A couple of months ago, I attended a
two-day postgraduate workshop on interdisciplinary research in medieval/early
modern studies. The workshop was convened by Peter Anstey of the University of
Otago and included sessions by Stephen Clucas of Birkbeck College, London, Peter Marshall of the University of Warwick, and John Sutton of Macquarie University in Sydney. If you check out the staff pages I've linked here, you'll see that these people (and the other workshop presenters) represent a variety of disciplines from within and beyond the traditional 'humanities'. Hence the purpose of the workshop: It provided a practical framework for pursuing
research that incorporate methodologies, theoretical frameworks etc. from
outside your own discipline. Practical sessions on scoping and planning an interdisciplinary project were interspersed with
papers where these researchers discussed their own experiences and
application of interdisciplinary methods (including active collaboration with
researchers outside their own fields).
Given my interests, I’m reasonably familiar
with incorporating approaches and ideas from the allied humanities/social sciences
fields that medieval historians frequently draw on – for example, literary
studies, anthropology, sociology, art history, and archaeology. However, I was
pretty interested to hear about some of the collaborations between humanities
disciplines and the sciences. Peter Anstey, whose field is early modern
philosophy, discussed his own collaboration with the botanist/plant scientist Stephen Harris to research John Locke’s seed catalogues. There was also a fascinating example of
collaboration between a specialist in Shakespeare and a specialist in cognitive neuroscience for work looking into questions of individual and social memory in the early modern
theatre. As one of the PhD students in attendance later framed it in a post on the Early Modern Experimental Philosophy blog:
The workshop made it clear that
crossing the boundaries of a particular discipline is not only fruitful but
even necessary when engaged in early modern research. Given that there is a
natural characteristic of interdisciplinarity to the early modern period we
must leave the comfort zone of our own discipline if we want to carry out our
research projects properly. Most of us have actually done this without noticing
that we are engaged in interdisciplinary research. The workshop brought this to
my attention and I started thinking about the many ways in which my research
would have been improved if I had consciously made an effort to enrich my
understanding of any given topic by allowing myself to explore what other
disciplines have to offer.
(Clearly, the same thing about blurred disciplinary
boundaries – for example, between ‘natural philosophy’, ‘medicine’, and
‘theology’ – can be said of research into medieval cultures.)
This set the scene for a couple of extended
practical sessions on approaching interdisciplinary research as a PhD student. Here
and in a planned follow up post (Part II), I’ll summarise my own notes from these
sessions to preserve the information for my future reference and to make it
available to others who may find it useful. What I have noted here is what is most
useful to me and I should emphasise that there were likely other aspects of
this workshop that other students would have found more relevant to their own
work. There was some discussion at the end of the two days about how the
organisers can make this methodology more widely available (e.g. via a website or
publication) so if you're interested, you can keep an eye on Otago’s Early Modern Experimental Philosophy blog for any updates.
Part I – Determining the research project
parameters
This forms a subset of a six-stage
heuristic. I’ll write up my notes on the full framework and how this bit fits
into it in Part II.
1) Set your temporal parameters
a) Choose the historical period(s) you’re
planning to work in
b) Identify chronological overlaps and
connections between periods
c) Identify the challenges posed by the
chosen chronological period(s)
Challenges could include the need to master
different languages, the need to get past barriers of terminology in order to
accurately understand key concepts (for example, the term ‘science’ or scientia meant something quite different
to people in 1412 than it does to us in 2012), lack of evidence etc. In my
case, I’m dealing with a period and place where at least four languages (Middle
English, Anglo-French, ‘French of Paris, and Latin) are in regular use in my
documentary sources. As I’m interested in political uses of language – not just
specific words or discourses but also the language strategically chosen to
express them – I also need to come to terms with how I am going to treat
after-the-fact written accounts of oral/aural speech acts (something I blogged about recently). Another thing to consider is how the historical
period you chose defines to an extent your key terms and concepts. For example,
as a well-known historian of chivalry has pointed out to me, if I chose a
chronological timeframe defined by the reigns of certain kings, then I am
implicitly approaching the concept of knighthood/chivalry in a top-down way, in
terms of the way kings/princes defined and used it – an important and powerful
conceptualisation of knighthood but certainly not the only one.
