Time-sensitive: Disciplines & Technologies Project Invites Applications for Two Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar positions [Deadline January 20] Also see: Center for Disciplinary Innovation at the University of Chicago

We intend to devote two years to developing an initial basis of knowledge on which to build a systematic account of the relations between technologies and disciplines.  By a discipline we mean a set of practices by means of which a body of knowledge is “acquired, confirmed, implemented, preserved, and reproduced.” [1]  A discipline cannot therefore be reduced either to a subject matter or to a method.  In order to count as a discipline, as such, a set of practices requires an “institutional framework in which whatever regularity they imposed can be mediated and effected” [2] —a department structure, for example.  And yet a discipline cannot be reduced to its institutional setting either. If that were the case, we would not be able to talk about disciplines’ changing in ways that departments fail to accommodate.  By a technology we mean, broadly, a device, machine, or mechanism—which may be virtual—that academic disciplines and human societies more broadly develop and use to instrumentally accomplish a desired end.  Generally, technologies have histories: they arise, change, and are left behind. Technologies typically entail the existence of particular communities—often disciplines—possessed of specific bodies of knowledge and distinct skills with which to deploy them.

During the two years of the grant, we hope to achieve two principal objectives. 

In the first place, we want to kick-start our investigations by pursuing two pilot studies of particular episodes of disciplinary and technological interaction.  We anticipate that one of these pilot studies will address an episode in the human sciences, the other an episode in the natural sciences.  Both will be historical in the sense that change over time will be a principal focus.  Although more work has been done about the evolution of technologies in natural science than social science and humanities disciplines, none of it has focused on their coevolution with the disciplines themselves.  Our hope is that these studies will enable us to define and refine our questions, vocabularies, and approaches for grappling with the relation between technology and discipline in depth.  By selecting our cases in this way, we also hope to recognize which issues attending our topic transcend even the greatest of the disciplinary divides of the modern university, namely that between the humanities and the sciences.  The scope of each study will be both broad (in terms of its framing) and specific (in terms of its empirical focus), and as such these are tasks most suited to experienced researchers—postdoctoral scholars, rather than graduate students who would have to spend time finding their methodological feet.

At the same time, we also want to generate a preliminary portrayal of how the disciplinary landscape in academia has in fact changed since, say, the advent of the major US research universities in the late nineteenth century, showing how those changes intersected with technological developments.  This would provide a broad, sweeping, but nevertheless empirical starting point for further investigations.  It will be a task primarily for the PIs, with the assistance of the postdoctoral scholars and the regular collaborators of the Franke Institute’s Disciplines and Technologies (D&T) group, which has already been meeting for about a year at the time of this submission. (Please see the end of this document for a list of those involved.)

Our overall aim is to combine these ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ perspectives—the high-level survey of the topic’s contours and the two ‘probes’ revealing the deep structure behind those contours—to produce an initial coordinate scheme, as it were, for pursuing this potentially boundless topic. 

Why the Franke Institute?  Why the Working Group on Disciplines and Technologies?

The Franke Institute can boast a decade-long commitment to the study of how the disciplines are changing.  Its first-Mellon sponsored initiative on the subject was conceived in 2001: “New Perspectives on the Disciplines:  Comparative Studies in Higher Education.”  Since then, we have followed up with a new humanities laboratory for exploring changing issues in the disciplines by way of graduate-level seminars co-taught across departments.  This is our Center for Disciplinary Innovation (CDI), which was the model for an eventual Consortium on Disciplinary Innovation in collaboration with Berkeley, Cambridge, and Columbia. 

Our initiatives at the Franke were first undertaken in response to a 2001 call for proposals by the Foundation asking humanities centers to find ways of reconnecting their programs to the core aims and values of their universities.  Our response to this was to suggest that the best way to achieve that goal was to recognize that the humanities-center movement in North America took shape in reaction to intellectual transformations that were neither being registered in the available departmental structures nor generating new departmental formations of their own.  Instead they took the programmatic form of shadow disciplines, usually called “studies,” and humanities centers were places where the new work was meant to be explored.  Understood this way, we argued, humanities centers should be recognized as temporary or provisional solutions to deeper issues that needed more effort and attention.

