Project publications to date:
learning to see with
Part of the process of research and learning on this project has involved veing-with and drawing as a process of learning.
Aside from spending time sitting or standing with sheep, I have also been observing behaviours and movements through drawing.
By studying how lameness is made visible in the movement of animals, I developed some sketches and gifs that illustrate this movement, leading in turn to some engaging conversaitons with the research team.
A lame sheep bobs its head while it moves:
A healthy sheep keeps its spine straight:
As documented by PhD researcher Nicole Gosling of the University of Lincoln:
I was struck when you first shared your illustrations on Twitter because it was an aspect of lameness I had never thought about before. All of the historical sources I have looked at primarily discuss how to identify disease once you have already identified a lame sheep (i.e. skin lesions etc), but don’t describe what a lame sheep actually looks like. Looking at the sketch made me think about what the farmer would first see in the field. It struck me that since we have come at this question from different disciplinary backgrounds and different ways of knowing and investigating we have come up with different stories about lameness.
To which I responded:
When I think about it, I've realised that I didn't just observe how a lame sheep moved, I imitated it. I started out last December trying to design how people would move if faced with a similar disabling condition, for an installation, and noticed that it was always my head and upper spine that moved first when I tried to move like a lame sheep. Then I went back and looked at the sheep, and started drawing that movement and seeing it. So I suppose I'd consider your point that the texts "don’t describe what a lame sheep actually looks like" and offer that, maybe, the more important point is that they don't actually consider what a lame sheep feels like. We over-rely on our eyes sometimes. This is becoming with, and it's why I was so excited about that discovery. It's something that goes beyond empathy when you embody a condition like that. And it's a threshold that you all (on FIELD) seem to be crossing - the historian/social scientist/epidemiologist/economist collaboration forces you to think in different ways (or at least, it has forced me to do so!).
This type of discovery is also generating other interest in the broader research community. Professor Jasmeet Kaler, an epidemiologist at the University of Nottingham, pointed out on Twitter that they are using a similar observation to train machine learning algorithms to track lameness in sheep.
