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"Humanities students should be more like computer-science students.
I decided that as I sat in on a colleague's computer-science course during the beginning of this, my last, semester in the classroom. I am moving into administration full time, and I figured that this was my last chance to learn some of the cool new digital-humanities stuff I've been reading about. What eventually drove me out of the class (which I was enjoying tremendously) was the time commitment: The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of failure, failure, failure before eventual success. Computer-science students are used to failing. They do it all the time. It's built into the process, and they take it in stride."
"Which is great when you're in one of the fields that's meant to serve as the grand and inspirational challenge. For the rest of us, though, this is trickle-down science: the best and the brightest get fired up to be rocket scientists, or high-energy particle physicists, and those who aren't quite the best or the brightest, well... they can study condensed matter physics, or something less inspirational. They'll still be an upgrade over the riff-raff who are presumably populating those fields now. You know, the ones motivated by wanting to save the world from cancer, or hunger, or pestilence.
Not only is this kind of insulting to those of us who have chosen to make careers in fields that aren't driven by Big Science, it's not remotely sustainable. If getting people to go into science and engineering is dependent on something as ephemeral as "inspiration," we're forever going to be careening from boom to bust."
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A sustainable solution to the supply of scientists and engineers can't be built around lightning-in-a-bottle scenarios like the Apollo era space race, where an exceptional combination of military goals and national pride happened to align with science for a time, spurring great progress. It's great if it happens, but as David Kaiser documents in How the Hippies Saved Physics, it had a cost for the generation of physicists who were coming along just as the national security establishment started to lose interest. It looks a little like the same sort of thing might be happening in the life sciences, where a huge influx of cash into the NIH drove unsustainable growth for a while, and the flattening out of those budgets is creating a big problem for young researchers.
ELSI = ethical, legal, and social implications
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Second, the ELSI framing explicitly focuses on the normative "problems" inherent in scientific and engineering research. This might lead STS scholars to ignore issues in science studies that are less laden with (socially-noteworthy) norms.
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Third, even if STS researchers want to do normative work, ELSI research seems to primarily involve participant-observation, such as attending conferences, conducting interviews, etc. These methods necessitate the continued participation of the the scientists and engineers doing the work. Thus, ELSI-type researchers may be more likely to pull their punches, else they anger or alienate their subjects.
"The intellectual culture of scientism clouds our understanding of science itself. What’s more, it eclipses alternative ways of knowing — chiefly the philosophical — that can actually yield greater certainty than the scientific. While science and philosophy do at times overlap, they are fundamentally different approaches to understanding. So philosophers should not add to the conceptual confusion that subsumes all knowledge into science. "
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In sum, philosophy is not science. For it employs the rational tools of logical analysis and conceptual clarification in lieu of empirical measurement. And this approach, when carefully carried out, can yield knowledge at times more reliable and enduring than science, strictly speaking. For scientific measurement is in principle always subject to at least some degree of readjustment based on future observation. Yet sound philosophical argument achieves a measure of immortality.
So if we philosophers want to restore philosophy’s authority in the wider culture, we should not change its name but engage more often with issues of contemporary concern — not so much as scientists but as guardians of reason. This might encourage the wider population to think more critically, that is, to become more philosophical.
"But there is also a deeper and ultimately more interesting sense in which the two fields are in dialogue with one another. My sense is that Environmental Historians have become increasingly aware that one cannot simply take the natural world as a given. Nature is now routinely interrogated as category of historical analysis. (Of course, this is not entirely new. People like William Cronon who are on the vanguard of the discipline have been doing it for a long time. But what used to be a fairly radical position seems to have become more or less mainstream.) In so doing, environmental history has found much inspiration from historians of science, scholars who have sought to embed our knowledge and experience of the natural world within narratives of social and cultural change for several decades."
Why aren't there more pop-culture books about the internet by professional sociologists?
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The number of pop science/business/cultural studies books that have come out on the subject of the Internet in the past few years has been staggering. Off the top of my head, we’ve got Nick Carr’s The Shallows, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus, Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, Evengy Morozov’s The Net Delusion, Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, Johnathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet; and How to Stop It, Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital, Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, and John Palfrey & Urs Gasser’s Born Digital.
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So where does this leave us? What can sociology contribute to the study of the Internet, and what can the Internet contribute to the sociological lexicon? We need new and better sociological concepts to deal with the contexts of virtuality. We need a new approach to text, one that treats it as something other than an inert data resource. We need a new approach to space and place, one that allows us to talk about these things without reference to geographic clustering. We need to rethink our privileging of face-to-face relationships in our research, and of methodologies that embed and perpetuate that privileging. But most importantly, we need to stop talking about what people do online as though it isn’t real.
"We praise upbeat creative curatorship. But we should also remember to praise curators who handle their material and textual ressources with honesty and humility. Such curators are in tune with reality and help satisfy our hunger for reality. Their work leads them away from themselves towards the things themselves; and a result they probably also help lead the museum visitors away from themselves towards the world outside them."
