How does the human mind go from scattered feathers to Daedalus’ wings?

Daedalus is a human sciences center at the University of Murcia, Spain, focused on out-of-the-box thinking about central questions in cognition, communication, and creativity. We develop innovative methods to study the fineness of human interaction and the intricate patterning of culture. Our overarching goal is to investigate the unparalleled capacity of our species for deriving meaning from the integration of disparate experiences, such as the interplay of voice and body, the wording in a text, the performance of music, or the layout of images.

How do we fly out of the labyrinth?

At Daedalus we are constantly rethinking current approaches to our challenging questions in the human sciences. We develop theoretical proposals on the cognitive processes underlying human communication and creativity. We model the speech-gesture relation using big data. We contribute to building audio-visual repositories, computational tools, and a networked community for research into multimodal communication. We also do corpus linguistics, comparative literature, psycholinguistic experiments, and ethnographic studies, examining language use, literary style, imagination and reasoning, communicative behavior, music composition, and oral poetic performance.

The Daedalus Lab, as a member of the Red Hen Lab consortium, contributes to and makes use of the NewsScape Library of Television News, a repository containing hundreds of thousands of hours of recorded television. NewsScape’s video clips include their force-aligned subtitles, which constitute a textual corpus of several billion words. We use a variety of tools adapted to NewsScape’s needs in natural language processing, computer vision, video annotation, acoustic pattern analysis, and more. The Daedalus Lab has a dedicated high-performance computing server to carry out large-scale computational analysis of video files. Through our own resources and those of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Murcia, we also have access to reaction-time software, eye-trackers, keylogging software, and the rest of the usual gadgetry in psycholinguistic research.

The Daedalus directors are early members of the Red Hen Lab international consortium. Through Red Hen, we collaborate with numerous researchers from around the world, and especially with the teams at University of California Los Angeles (Francis Steen), Case Western Reserve University (Mark Turner), and FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (Peter Uhrig).

Through grants, fellowships, or partnerships, we collaborate with the Alibali Cognitive Development and Communication Lab at Wisconsin-Madison, the Baayen Quantitative Linguistics Lab at EK Universität Tübingen, the Bonifazi Discourse Studies Group at the University of Cologne, the Núñez Cognitive Science Lab at UC San Diego, and the Olza Multimodal Pragmatics Lab at the University of Navarra.

Most recent first:

ERASMUS MUNDUS Design Measures Grant

Fulbright Foundation (Doctoral Fellowships)

Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Fellowships for Experienced Researchers)

University of Murcia (Research Fellowships, Research Grants, Internationalization Grants)

Séneca Foundation of the Regional Government of Murcia (Research Grants, Doctoral Fellowships, Postdoctoral Fellowships)

Society of Spanish Researchers in the United Kingdom (On-the-move Fellowships)

Ramón y Cajal Program (Research Professorships, Ministry of Science, Spain)

NetIAS (European Network of Institutes for Advanced Studies) – NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study) Fellowships

FBBVA Leonardo Early Career Grants

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (Postdoctoral Fellowships)

Scholarship at ERC Advanced Grant Emotions: The Greek Paradigm (PI: Angelos Chaniotis, All Souls Oxford)

Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (Tandem Fellowship in Linguistics and Literature

Job vacancies or other opportunities will be advertised on this website and through our social networks.

We also support excellent candidates internationally for internships, scholarships, Google Summer of Code, and the best doctoral or postdoctoral schemes.

Research at Daedalus is problem-oriented and ultradisciplinary, in the sense of going beyond disciplinary boundaries, or perhaps flying over them. So far we have been working with researchers in: artificial intelligence (computer vision, machine learning, NLP), classics, cognitive science, comparative literature, computer science, data science, digital humanities, English, gesture studies, Hellenic Studies, linguistics (computational, corpus, musicolinguistics, phonetics, pragmatics, quantitative, semantics), literary theory, musicology, poetics, psychology (cognitive, developmental, psycholinguistics), rhetoric, semiotics, Slavic Studies, or Spanish and Hispanic Studies.

Needless to say, and following national law and University-of-Murcia practices, we do not discriminate on the basis of anything but professional competence, suitability for the specific project, ability for teamwork, and overall niceness, coolness, and awesomeness. If you are the best candidate and you are facing a disability or any other challenging circumstances, personal or collective, we will be proactive in helping you successfully integrate within the team.

Affiliation or employment with the University of Murcia is just one of the options available for working with us.

Interested? Email one of the directors with a CV and a short cover letter:

cpcanovas@um.es | jvalen@um.es

Meanwhile Daedalus, hating Crete and his long exile, and moved by the longing for his native place, was imprisoned by the sea. “He may rule over the land and block the waves,” he said, “and yet the sky certainly lies open: we will go that way. He might rule over all things, but Minos does not rule over the heavens.” So saying he applied his mind to unknown arts and altered the natural order of things.* He laid down lines of feathers in order, beginning with the smallest, following the shorter with longer ones, so that you might think they had grown like that, on a slant. In that way, long ago, the rustic pan-pipes were graduated, with lengthening reeds. Then he fastened them together with thread at the middle, and bees’-wax at the base, and, when he had arranged them, he flexed each one into a gentle curve, so that they imitated real bird’s wings.

(…) Some angler catching fish with a quivering rod, or a shepherd leaning on his crook, or a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough, saw them, perhaps, and stood there amazed at their power to seize the sky, believing them to be gods.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, 183ff

*… et ignotas animum dimittit in artes
naturamque novat

“When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”

Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man