October 20, 2014

Logos & the Academy: What Is a Dissertation? The Future Is Not Written (Part 1)

No sooner had the notion of the Flood regained its composure,
Than a hare paused amid the gorse and trembling bellflowers and said its prayer to
the rainbow through the spider’s web—Rimbaud, “After the Flood”

To adapt to the times requires imagination and a bit of daring, which was in evidence a few Friday evenings ago in The Graduate Center English Department lounge, at the forum What Is a Dissertation? New Models, New Methods, New Media, in the persons of panelists Jade E. Davis, Dwayne Dixon, Gregory T. Donovan, Amanda Licastro, Nick Sousanis, and Cathy N. Davidson, Distinguished Professor at the GC and Director of the Futures Initiative and HASTAC@CUNY, who chaired the event. Practically oriented, the forum asked its panelists—whose fields range across Communications, Media Studies, English, Education, and Cultural Anthropology—to talk about the various extra-textual tools, media, and platforms—digital, online, and otherwise—they used to construct their dissertations and what these uniquely enabled them to accomplish as distinct from what they might have otherwise done within the confines of a conventionally constructed dissertation.

Among the innovations on display were: digital photography and social media to open up the photographic archive of historically under-represented and misrepresented people; data visualization and online platforms to map the multiplicity of connections that spatially, temporally, and culturally configure experience; creation of a social network site in collaboration with research participants to study their interaction with social media; and analysis and visualization of digital data to study online student writing. Insofar as digital tools and online media are singularly appropriate means for conducting such research, these being uniquely capable of producing results consistent with the nature of the subject matter, the scholars featured here would, perhaps, have been remiss had they failed to make use of them. This would be a trivial point were it not for the fact that much research is remiss in this way.

More strikingly significant, in any case, were telltale structural elements of the dissertations under discussion that hinted at a paradigmatic shift underway in what it means to do academic research, particularly for those membered among disciplinary varieties appearing under the species of humanistic studies and the humanities. That there should be such a shift is not altogether shocking, nor are the changes involved strictly specific to the academe. What is happening is a function of a larger paradigm change that has been in process for decades now, at least since the emergence of the modern communications era, which began, as some have argued, when the father of information theory, Claude Shannon, drew a firm line through the watery word and divided meaning, which lay above the firmament and was said to be as irrelevant as the Heaven of old, from information, which remained below and was said to be all that mattered. With that he let loose a flood, on the seas of which all of us now are afloat.

But now that half a century has passed since ours was declared the Information Age, and more than a decade since digital technologies began to be integrated into every nook and cranny of our lives and our lives woven into the vast web of the internet, it’s surely time we stop wringing our hands, as has been happening of late, about whether fast streams of information are diminishing our capacity to swim into deeper truths, about whether cyberspatial gardens are in fact gloomy caves in which attunement to reality is becoming attenuated by a delusional relation to images and phantoms, about whether being tethered to our devices leaves us disconsolately distracted and alone. The time has surely come, that is, for us to adapt, to find our feet, to learn how to swim, to build a ship.

This especially the case for academics, who make information and meaning their very business, whether under the sign of the defunct Heaven or on the more solid ground of living Earth. This is especially challenging, however, for those whose disciplines have, traditionally, required that research be primarily articulated in the austerity of the word, on the page, in the book. The question at hand is a large one: What is the future of academic writing? The answer is uncertain, because the lay of land and sea has not yet been fully charted; but thanks to some seafaring scholars who have felt the need to adapt sooner than most, a topology of possibilities is emerging.

There is much to say about this, and I will have more to say about what last Friday’s forum on the dissertation gave me to understand about our shifting paradigm in the second part of this post, which will be the first in a series on academic writing. Although it will largely be devoted to issues concerning more conventional aspects of scholarly writing that I, disciple of the word, think will remain perennial concerns for academic work, it is fitting that this series begin with the question of the future of writing and research in humanistic studies and the humanities because, given the state of affairs, what will become of scholarship traditionally conducted by means of the word is not at all a given; and what will become of the disciplines of the word, as they may be called, is even less a given. So even as I will endeavor to elaborate in upcoming posts on the nature of academic writing as determined by more or less conventional expectations, I will nevertheless be keeping an eye on the question mark flickering at the end of the line.

Meanwhile, you should check out the some of the luminaries of the present (may there be others who burn as brightly and light the way all the more brilliantly):