2) Set your disciplinary parameters
a) Select the historical disciplines you’re
looking at – e.g. natural philosophy, theology, rhetoric etc.
b) Select the contemporary disciplines
you’ll be drawing on to help interpret and understand those historical
disciplines. For example, if you’re looking at early modern alchemy you may
also be drawing on the modern science of chemistry.
c) Regulate any mismatches and determine
how you are going to deal with them.
The alchemy-chemistry example is a good
one in this context, as early modern alchemy incorporates elements of
mysticism, theology etc. that are utterly foreign to the modern lab science of
chemistry.
3) Set your linguistic parameters
a) The historical languages of your sources
b) Contemporary languages - for example, I
need to incorporate modern scholarship on my topic that is published in German, French
etc. Depending on their topics, others might need to learn the disciplinary ‘languages’
of chemistry (periodic table, chemical formulas...), mathematics etc.
c) Identify potential issues and problems
so you can figure out how you are going to deal with them. This could be
anything from learning a new language to putting aside funds to hire
translators or engaging in strategic collaboration with someone that does
understand the ‘language’ (a mathematician, a botanist, a theologian etc. etc.)
4) Set the technological parameters
a) Identify any historic technologies or processes you need to
understand – e.g. printing or book-making, manuscript production, alchemical
equipment, medical equipment etc.
b) Identify any contemporary technologies
that you need to use – xray, carbon dating, photography etc.
5) Set any other parameters, including e.g.
- geographical,
- thematic (‘skills and practical knowledge’,
‘material culture’ etc.),
- institutional (church? universities?
medical professions? etc.)
- social –
is your research focused on elites/nobility? merchants? artisans? etc.
To an extent, this also determines the next parameter, which is –
- sources - archival records, books, material culture, landscape etc.
6) Determine your requisite skill set
Given all of the above, what do you as a
researcher need to be able to do or understand in order to complete your project? Obvious skills for historians
include languages (modern and historical), archival research skills,
palaeography, codicology etc. Someone studying historical boat-building,
manuscript illumination, or alchemy (amongst other things) might also learn a
good deal from some hands-on experience in the practical aspects, tools etc. There was a historian of early music at the workshop who told us they didn’t fully
grasp the logic behind a particular musical notation system until they built a
copy of the relevant historical instrument and tried it out themselves. An
important point made at this juncture was that you don’t necessarily need to
learn all these skills yourself but learn how to find and draw on the knowledge
and skills of specialists.
Finally, on the first day of the workshop
there was a brief session on ‘mapping’ disciplines other than your own. I
thought this would be particularly useful for anyone in a humanities discipline
wanting to get to grips with a field quite a long way from their own – for
example, historians wanting to understand cognitive neuroscience or chemistry.
So to conclude Part I of this series:
Mapping disciplines other than your own
This was presented as a structured way to
go about finding the important and useful ideas in a field and understanding
the wider context they evolved in (including any disciplinary shit-fights and
controversies you may be unknowingly wading into). You can start with popular
works, especially in the sciences (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Stephen J. Gould) to
get a sense of the overall field, but be aware that these people are often
writing outside their own speciality in order to make their works accessible
for a lay audience. You then need to get into the academic literature in order
to understand how the bit you’re interested in fits into the larger field. Start
by identifying the main journals in the field(s) (asking someone in the target
discipline in your university can be a quick way to find out which are the
journals that really ‘count’). Then, hit up the review / ‘state of the field’ articles
to start getting to grips key concepts and theories, how they developed,
dissensions/ debates, counter-arguments etc. You also need to figure out if the
particular theory or finding you want to draw on is considered respectable or
pretty leftfield/wacky. Citation counts on something like Google Scholar are
one indicator of this but they can be misleading. (For example, the person
could be getting cited a lot in articles criticising their work/findings.)
Again, review articles and talking to people currently working in the discipline
are a good way to get some fast feedback.
Okay, well that was pretty long but I hope
some of you may find it useful. In the second part of this series
(which I’ll aim to get up within the next week or so), I’ll describe the wider
six-stage heuristic that this parameter-setting exercise fits into.