From 16th-century Chinese monasteries to 21st-century farms in Gabon, Arts & Sciences researchers are finding solutions to real-world mysteries and problems. This past year alone, they’ve used video games to understand human behavior and bridged big data with archival research—and so much more.
Nearly 20 years have passed since Fallou Ngom, a professor of anthropology, dusted off a box of his late father’s papers and began reading them. Inside, he found a note, scribbled in his father’s hand, about a debt he owed a local trader. The note was doubly surprising. First, Ngom had thought his father was illiterate—he didn’t read French, the official language of Senegal. But the note wasn’t in French, it was in a script that looked like Arabic but sounded like Wolof, a regional West Atlantic language.
Ngom began to find this modified Arabic script everywhere in Western Africa. He discovered religious texts, medical diagnoses, advertisements, love poems, business records, contracts, and writings on astrology, ethics, morality, history, and geography, all from people who were considered illiterate by the official governmental standards of their countries. He realized that he had proof that a centuries-old writing system, Ajami, was still thriving in many African countries.
Since his discovery, Ngom has helped to build BU’s Ajami Research Project, which contains more than 30,000 pages, and he leads the only Ajami program in the US. A 2022 grant from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme will help BU digitize 50,000 more pages.
“To me, there’s justice in making these voices heard,” he says. “For so long, they weren’t. And my attention has shifted completely to making it happen.”
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A successful campaign to protect elephants has created an agricultural crisis in Gabon, where the five-ton creatures are eating crops. How can a country balance these sometimes conflicting priorities? With an international team of researchers, Andrew Reid Bell, an associate professor of Earth & environment, used video games to test how farmers react when faced with conservation dilemmas. Their work was published in Communications Earth & Environment (February 2023).
When it comes to our changing planet, says Bell, we have a lot of big data—satellite images, gauges on land, sea, and air—but not nearly as much information on human decision-making. “We need ways to better engage with people to capture their decisions.” Games allow researchers and policymakers to dig into human behavior and decision-making in deeper ways than a survey or interview can. “It’s really common [that] people can’t tell you what they’re thinking,” Bell says.
In the Gabon study, popular strategies such as payments designed to motivate eco-friendly behavior weren’t a reliable panacea: if they boosted pro-conservation work, they usually dented agricultural outputs. The study did, though, discover one seemingly surefire way of improving conservation and production: including more women in decision-making. Their involvement boosted cooperation between farmers on environmental issues and increased output.
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Over the past four decades, Christianity has grown faster in China than anywhere else in the world—from an estimated 1 million Christians to 100 million. What led to that explosion, centuries after the first Christian missionaries arrived in China? Eugenio Menegon, an associate professor of history, Daryl Ireland, a research associate professor of mission at BU’s School of Theology, and Alex Mayfield (STH’21) have created the China Historical Christian Database with the aim of finding out.
The project, which began in 2018, links web-based visualization tools with a database packed with the names and locations of missionaries, churches, schools, hospitals, and publications. The team released version 2.0 of their database in 2023, doubling the amount of data previously available, to approximately four million items—names, occupations, locations, dates, and more—spanning four centuries (1550–1950). Researchers can query the database in hopes of finding answers to all kinds of questions, like studying how religions respond to climate change by visualizing the movements of Christians in relation to famines and droughts.
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There are a lot of emotions that can drive people to the polls—hope, anger, fear, belief in a particular ideology—but Christine Slaughter, an assistant professor of political science, is particularly interested in the political behavior and participation of Black voters—especially their optimism.
“How do people remain hopeful, remain steadfast, have an outlook that can lead them to want to enact change versus to be motivated by anger?” she says, especially as minority voters face more structural barriers to participate in elections, like voter ID laws and limitations on voting hours and locations.
According to one of Slaughter’s most recent papers, published in PHILLIS: The Journal for Research on African American Women (2021–2022), African American women were the most optimistic about the future of the country compared to white men, white women, and African American men. And that optimism was associated with an increase in participation. “This suggests that Black women who are optimistic about the future of the United States are also willing to engage in the political process, which ultimately brings about change in society,” the paper states.
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