20131122.0622

My morning reading of my social media feed presented me with a webcomic, Stephen McCraine's Doodle Alley.  I have had some experience with comics, both in print and on the web, so I did not hesitate to page through a few of the offerings on the site.  The simple color scheme and style work well in the series, the lettering reads easily and well, and the contrast and dynamism of the frames are compelling.  Indeed, I find myself jealous of the artist--of many comic artists, really, and many artists in other media--who are able to effectively integrate image and text; doing so is not something in which I am skilled, and I am not convinced that I have the wherewithal to practice enough to be able to become skilled.  But that is another matter.

More to the point is McCranie's 1 May 2013 offering, "Diversify Your Study."  In the webcomic, McCranie points out the need to study multiple disciplines, citing the ability of expanded study to open perception and allow multiple avenues of inquiry about a single topic.  He sketches out a method for branching out into other disciplines, as well: work from the core study to proximal studies and outward.  The affirmation is useful, and it is the case that a single issue or page of a webcomic cannot account in detail for the myriad paths fashioning of an interdisciplinary identity can take, so McCranie does an at least adequate job of provoking thought and conversation about the matter.

At least, he does for me; his comic brings to mind a number of things with which I have grappled in my mind.  One prominent among them is a classroom commonplace, the whining of students about having to learn things outside of their chosen major.  "Why," they ask, "do I need to learn about literature if I am going to be an accountant?"  "What is the point," others complain, "of this?  I'm going to fix cars," or "be a farmer," or "go into politics; when am I going to need to write?"  Even some of my fellow scholars in the humanities offer such comments as "I have never needed anything above seventh-grade math.  Why I had to take college algebra is beyond me."  The answer I give to my students is that they may well need the overt skills my classes have them practice; being able to examine evidence closely and draw reasonable conclusions from it applies to every field, and being able to express the evidence and reasoning convincingly can permit such things as getting investment capital and not getting a ticket (sometimes).  Most of them are content with it, and those who are not tend to not submit their work, making themselves unproblematic for me.

The answer I would like to give them, though, but which I do not because I do not think they would listen, is much like that McCranie advances.  Training in outside disciplines is not simply a matter of acquiring knowledge; it is a matter of developing patterns and methods of thought and inquiry that can be deployed later.  I am very much a student of humanities, but I find that the inductive reasoning that typifies scientific inquiry a useful tool; identifying patterns and extrapolating from them is useful in literary critique.  I find that the systematic reasoning from postulates and theorems taught me in my math classes is also useful; there are principles of inquiry that can be applied and followed.  And study of the humanities seeks both to remind people of traditions and explicate human nature through examination of how those traditions form and are maintained and appropriated; my students, whatever their field, live in a human world, and so an understanding of human nature and human culture is doubtlessly of benefit to them.  The perspective is helpful.

Something else McCranie raises in my mind is my own privileged position with respect to interdisciplinarity.  I am by training a literary generalist with a focus (not a specialization, really) in medieval English literature.  My dissertation (which I seem to be referencing an awful lot recently) spans centuries, literary periods, and the Atlantic Ocean.  My research frequently looks at how ideas are transmitted forward through time.  Doing the work I do necessitates that I have an understanding not just of lots of books, but the contexts from which those books derive and in which they are and have been read.  I have to have a handle on literature, history, various technologies, theology, art, architecture, archaeology, and the like--and many of my more specialized colleagues do not.  I am necessarily interdisciplinary in my work, and (as I have been telling potential employers in the many application letters I continue to send out into the world) that interdisciplinarity allows me to respond to many students I would otherwise not and to further human knowledge of the human in ways the traditional disciplinary boundaries--useful for focusing attention and developing deep knowledge, yes, but always in danger of myopia, as McCranie, following Asimov*, points out--cannot.  Being able to identify, explicate, and anticipate connections among seemingly diverse sets of information is useful--and increasingly so, given the data-saturation of the world.  Those of us who study the older things are therefore particularly well placed to work among the newer--something McCranie suggests in his comic.

There is another thing to keep in mind, though: interdisciplinarity does not mean surface-level study.  Being able to be effective in multiple disciplines requires taking the time and investing the effort to develop that effectiveness, and it is not an easy task.  The most useful eyes either see very deeply or very far; in neither case is it helpful to take only a glance.

*Read "Sucker Bait."  I have it in an old and battered copy of The Martian Way and Other Stories.