The Deep, Webbed Rabbit Hole in the Center of Campus

Here's a question: what is the proper role of professorship in an age of world mind? Last night, after spending some time in class discussing ancient sources of Odysseyan legends, Homeric and otherwise, I found myself following a series of hyperlinks concerning fairytales and legends deep into the labyrinth of the oh-so-aptly named World Wide Web. Living as I do in a rural area with no cellphone service and only a weak internet connection at home, I do not often run the risk of losing myself in the Web, but last night using speedy campus servers as my wings I found myself as quickly entangled in my informational misadventure as any foolish fly. When I retraced my breadcrumb trail of links back out of the rabbit hole ("block that metaphor!"), I discovered I had gone about 2 hours and 50 links deep (and/or sideways), and had not only encountered a great deal of reputably documented information I had not known about, as well as a number of questionably sourced articles I could more or less ignore, but had wandered into realms so far removed from my original query as to be in some ways absurd--the later colonial history of Trinidad and Tobago, the lore of spectral hounds in the British Isles, the impact of Isidore of Seville on the medieval preservation and distortion of classical learning, and so forth.

Can a hyperlinked world be anything but interdisciplinary? Is the best role of the lecturer/professor/mentor now to be a guide, a pointing finger only, a Virgil to the myriad student Dantes who have stumbled from their various thickets into the swirling limbo of facts and fictions that is this Web, this Matrix, this human-tended, human-groomed, superorganismic termite underhill of world mind? How should we then teach, when information itself is so superabundant that the single brain is stunned on contact? As the oracular Web itself reminded me, the world of scholarship was once so different. Back when that learned 6th-century Spanish Catholic and "last scholar of the ancient world," Isidore of Seville put together his compendium of world knowledge, the Etymologiae, it was brutally reductive and biased, but it was still a single, manuscript volume compiled by one scholar and then used as a primary source for nearly a thousand years by several thousands of later clerics, including the first teachers of what would become the great European universities. Yes, long, long ago, and yet. . . . Are we still teaching in a way that tacitly presumes such weighty tomes are the anchors and guarantors of our knowledge, when knowledge and lies alike now form one bewitching, fay electric swirl that halos and tempts astray each of our confused little heads? Is it even possible for individual human minds to follow the eerie, flickering lights of the Web, to wander into that world "under the hill" and safely return at all, much less with only true stories to tell?

Shadow Stories of Plato's Cave

The beauty of interdisciplinarity is that one's field becomes whatever one knows and one's research becomes whatever one does not know. More often than not, what little one knows serves mainly to point to wonderful new areas unknown. Or, as they were once infamously phrased--"the unknown unknowns." Teaching a class about storytelling from an evolutionary perspective this spring has opened whole new areas of those previously "unknown unknowns." Despite a long interest in the evolution of language and of symbolic culture, I don't think it ever occurred to me before this term that it is a complete mystery to all of us when the telling of stories actually began. Now that I think about this particular mystery daily, I find the world once again transformed by a new question. Genetic evidence for modern human origins (currently pointing toward somewhere in eastern or southern Africa perhaps a couple of hundred thousand years ago, see Tischkoff et. al. in Science, April '09, The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African-Americans), plus archaeological evidence for ornament and symbols as far back as the South African Middle Stone Age, and the ambiguous evidences from linguistics, genetics, archaeology, neurology, and so forth for much earlier use of language and control of fire, perhaps rooted well before our emergence as this particular species of Homo, all begin to rearrange themselves as fuzzy pointers to when people might have first begun that quintessential and universal human activity, telling tales, short or tall, around the common campfire.

Recently, Genevieve Von Petzinger, a graduate student at the University of Victoria in BC, made a sensation in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and rock art scholarship when she documented a comprehensive pattern to the simpler cave "signs" found among the famous Upper Paleolithic rock art sites of France, such as Chauvet cave. (For a laudably readable news article on her work, see The New Scientist cover story in Feb '09, The Writing on the Cave Wall.) While the really spectacular paintings on those caves have received by far the most attention, Von Petzinger focused on the dull little dots, squiggles, half-moons, and hand-stencils found scattered around the beautiful depictions of aurochs and horses. Turns out that there's a pattern to those squiggles, a pattern that echoes, with variations, the basic repertoire of rock art squiggles found around the world.

What do those squiggles mean? What stories did they once help tell? Down in Canyonlands, Sarah Jeffreys has been documenting and studying the layers of rock art left by indigenous Americans. Lo and behold, many of the same simple patterns reappear. Is there an innate fondness for certain fragmentary geometries, dots, lines, and so forth, shared by humans without knowing what they share? Do the stories connecting those dots have much or little in common? If much, is it because of the common psychology of humans everywhere, or were some fragments from tens of thousands of years ago still living as glowing narrative embers carried around the planet by far-flung foragers? Any discipline at all might bring some new perspective to bear, some new way of seeing the evidence all around us.

New Presence on the 5th Floor

We came back from the holidays to find new company on the UVU Library's 5th floor: Charles Darwin, as sculpted by Associate Dean of Science and Health Dan Fairbanks.