The transformations that led to the creation of so many humanities centers from the 1960s and 1970s onward mostly preceded the emergence of what we now call “digital humanities.”  With the notable exception of media studies, not many of the new interdisciplinary “studies” in that period had much to do with technology.  The pressures that the digital humanities have placed on the contemporary structure of disciplines, however, have lead to a recognition on the part of many center-directors and other academic leaders that the disciplinary issues addressed by humanities centers and those addressed by scholars working in digital humanities strongly overlap.  Thus, the Scholarly Communication Institute has, over the last few years, helped to form an interlocking leadership group from members of the executive boards of CHCI (the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes) and CenterNet (the consortium of digital humanities centers).  The Franke Institute has been intimately involved in these developments.  Its current director serves on the interlocking CHCI/CenterNet committee and helped to draft its intellectual agenda under the title:  “Digital Disciplines, Digital Publics.” 

At the same time, back in Chicago, we decided to attack the question of the role of digital technologies in disciplinary transformation both by approaching it within a wider spectrum of university work and a longer historical perspective than is typical.  This two-pronged approach led to the working group on Disciplines and Technologies, formed at the beginning of the 2011–12 academic year.  The D&T group consists of some two dozen members from well over a dozen departments, across many parts of the university, who are all interested in some aspect of how technologies and disciplines interact over time.  In our early meetings we found that many of our colleagues were deeply engaged in ongoing projects that directly addressed such issues.  We met several times over the course of the year, and in April, on the occasion of the annual meeting of the four CDI centers (which it was Chicago’s turn to host) we staged a mini-conference with five presentations and some robust discussion about general problems and implications.

It was the view of many in this group that our specific projects and more general discussions needed to be supplemented by some independent case studies.  This led to the current project involving two postdoctoral appointments.  These two scholars are expected to come to the meetings of the group (about six per year), to discuss our ongoing projects as they are presented within the group, and to join in our more general conversations about larger questions.  We anticipate that the scholars will anchor the D&T project in empirical research chosen and commissioned specifically to advance the group’s aims.  Similarly, the group will provide the postdoctoral scholars with a robust and relevant academic community for their intellectual interests.

Expected Outcomes and Future Sustainability

We envisage holding a conference at the end of the two-year period, in Spring 2014.  Its structure and focus will be devised on the basis of the insights generated by our twin-track strategy.  This conference as an integral part of the project, and an essential stepping-stone between the particular researches of this project and the broader inquiry which we hope it will inspire.

Each of the two empirical research exercises at the heart of the project will generate publications, at first in the form of journal articles.  The timescale is probably too short for books to emerge.  But this is also an opportunity to take advantage of the facilities that now exist for online archiving and circulation by inaugurating a digital venue, not only for this research but for future contributions.  We have in mind here a form of ‘digital museum,’ as one may call it, along the lines of the Virtual Laboratory produced by the Max Planck Institute in Germany, or, more modestly, the Omeka project at George Mason University.  These are not just archiving sites, but platforms that allow for experiments in the collation and representation of historical materials.  ‘Exhibits’ are based on relatively specific artifacts or records, but can range widely across disciplinary questions—hence the appeal of the ‘museum’ concept, which emphasizes breaking the bounds of conventional textuality.  It seems that we are finally in a position to produce such flexible installations without having to undertake prohibitively expensive and technical coding.  This kind of device, moreover, is particularly suited to our project because it invites ongoing contributions, and contributions that are not restricted to particular media or disciplines.  It almost seems that an application of such a system to issues of technology and disciplinarity would be making manifest something that is implicit in the system itself.  Like articles and books, our online exhibits will enable us to convey a narrative of insights based on preliminary conclusions. These exhibits will also be designed to allow visitors to undertake independent exploration of the information we collect that will likely lead to new understanding.  Our present intention is to have our system’s basic structure in place by the end of the project.  We mean to model the sessions of the closing conference on that structure—something that we hope will both allow us to see any conceptual gaps or weaknesses and embed awareness of it among participants. 

