Shifting
meanings: the fate of words in transdisciplinary academia
Andrew
Hugill, January 2020
There has been a flurry of interest in the
talk I gave at IRCAM two years ago entitled ‘Establishing
Transdisciplinary Entities in Universities, or: why is it that musicians make
the best interdisciplinarians?’ The interest was prompted by my comments about
the way in which words change their meanings in different academic contexts
(view the video from 16′ 30″ onwards). These are ideas that I have frequently
elaborated in conferences and discussions, but I realised that I have never
written them down in a publicly accessible form, hence this essay.
In 2006, I founded the Institute Of Creative Technologies at De Montfort
University, Leicester, UK. This was a research institute which, at its height,
included over 100 researchers working on a wide range of interdisciplinary
projects. The IOCT continues to flourish to this day and retains that
transdisciplinary spirit in everything it does.
The three main contributing Faculties
to the IOCT were: Humanities (which included performing arts); Art and Design;
and Technology (which included science and engineering). The rule of the IOCT
was that all researchers must work across disciplines, preferably collaborating
with someone from another Faculty. This led to some amazing
projects but it also created many challenges. Transdisciplinarity is hard to do, and even harder to do
well.
One of the main challenges was
language. I witnessed many formal and informal discussions in which it became
obvious to me that the academic jargon that was necessary to each discipline
was creating barriers when people tried to work together. To put it simply,
people could not understand one another, not because they were unable or unwilling,
but because the very words they used embedded a set of assumptions about
meaning so deeply that they could not recognise the fact. Now, it is important
to state that jargon is a necessary part of any discipline. It is only by
sharing a set of understood meanings that a community of scholars can make
progress. If everybody had to define every word they used anew every time they
used it, research would grind to halt. So, it is not that these shifting
meanings of words are wrong, it’s just that they become an
obstacle to effective communication in a cross-disciplinary working.
I identified three common scenarios,
which occurred again and again on a daily basis:
Certain words appear quite innocuous,
which is why they can cause so much confusion and surprise. One good example is
the word “pattern”. I can remember using this in a planning meeting with a
mixed group of scientists, designers and artists, and
being surprised by the variety of their reactions. In fact, it took quite a bit
of discussion with the three groups separately to get to the root of the
problem and find ways to remedy.
In science, to discover a pattern in
nature is one of the most prized things. Indeed, it could be a Nobel
prize-winning discovery. The reason is that such patterns lie at the
foundations of verifiability, or what John Ziman
calls “perceptual consensibility” (Ziman 1978). It is this that enables scientists to agree on
what is reliable knowledge, even if at a physical or temporal distance.
In design, patterns are typically
just a starting-point. A quick browse of The Pattern
Library will quickly give an idea of what this means. Patterns
are repetitive designs that can provide a foundation for something more
creative (web design, in that case). There is an inherent beauty in the
symmetry of patterns of course, but usually designers wish to de-pattern to
make something more interesting. Perhaps this relates to the old Islamic idea
that an error should be introduced into any pattern because “only God is
perfect”. In any event, it is unlikely that designers will be excited by
patterns alone.
In music, and indeed in other
art-forms, having your work described as “mere pattern-making” is quite an
insult. It implies that you have nothing original to say and fall back on
mechanical formulae. There are many references to this very phrase in the
literature. Here is a typical example, from R. A. Sharpe’s essay “Music and
Humanism”:
“Our
conception of music as capable of expressing human psychological states is
deeply enmeshed with our sense that it is a humanist art-form in a way that
mere pattern-making is not” (Sharpe 2000, viii).
Even minimalist music which, in the
early days, was very susceptible to the charge of “mere pattern-making” has
been salvaged from that fate by the expressivity of composers such as Steve
Reich and Philip Glass.
So, when I was addressing my mixed
group of researchers, I used the word ‘pattern’ and was surprised to see all
the scientists sit up and take notice, all the designers look bored, and all
the artists (musicians in this case) becoming hostile.
I have encountered similar problems
with the word “abstract”. In science, abstraction consists of layers to be
crossed as one travels from the language of mathematics to the materiality of
physics, or, in computer science, series of functionally co-dependent yet
discrete hierarchical levels that hide the workings of a subsystem in order to allow unhampered consideration of, for example,
algorithms. Abstract art, on the other hand, refers quite
specifically to the tradition of non-figurative or non-representational
painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 19th century. The social
sciences, by contrast, borrow the idea of layers of abstraction from science,
but apply them in a rather different way, somewhat like a biologist focusing a
microscope. So, for example, John Murmann complains
that “The dominant North American style of research in Organization Theory,
Strategy, and International Business encourages researchers to frame their
explanations at the highest level of abstraction where country-level contextual
factors are suppressed or ignored” (Murmann 2014,
381).