"For one thing that I have found really interesting about the turn to speculative realism is that is has clearly been fuelled by online communities which have turned above all to blogs as an important means of swapping material, revealing first thoughts, and making revisions. I doubt that the growth of speculative realism would have been so insistent without these communities scattered all over the world, or so rapid. Why?"
"The divisions between neurology and psychiatry suggested in the image above stir up lots of interesting questions not only about what we consider to be “neurological” or “psychiatric”, but more generally about the social production of knowledge."
"But… I am not interested in applying this to “library instruction” (aka instruction we do about using library resources and developing research skills) but rather, to the enterprise level of learning across campus. Let’s frame it this way: how can the library help students cross through the difficult thresholds and learn critical concepts that will enable them to succeed with their chosen major?"
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If I’m a physics librarian (or engineering librarian for that matter) what can I do to support an instructor teaching heat transfer? This is difficult and perhaps different. It expands our focus beyond assignments and gets into the heart of learning. What can we do in terms of learning objects, collections, instructional support, etc to help with this threshold / keystone concept.
Obviously faculty are the experts here and we cannot presume to be able to do a better job with these big ideas. But we can play a support role and demonstrate some knowledge and proficiency regarding the related threshold concepts for the subjects we are responsible for. This could greatly aid the impact and reputation of the library and librarian in the eyes of the academics.
For example, if I’m the English Librarian I should be conversant on deconstruction theory and other major forms of literary criticism. It’s one thing to know how to use keywords and subject headings to identify and locate information, but to be able to have an off-the-cuff discussion with some students or faculty about Derrida and Heidegger as it applies to literary criticism could strengthen my role or how I am perceived.
I’m not saying we need to be experts, but if we call ourselves subject specialists or something to that effect, then we should at least have a basic understanding of the “difficult” concepts within the discipline that we are supporting.
"What do scholars offer present politics? Does it depend on the discipline - sociology vs. history vs. chemistry - and, within disciplines, on sub-fields? Amongst historians, does a US historian like Cronon have more to offer than, say, a medievalist? Does it matter *where you live* (Cronon's made much of his place-based identity), or *what you know* (e.g. for the sake of comparison), or *how you think* (pattern recognition, textual analysis, &c.)?
Possibly all of these questions matter. What I want to figure out is (1) what Cronon thinks he has to offer as a "Scholar Citizen" (which is *not* the same as a "Citizen Scholar," the analogue of the "Citizen Scientist"), and (2) how this relates to the relationship between "scholarship" and "citizenship" (or politics)."
"What interests me about all of the above blogs is that they situate architecture within a broader context. Disciplinarity is dying at a rapid clip. I suspect the lament is partly a reaction to the end of disciplinarity. We are losing our ability to talk about architecture on its own terms."
"The meeting is in part a stock-taking. After two decades of increased public funding for STS, what can we say about our achievements as a “thought collective”? "
"STS works with a continental model of knowledge – thick description and, as Ezra points out, proliferation of concepts. Rather than hammer a variable home, they jump from interesting case to case. They revel in new phenomena. It’s very ecological – new empirical observations suggest new ways of combining concepts, creating a mangled web of theory. Of course, this is very anti-normal science. You end up with a cabinet of curiosities than a deep and precise knowledge of a specific issue."
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For me the most compelling question in English studies today is the tension between the figure of reading and the figure of writing, especially as it plays out in what David Downing calls managed disciplinarity, the disciplinary division of labor between writing and literature.
Nearly everyone thinking about this question acknowledges that it’s a distinction serving to justify the division of resources and rewards—time, salary, prestige, power—rather than a coherent intellectual division. This wasn’t always the case, but it was for much of the twentieth century. So long as the literature curriculum remained central to sustaining nationalist and imperial projects, faculty working under the sign of “literature” were steadily more likely to be associated with research-intensive, or at least tenurable, appointments; to control institutional resources; shape the disciplinary agenda of the field; receive funding and media recognition, etc.
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The decimation-or-more of the field hardly begins to tell the story of the losses to literary study in particular, however, since there’s been notable growth in tenure-track hiring in some of the subordinated fields, especially rhetoric and composition. (Though as I’ve observed before, to less than universal acclaim in the rhet-comp discourse, much of this growth has to do with the need for low-level administration of a vast army of the nontenurable: while only a minority of the research produced by rhet-comp specialists is about program administration, I’ve argued that the lower-managerial subjectivity shapes the discourse of the field.)
In addition to the continuing trend of rhet-comp specialists doing more and more administration—in institution-spanning positions across the curriculum, in digital media labs, writing programs, writing majors and minors, and offering new graduate degrees--there is quite substantial new tenure-track hiring in all writing-related fields--creative, technical, and professional writing, including scriptwriting, creative nonfiction, and composing for digital media. Some of the most interesting new hiring addresses the growing support for civic engagement in pedagogy by fostering socially engaged writing and rhetoric.In the limited space of this forum, I’d like to zero in on the question begged by that last observation: with all of these new justifications for hiring, why isn’t the story of English more optimistic?
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