Dan gives an amazing lecture about evolution while sculpting a young Darwin, who ages as the lecture/sculpting moves along. It's a breathtaking display of interdisciplinary work.

And, of course, Darwin was himself an interdisciplinary thinker. In fact, 18th and 19th-century scientists were often thought of as natural philosophers and/or naturalists. It wasn't unusual for Darwin to be as interested in geology as he was in marine biology, as competent in botany as in zoology. Big problems (and evolution is one of THE big problems) require knowledge of all sorts, data of many kinds, and a general ability to synthesize information from various sources.

So, welcome Mr. Darwin.

Interdisciplinarity in Science

Ben Abbott, my son, is currently doing Ph.D. work at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The photo of him was taken while he was working at the Toolik Field Station north of the Brooks Range in Alaska. I asked him about interdisciplinary aspects of the project he's involved in. Here's his answer:

Interdisciplinary work is essential to doing good science. None of us studies everything. The various fields of knowing have expanded and deepened to the point that no one is capable of mastering all of the current unfoldings and discoveries. Luckily, collaboration is possible. When numerous researchers examine a new question a more complete understanding is attainable. As an ecologist, I study the interactions between the living (biotic) and non‑ living (abiotic) systems of earth. Right now I'm looking at the causes, extent, and effects of sinkholes, called thermokarsts, which have been melting more and more frequently in the permafrost on the North Slope. There are 13 principle investigators (big bosses) and 20 graduate students working on this project. Each researcher has a specialty or emphasis depending on their interests and background. The first challenge we're dealing with is generating compelling and powerful questions. Why are these features forming where they are forming? How are they changing the vegetation? What is being released from the sinkholes? Not only does each

researcher's background determine what parts of which questions he or she can work on, it influences the very questions they are capable of generating. I didn't think to ask, "how deep does the thermokarst disturbance extend into the soil and underlying material," though, once that question was posed by one of the geomorphologists in the group, I immediately recognized its importance to understanding the system as a whole.

One possible complication in assembling an "interdisciplinary" team is the trouble of finding people of truly different disciplines. Many times the fields or disciplines that are brought together have shared roots. This facilitates communication and consensus but it also propagates prejudice and potential bias. For example, though I feel the team working on this thermokarst project is wildly diverse, a non‑ scientist might well consider us completely homogeneous. I mean what I see as interdisciplinary‑‑ gelogists, ecologists (of the terrestrial, aquatic and community varieties), climatologists, hydrologists etc.‑‑ may seem totally one sided to an outsider. Indeed, we all share some basic assumptions about how to uncover truths. There are a couple collaborators with more distant relations to the physical scientists, one of whom is an anthropologist interviewing native populations about their understanding of the frequency, importance, and duration of these features. There has only been one field season of data collection so far so it is still to be seen if there will be real dialogue and collaboration between the physical scientists and the cultural scientists. I'm excited to see how much "inter" and how much "discipline"for that matter there will be in this project.

Disciplinary Nodes: A Botanical Metaphor

Disciplinary nodes

Lyn and I picked these buckwheat plants (our name for them is "pod people" -- botanists prefer "eriogonum inflatum," and common names are Desert Trumpet and Indian Pipeweed) on the San Raphael Swell. Besides their simple beauty, they work as a metaphor for me of interdisciplinary work.

The swellings are those biology or music or history emphases, the disciplines where we gain depth of focus and the tools we need to investigate whatever problem or question we're interested in. The stems between the swellings are the connections without which we remain in disciplinary isolation.

And the snowy ground behind them?

I think I'll just let the metaphor rest.

For an interesting look at recent thinking on interdisciplinary studies, see
http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-wi08/le-wi08_Inter_Studies.cfm

Some IS Graduates

Integrated Studies Metaphor

Monument, metaphors, interdisciplinary studies

Just down the hill from our house in Woodland Hills stands this fine piece of installation art. Or is it garden art? Or, as I've wondered more than once, is it a monument to interdisciplinary studies gone horribly wrong?

Well adorned with live and artificial flowers, guarded by a watchful plastic pig, fronted by plush rabbits and the proverbial pink flamingo, announcing that it's time to go back to school, the rusty green pickup stands (slumps) as a creative advertisement for the Hiatt Construction Company.

So far so good.

But as a monument for interdisciplinary work, it can only serve as a warning.

Say you're working on a problem, like the question of how language both enables and disables us (the problem Alex Caldiero and I will address with a group of humanities and integrated studies and communications students next fall). If you think the problem additively (which is the methodology of the pigflamingoflowerrabbittruck) you'll end up with a hodgepodge, unfocused and superficial and unsatisfying. We're nervous about this and are working hard to use the tools we jointly have to get at the basic problem without slipping away toward yard art. Linguistics and poetry, literary criticism and history, anthropology and religious studies will all play parts in our investigations, and if we use the tools of these disciplines skillfully, we'll know a lot more about how we speak language and how it speaks us than we did when we started.