So, once again, using the word
“abstract” in the context of a mixed group, invites several different
interpretations based on disciplinary ideas that are so deep-rooted that the
researchers themselves are unaware of the fine distinctions between them.
2. People using
different words to describe the same thing
A good example of this problem
concerns that stage of any creative process in which one has little idea what
one is doing. At this moment, often at the beginning (but not necessarily so),
one is feeling for a way forwards, perhaps trying out ideas, maybe engaged in
ultimately irrelevant or disconnected speculation. Psychologists would call
this “divergent thinking” in which ideas seem to emerge spontaneously, in a
free-flowing and often non-linear way. This contrasts with “convergent
thinking”, in which data and facts are brought together to find a “correct”
answer to a problem.
All disciplines engage in this kind
of divergent thinking (creativity is not just for artists!), but they use
different words to describe it. The mathematician Henri Poincaré
described his thought processes thus:
“Ideas
rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak,
making a stable combination. It seems, in such cases, that one is present at
his own unconscious work, made partially perceptible to the over-excited
consciousness, yet without having changed its nature”.
This kind of ideation is normally
described in scientific circles as “intuition”. Indeed, there is a whole
scientific philosophy of “intuitionism” which locates scientific discovery
purely in the minds of humans. The point is that conscious reasoning is absent,
something that appears to lack rigour but which, intuitionists argue, possesses
another (even superior) rigour of its own.
Designers, on the other hand,
recognise this exact same type of thinking as the “fuzzy front-end” of
innovation. This describes a collection of tools and activities that encourage
the designer to step out of the rigid structures of the design process. In
colloquial terms, this is “thinking outside the box”, and is generally
encouraged in workshops and “brainstorming” exercises. It tends to be an
unstructured but guided form of play-like activity that is time-delimited.
For artists working in research, this
aspect of thinking has become something of a major problem. Many artists would
argue that the kind of unstructured, intuitive, divergent thinking described
above is the very substance of what makes them artists. However, in an academic
context this is problematic, because of the need to articulate in words what
makes the work “research”. For some artists, this is a potentially fatal
stumbling-block to their involvement in academia, something that has been
extensively written about and discussed elsewhere. Yet there is also a wider
problem, in that no credible discipline-specific terminology exists to describe
this aspect of artistic creation. At one time, the word “inspiration” would
have been used, but that has fallen out of favour because it is rather vague
and laden with a 19th Century image of the Romantic artist. I can remember, in
my own PhD thesis, coining the phrase “non-systematic” to describe those
moments when I could not account for my own decisions. Nowadays,
artist-researchers tend to use a range of terms to describe this, or just avoid
the topic altogether.
3. Things that are
so new they don’t have names yet.
This is a perennial problem for
anyone working in cutting-edge research, which is permanently situated on the
crest of a wave of invention and discovery. What should we call things when
they have not previously existed? If we invent a new word, then we have to provide a definition (very hard to do) and spend the
next several years explaining its meaning to everyone else. If we use an
existing word, then people complain that we already know what that means, and
so how can we claim this new thing as a genuine innovation?
I remember the challenges we in the
IOCT encountered with the word “transliteracy”. It
was not a completely new word at the time, but it was so new
that nobody really knew what it meant. The definition and elaboration of the
concept came from my colleague Professor Sue Thomas, and
is explained on her blog. Her definition in 2007 was:
The
ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through
handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.
She devoted an enormous amount of
time and effort trying to explain it to everyone else, organising workshops,
writing profusely, and encouraging researchers to develop the idea. Her own
work extended the concept into “technobiophila”,
another new word which she defined as: “the innate attraction to life and
lifelike processes as they appear in technology”. She published a fascinating book on the subject in 2014.
The word “transliteracy”
became a locus for all sorts of research activity, but I think it is true to
say that it fully was adopted only by a relatively small number of disciplines.
In my experience, people tended to fall back on “digital literacy”, which was a
more familiar concept and seemed to be more susceptible to ready interpretation
and measurement. Nevertheless, “transliteracy” has
been adopted in fields such as information science, where it fulfils a distinct
role in libraries, especially in assisting collaboration between diverse groups
of people.
References
Ziman,
John (1978). ‘Common observation’. Reliable knowledge: An exploration
of the grounds for belief in science. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press). pp. 42–76
Sharpe, R.A. (2000) Music and
Humanisim (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Murmann,
J. P. (2014) ‘Reflections on Choosing the Appropriate Level of Abstraction in
Social Science Research’. Management and Organization Review 10:3,
November 2014, 381–389.