At the end of two years, we thus expect to be in a good position to provide both a finely textured set of parameters for conducting empirical studies of the technology-disciplines nexus and a preliminary historical map of the nexus itself.  We cannot hope to have attained a final position on what is, after all, a huge and diffuse topic, with aspects relevant across the university world and beyond.  We can hope, however, to have provided a secure baseline from which to progress to that more definitive account: we will be in a position to set an agenda based on solid empirical evidence and theory, and we will have created a simple digital venue for an ongoing pursuit of that agenda.  To adopt Churchill’s resonant phrase, we will have arrived at “the end of the beginning.”

Postdoctoral Scholars (i): Selection

We will recruit two postdoctoral researchers to conduct in-depth pilot studies of the technology/discipline nexus in historical context.  These will provide fine-grained accounts of particular histories.  We anticipate that one will work in a broadly natural-scientific area, the other in a broadly human-scientific. 

Postdoctoral Scholars (ii): Duties

Each postdoctoral scholar will choose some technology and investigate how, over time, it has interacted with the changing disciplinary structures of the universities.  “Technology” here is interpreted fairly broadly; it could include, for example, surveying techniques in the social sciences, or examining markup language in textual enterprises.  Whatever the choice, it should have a history extending back more than a generation, and a broad enough set of uses that it has been employed in several disciplines.  Those disciplines would ideally not all be clustered together: it would be helpful if they were as far apart, say, as meteorology and particle physics in the case of the cloud chamber, or as physiology and the “experimental history of the air” in that of the air-pump.  Ideally, too, its history should also be continuing today.  We are likely to be less interested in technologies that are totally superseded, because one of the points of the project is to try to understand how the map of the disciplines is changing now, with a view to appreciating the forces shaping the future of the university itself.  Examples of suitable technologies might therefore include the calculator, the database, the search algorithm, the MRI machine, radio tagging, and GIS systems in digital mapping.  Each of these is a technical artifact that has a reasonably long past to explore, and that has gained acceptance in a range of academic fields, some of which are far removed from its point of origin.  For example, MRI machines have been used to study the psychology of prayer, and RFID (tagging) devices allow scientists in a wide range of biological and other fields to track populations across time and space.  Whatever the choice, the researcher will use archival, interview, and other historical resources to construct an account of how the technology came into being, how it was first put to use in some intellectual enterprise, and how it subsequently changed as it mediated transformations in its relevant disciplines.  We will select and help the postdoctoral scholars develop these cases around technologies, rather than around disciplines, in order to productively limit the scope of inquiry, while still exploring the coevolution of technology and discipline.  In contrast, to responsibly analyze two entire disciplines and all of the technologies that enter, evolve, and depart them would require substantially more resources.  Moreover, our project design choice will allow us to focus on how technologies influence the nature and porousness of the intellectual “membranes” that separate disciplines.  As disciplinary membranes or barriers threaten to dissolve in some places and re-form in others, our preliminary investigation will reveal some of the roles technologies play in mediating and moderating these transformations.

Our intent is that, at the end of the two-year period, each postdoctoral project will have given rise to a thorough, sensitive account of how a technology and a set of disciplines have developed in tandem over decades.  Having these studies in hand of two distinct technologies and disciplinary clusters, we should then be in a position to identify cognate themes, issues, concepts, and questions.  This will provide us with the parameters required to structure a more ambitious and sweeping future inquiry that symmetrically explores the broader matrix of technologies and disciplines.

