone is talking about themselves as this point of connection and it, it, it echoes so beautifully all together and that wasn't my intention, you know, at least not in the beginning toward the end I had a little bit more of an idea. But these things sort of evolved. And each of these projects they're very simple on their own. And that was part of what was hard for me because Dave, I wanted to tell everyone about your model. Awesome. Just like I wanted to tell everybody about how Ben Mitchell writes unicode proposals in his free time for no money to, to make like language communities have access to digital tools right like everyone here is so interesting everyone's doing such amazing stuff and I want to tell everyone everything about them but I had to use only one tiny fraction of what we were talking about and then have hope that when it all came together it would become a more complicated and sort of resonant project. It's been so amazing. I want to make sure that anyone else has a chance to ask any questions before we wrap up. I have enjoyed this talk so very much. Me too. Thank you so much for inviting us Sarah, and David for, you know, continuing to work with me. I love all the things we do together even the projects that we make that we don't finish or don't work I mean it's not like everything we try to do works out just like any other project and anyone else's research and you know we're all just starting a lot of things and finishing some of them. Hopefully. Yeah. Yeah, hopefully. No, I've enjoyed so much and thank you so much Sarah for the introduction or the invitation for this talk. Absolutely. I just appreciate you sharing your work with our ADHC community. And the time has come for us to wrap up this podcast so I will just leave you with a thank you. Thank you to the folks who are here. I know that some people will tune in later but Catherine, thank you for coming. Larry and, and my mother. Hello. I'm glad to see all of you. And Sarah especially big thanks to you. Absolutely.