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A method for the systematic review of research that shows the influence of context on research outcomes: “What works for whom under what circumstances, how and why?” (See: Abduction, Research, Study, Theory) |
Real-Time |
The temporality of automation: a continuously unfolding present, an anticipated future. (See: Anticipation, Momentary, Temporality) |
Real-World |
Also referred to as ‘In the wild’ or ‘naturalistic’, Real-World refers to everyday activities and spaces, as well as actual experiences, environments, and populations. Real-World is understood as an external basis for abstractions, theories, concepts, or simulations. In clinical trials, a Real-World Setting or Environment refers to the design of studies conducted in everyday life situations. By placing the research outside of controlled laboratory or clinical settings, the aim is to capture a more authentic range of behaviors and outcomes. (See: Clinic, Home, Environment, Research, Reworlding, Simulation, Topos, Translational Medicine) |
Research |
Systematic investigation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge. (See: Study, Synthesis) |
Resonance |
“A sympathetic vibration or ‘the condition in which an oscillating or periodic force acting on an object or system has a frequency close to that of a natural vibration of the object.’ One system acts upon another near it spatially or akin to it vibrationally. It is the physical, social, linguistic, and psychological fact of the more than one.” (See: Attunement) |
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) |
A natural language processing (NLP) technique used by AI models which combines retrieval with generation. RAG-enabled AI models are able to generate responses to queries based on specific contextual material provided to the model. (See: Embedding, Large Language Model (LLM), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Prompt Engineering) |
Retrospective |
Looking backward, as in recalling a memory, or analyzing data sampled during past events. (See: Longitudinal, Momentary, Sampling, Soundscape, Temporality) |
Reworlding |
To introduce something that has been abstracted or compiled into a complex, real-world environment, for the purposes of re-sampling the signal, mixed with resonant traces of the new environment, the tools, and the processes used. (See: Environment, Real-World, Resonance, Sampling, Signal, Transduction) |
Sampling |
Taking a small amount of something to make generalizations about that thing. This can refer to signals, populations, observations, processes, etc. As with any representation, there is loss—choice of sample type and size, as well as identifying what features and relationships are meaningful are crucial aspects of sampling. (See: Compression, Data, Longitudinal, Momentary, Retrospective, Temporality) |
Self-report |
A kind of research tool used across science, medicine, and marketing research: questions people answer about themselves in order to communicate thoughts, feelings, attitudes, symptoms and behaviors related to one’s own direct experience. (See: Apperception, Life-Writing, Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD), Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs), Sampling) |
Signal |
Where attention is directed, what calls out. (See: Attention, Data, Distortion, Information, Noise, Sampling) |
Simulation |
Simulations are “the real-world activations of data to calculate and predict future action and movement: how a star will explode, how a hurricane will move. They are both literal products of equations that describe what actions can happen inside of a virtual world, and potent metaphors for future-casting.” simulations are unreal worlds that produce real actions: “We simulate when we imagine ourselves and others in the future, and we base our current actions on that mental simulation.” (See: Data, Real-World, Reworlding) |
Sociotechnical |
A way of describing systems, designs, attitudes, and imaginaries that emphasizes the ways development of technology is socially determined and society is shaped by technical artifacts. Each makes the other. (See: Technoscience) |
Software as a medical device (SaMD) |
"Software intended to be used for one or more medical purposes that perform these purposes without being part of a hardware medical device." (See: Application Programming Interface (API), Instrument) |
Soundscape |
A transformational arrangement of the field of listening. In sound artists and organizers Ultra-red’s use of the term, the soundscape as a mutable object for collective inquiry. Silence is a precondition for a soundscape to become apparent, either through listening, as a disciplined and political act of deference, or noise-canceling, as a methodological frame found in the idealist fields of acoustic ecology and later, sonic materialism. In Ultra-red’s methodology of Militant Sound Investigation, the soundscape is accessed with the aid of technological instruments, with the “capacity to recall the investigators to silence” to “correct the tendency to fixate on demands that do not resonate with the curiosity, friendship, love” that hold the collective effort together. (See: Attunement, Composition, Incommensurable, Instrument, Noise, Retrospective, Sampling, Silence, Study, Topos) |
Study |
Study has both formal and informal uses: as a research process following a protocol and agreed-on best practices within a particular discipline, such as with a clinical trial; study can also be used more informally to refer to co-learning, or communal engagement with a subject of shared interest. I like the way Fred Moten and Stefano Harney keep the term in circulation: “study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal—being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory—there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present. These activities aren’t ennobled by the fact that we now say, “oh, if you did these things in a certain way, you could be said to have been studying.” To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice. What’s important is to recognize that that has been the case – because that recognition allows you to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought.” |