At the same time, we will invite the scholars to contribute as regular participants in our team-based effort to produce an initial ‘top-down’ map of the disciplines as it currently exists, historicizing it by excavating the corresponding maps of major US universities for every decade or so over the last century.  We hope to be able to juxtapose this historically dynamic picture with previously researched histories of major technologies.  The aim is not to produce the kind of fine-grained understanding that our case studies will yield, but to generate an initial framework in which to place those studies—to see, in effect, what they are cases of.  Surprisingly enough, it seems that no such broad-brush historical map has yet been produced.  Yet we will be able to draw on work that was done in an earlier Chicago-Mellon project on the disciplines, which did include a preliminary venture along these lines.  This work will be carried out by the PIs, with the aid of the rest of the Franke group.  It will be based primarily on institutional documentation that, while not exactly published, is generally not obscure or hard to collect: college catalogues, teaching schedules, departmental and divisional charts, and the like.  At the University of Chicago these are retained in Special Collections, and the same is typically true of other major campuses. 

Rationale

One of the original meanings of the word technology related rather precisely to our subject.  In the seventeenth century, technologia was the science of mapping the disciplines (the “arts,” in early modern terms) in order to discern promising relations or gaps between them. [3]   Preoccupied with the idea that they could produce a definitive spatial map of knowledge, colonial puritans thought the enterprise should be a central pursuit for any godly individual, and the earliest American universities were established on that assumption.  We no longer think quite that, but the appeal of a spatial representation of the knowledge enterprises is still strong today; something like it is part of the ambition of this project.  But of course we want to see such maps as themselves historical—as human achievements, not divine dispensations.  They are fundamentally unstable, requiring more or less constant shoring-up.  In the modern age, technology is one of the sources of this instability.  Technologies constantly tunnel through the walls dividing the disciplines from each other on any such map.  What happens when they do is the central topic of this project. 

This early usage is helpful to bear in mind because it reminds us that, historically speaking, we are not dealing with two categorically distinct domains.  On the contrary: at their point of origin technology and the disciplines were conjoined.  If they are not fundamentally distinct in the first place, then neither may legitimately be reduced to the other.  We cannot simply assert that a new technology—digital networks, say—causes new disciplines to come into being.  After the fact, the process may indeed come to take on that appearance to those looking back on it.  But for contemporaries it is indeed a process, and there is a lot more involved, and a lot more at stake, than a simple cause-and-effect story can capture.  To understand the nexus of technologies and disciplines we shall need to investigate how each affects and reshapes the other at those moments of unpredictability—moments when choices have to be made.

A number of investigations have already been carried out that may, with a little creativity, be regarded as offering suggestions and precedents for this project.  In the history of science, in particular, efforts to understand the culture of laboratories and the uses of instruments in scientific practice have burgeoned over the last generation.  One thinks immediately of Peter Galison and Alexi Assmus’s classic discussion of the cloud chamber. [4]   This device was initially invented in the nineteenth century as part of an incipient discipline of cloud science, associated with meteorology; but with the rise of particle physics after 1900 it was repurposed, principally by C.T.R. Wilson, as a means of seeing the paths of particles.  In that form it became a central technology in the creation of this new discipline.  Galison and Assmus’s account is valuable not only for tracing in detail this model process, but also for its irreductive rigor. [5]   That is, in contrast to so many stories offered of our own time, theirs is not a straightforward story of how a technology caused a discipline to emerge.  It is not that particle physics was somehow immanent in the cloud chamber even while it was being lugged up Ben Nevis to model mountain meteorology.  Their argument is closer to the reverse, but in truth it does not allow for a reductive interpretation in that sense either.  What we see instead is how shifting coalitions of institutions, interests, researchers, and artisans (the technicians who actually built physicists’ devices) developed in constant interaction with changing perceptions of this instrument’s character—changing, that is, even though to our eyes the machine itself remained remarkably stable.  That offers a powerful model for our inquiry.  Whatever we produce will need to offer as effective a story with as rigorous a refusal to embrace reductionism (or even functionalism) on either side.

Another example is the small but energetic field devoted to reenacting past scientific experiments.  The point of the exercise is that science—like any knowledge enterprise—is not simply a matter of theories alone, but of arguments that have to be made operational through technologies.  For example, Otto Sibum’s group in Germany reconstructed critical experiments in the early history of thermodynamics. [6]   Similar reconstructions have been done of Goethe’s experiments on colors, Newton’s optics, and other episodes. [7]   Such trials do not directly reveal ‘the truth’ about some experiment or device in a way that original documentation conceals, but they can show how ineffable factors like skills, sites, and (in Sibum’s case) ambient temperatures can shape the conceptions that then become foundational to disciplines.  In some cases, reenactment has been introduced into undergraduate classes so that it becomes, presumably, a formative element in the next generation of disciplines too.

