[Humanist] 31.493 pubs: coming to Know, interdisciplinarity and collaboration
Humanist Discussion Group
willard.mccarty at mccarty.org.uk
Fri Dec 29 12:32:20 CET 2017
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 31, No. 493.
Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist
Submit to: humanist at lists.digitalhumanities.org
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2017 11:08:41 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty at mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: interdisciplinarity and collaboration
In the leading article of the first issue of Know: A Journal on the
Formation of Knowledge
(http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/know/current), Simon Goldhill
surveys major problems requiring an interdisciplinary approach then
observes that,
> When expertise is so hard to attain and fields are developing so
> rapidly, there are inevitably only a few people who are in
> themselves genuinely interdisciplinary in the sense of having
> mastered two or more disciplines in a creatively combinatory fashion.
> Rather, what most of the major problems I have mentioned do need is
> collaborative responses. The question of interdisciplinarity, thus,
> is most insistently a question of how to collaborate.
In describing his first major interdisciplinary project, Goldhill
tells how collaboration itself for each of the participants meant
becoming interdisciplinary -- coming to know the fields of the other
participants, "celebrated books from other fields that I had not heard of".
Indeed this happens all the time even in solitude, when collaborations in
a sense begin unexpectedly, through writings and in conferences,
conversations and online exchanges. But all this is grounded,
Goldhill points out, in solid disciplinary training and returns to one's field
of origin with the improving demand for "better disciplinarity, better
practice".
If the conversations I overhear and the writings of which I am aware are
indicative, we usually tend to stop with interdisciplinarity as a claim
and collaboration a convenient social arrangement during which the
participants learn a thing or two they didn't know before. That's the
reason why I think the relatively new journal Know (2017--) is worth
mentioning here, for its commitment to dilate from the practical
concerns of forming a team to deal with problems beyond our individual
powers and then doing our little bit. Allow me to recommend not only
Goldhill's article but also the Editors' introduction to the first
issue, G.E.R. Lloyd's "Where Now for the Interdisciplinary and
Cross-Cultural Study of the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind?" and
those that follow.
Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/), Professor emeritus, Department of
Digital Humanities, King's College London; Adjunct Professor, Western
Sydney University and North Carolina State University; Editor,
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (www.tandfonline.com/loi/yisr20)
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