Synthesis |
A generative and unfixed process of assembling or bringing together in a mixture. As the inverse of analysis, synthesis activates imaginaries, tracing lines of relation to “unpack the context/mechanism/outcome relationship.” As a listening strategy, synthesis provides a momentary opportunity to check for shared understanding, to correct misunderstanding, to demonstrate that narratives have been heard and interpretation is in progress. Synthesis is difference: in the midst of collapsing, mutating, deterritorializing into something else. (See: Analysis, Imaginary, Momentary, Theory) |
Temporality |
The state of existing within, or having a relationship to, time. Ability, gender, culture, sexuality, class, race, age, immigration status, etc. all contribute to the configuration of widely differing and specific temporalities, manifest through individual and collective experience of interruptions and reconfigurations, deferred or uncertain futures, as well as understandings of memory, inheritance and legacy. Temporalities are subject to distortions through processes of normalization. (See: Anamnesis, Anticipation, Distortion, Exposome, History (Hx), Longitudinal, Momentary, Retrospective) |
Texture |
How a thing feels: the attributes of surface and structure as they appear in a consistent way to the senses. |
Topos |
Τόπος [place], as in: a place to find something, a landscape. The features and locality of a space—affective, cultural, demographic, epistemological, geographic, linguistic, logical, social, technological, etc. A theme, topic, or set: a way of laying out categories to understand relationships or make decisions. (See: Affect, Epistemology, Manifold, Texture) |
Transformer |
A type of AI model architecture that is popularly used for natural language processing and related tasks. Transformers encode position (for sequential data, such as text) and perform self-attention, weighing the relative importance of different fragments of data (tokens) to capture what is meaningful over large stretches of data (Vaswani et al.). (See: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Attention, Embedding, Large language model (LLM), Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Variation Autoencoder (VAE)) |
Transcoding |
Moving a representation between models, such as between higher and lower dimensions or resolutions. (See: Compression, Data, Information, Model, Sampling) |
Transduction |
A carrying, or leading, across. A signal or impulse moving from one medium into another, like a voice on a phone, or cream stirred in milk. In biological terms, “the conversion of signals from the environment outside of a cell into physical or chemical changes within the cell” (Sharma) (See: Affect, Diffraction, Signal, Translation) |
Translation |
Converting something from one form or domain to another, such as between languages. Translation captures and conveys nuanced meaning and context from the original so that it can be understood in its new domain. (See: Transduction, Interpolation, Interpretability, Transcoding, Sampling) |
Translational Medicine |
Multidisciplinary approach to connecting basic laboratory research with real-world applications, translating findings from research into therapies, tools, and better patient experiences. (See: Patient-Centered Care (PCC), Real-World, Research, Reworlding) |
Treatment (Tx) |
Interventions involved in the management and care of a patient’s health. Healthcare providers deciding on approaches to treatment may consider diagnosis, patients’ needs, clinical outcomes, and value. (See: Diagnosis (Dx), Minimum Clinically Important Difference (MCID), Patient-Centered Care, Value-Based Care) |
Uncomputable |
Problems are uncomputable (or undecidable) where they can’t be solved with a definitive ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Although this ‘undecidability’ can be for logical or abstract reasons, it is a matter of limits. In this light, problems are “effectively” undecidable where they require more energy or attention than are available to the solvers of the problem. |
Value-Based Care |
Framework for structuring healthcare systems (delivery, payment, management, etc) around value for patients, defined as positive health outcomes per unit of cost. |
Variational Autoencoder (VAE) |
A machine learning technique that is central to many generative AI systems. An autoencoder learns how best to compress something, that is, represent some original version of a thing in the simplest possible way, such that it can be re-made (decompressed) as a near-identical proxy. A variational autoencoder, by extension, provides access to the model to make adjustments at the compressed level (in its latent space of representation), producing variations on the original that maintain its key features and internal relationships. (See: Compression, Latent Space, Large Language Model (LLM), Machine Learning) |
Waste |
In summing up the stuff of cancer treatment (self-help books, prosthetics, wigs, nutritional supplements, unused medication, etc.), anthropologist Lochlann Jain puts the waste of disease in contrast with its data—where the latter is “lifted out” of a person to shape a clinical representation of them, the former, as a mess of odds and ends, reveals the work of pulling together weakly normalized, social persons. Jain draws on Mary Douglas’s definition of dirt as “‘matter out of place,’ or the stuff that does not fit within categories.” A generation earlier, Douglas had written: “Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.” Waste, unlike its cleanly abstracted counterpart data, implies both “a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order” (Douglas 36) (See: Data, Information, Noise, Signal) |
Subsets and Splits