It would be a simple matter to construct a miniature canon of such analyses.  In fact, much of the more renowned work produced in science studies since the mid-1980s could in retrospect be ordered in these terms.  For example, Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) was in part an excavation of how the “material technology” of Robert Hooke’s air pump, put to use amid “social” and “literary” technologies, facilitated the development of the new enterprise of experimental philosophy.  Paul Rabinow’s anthropological investigations of early biotechnology did something similar for PCR, the reaction that, on his account, catalyzed the emergence of this scientific industry.  Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s accounts stressed the centrality of paper and imprinting technologies to laboratory culture. [8]   It would be redundant to continue the list.  From the perspective of 2011–12, the themes of science studies can evidently be read as addressing the technology/discipline nexus. 

Still, this would be an active reinterpretation of that field—one that necessitated subordinating its own history somewhat to our current questions.  And while the insights and suggestions such studies generated can indeed be made useful to us, it takes work to make them so.  Nobody has yet shown how their rather scattered achievements can be focused together on the kind of questions that concern us today.  This is something we hope to achieve by recruiting a postdoctoral scholar specializing in the historical, literary, or sociological study of a scientific field. 

The situation is rather different in the humanities.  While projects designed to use new technologies (especially digital media) within humanities disciplines have proliferated, it remains harder to identify a sustained tradition of work that examines the coevolution of those technologies and the disciplines themselves.  Nevertheless, from the work of scholars like Walter Ong in the pre-digital age, a series of individuals have raised cognate questions. [9]   As new media become ever more embedded in the routine practices of humanists, so has curiosity increased about the past and present impacts of technologies of representation, storage, and communication.  For example, historians of the book like Ann Blair and Anthony Grafton have focused on the history of scholarly reading, writing, and picturing techniques, relating them to the advent of historical and literary disciplines. [10]   Their attention extends back as far as the origin of the book itself in Antiquity.  For a more recent period, John Guillory and Janice Radway have argued that the rise of English as a discipline must be accounted for partly in terms of the information technologies of high modernity (roughly 1890–1930), and Alan Liu suggests that its transformations in later generations took place in engagement with subsequent shifts in those technologies. [11]   Additionally, Jerome McGann has long been insisting that not only textual editing but also criticism must now operate in a “managed” digital world. [12]   We at Chicago mooted a similar set of questions as part of the “Arts of Transmission” project in 2004—a project that was one of the wellsprings of the current proposal, and in which Blair, Guillory, Radway, and Liu were involved. [13]   Meanwhile, Lisa Gitelman and Matthew Kirschenbaum have shown that the dependence of the humanistic disciplines on recording and archiving technologies is so complete that the histories of technology and humanistic practice ought to be seen as inseparable.  A recent report for the Council on Library and Information Resources on “Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections” argued for that point to be made the basis of real policy innovations, since the future intellectual credibility of humanists will depend on their being able to analyze digital artifacts with a degree of forensic nous equivalent to that which their Renaissance predecessors brought to manuscripts of uncertain provenance. [14]  

It is possible that the advent of giant online databases, with all their attendant issues of access, accuracy, and material culture, will trigger the kind of embedding of attention to technological mediation that writers like Kirschenbaum propose.  Compared to the sciences, however, progress in this vein is as yet still patchy.  Our empirical understanding of the issues involved in the humanistic disciplines is patchier still.  One issue here is that disciplines tend to be outward-looking and somewhat unreflexive: a major reason why analyses of scientific disciplines and technologies are so rich is precisely that there is a strong humanistic discipline, ‘science studies’, devoted to looking outward at scientific cultures.  There is not really a comparable ‘humanities studies’; nor is it evident what its foundations would be.  So in attempting to recruit a postdoctoral scholar to look at this aspect of academic culture, our aim is complementary to but distinct from that involved in recruiting a science studies scholar.  Humanists can be very good at articulating qualitative change, especially for the sciences; but they have not been quick to apply their insights recursively, or to acknowledge the broader or deeper epistemic implications for their own domain.  We do not yet properly understand how the history of the human sciences themselves, as knowledge systems, has intercalated with that of technological development.  We are therefore in the position of having some fairly elementary problems to address (such as why rates of change differ so markedly).  But experiences in science studies—coalescing now in the research to be done in parallel for this project—can inform our approaches to them.  They can suggest strategies and practices for proceeding.  We can know how to reveal the contests, struggles, and practical initiatives that shape scientific disciplinary transformations, and are consequently better equipped to understand them in humanistic ones, where they may be more visible but less appreciated.  And we now possess a number of evident ‘sites’ that could be selected to explore this: technologies prominent for their trans-disciplinary use, which can tell us much about the interaction of disciplines and technologies.  Examples may include Google Books and other massive datasets, cellphones, games and simulation devices (especially in social sciences), sound recording both digital and analog, and motion picture film—a medium that in fact has played significant roles in both the human and natural sciences.

Principles and Approaches

In effect, an assessment of current preoccupations—coupled with a reading of literature about knowledge enterprises since c.1980—provides the incentive to examine the technology/disciplines nexus and a cluster of principles and motifs that are likely to characterize a promising approach.  The need to displace facile reductionist assumptions is only the first of them:

• Irreduction.  The focus must be on how disciplines and technologies involve each other in their development, not on assertions about how technologies “transform” or “create” disciplines, or about how disciplines “suppress” or “exploit” technologies.  There may be cases when either extreme occurs, but the interesting examples are likely to be incompatible with any such account.
• Everyday practice rather than high principle.  It is almost axiomatic that the consequences of technological and disciplinary interactions will be most important at the level of practical techniques, rather than at that of secondary representations purporting to capture the nature of disciplines or technologies themselves.  This has been a leitmotif of science studies for a long time now, albeit in the slightly different form of a call to observe practice rather than theory.  Like the more recent work in that field, we will want to insist that theorizing is itself a practical activity. [15]
• The historicity of questions and practices.  How do new questions and techniques (not just new knowledge) emerge from the interaction of disciplinary practices and new technologies?  One potentially interesting observation is that new questions can take effect even in situations fairly far removed from the actual sites of intersection between disciplines and new technologies.  For example, Simon Schaffer’s recent reconstruction of the “information order” of Newton’s Principia deals with a period distant from any modern notion of information orders, and does not itself use information-technology tools to any significant extent—yet it draws on the novel perspectives facilitated by the juxtaposition of such tools to historical research to rethink the greatest classic in the history of science. [16]  
• Traditions.  In one view, disciplines are akin to traditions: they have that productive combination of lower-case conservatism and organic flexibility.  How do they persist through changing, or change (and even disintegrate) through persisting?  It would be easy to assume that technologies simply corrode traditions—technologies, after all, are usually represented as new, radical, and disrespecting of cultural constraints.  This is especially true of digital networks.  But a little reflection shows that technologies too have their traditional elements; the longevity of the QWERTY keyboard is a simple and notorious case in point, not least because it remains a central, everyday component of the very information technology that is supposedly so radically innovative.  A fruitful avenue of approach may therefore be to consider the disciplines/technologies nexus as a point where different kinds of tradition converge and interact.
• Recursion.  At moments of likely change, disciplines and technologies are often both socioculturally recursive, to use Chris Kelty’s term (derived, in his work, from computing). [17]   That is, cultures seem to be formed by nascent communities coalescing around consideration of their own founding principles.  It is possible that the formation of such a “recursive public,” to use Kelty’s phrase, may flag a process worth attending to in this project.
• Reading.  In another sense, disciplines are reading (or, more broadly, using) communities.  They uphold practices and standards for how best to make use of sources of all kinds.  How is this managed?  How do disciplinary communities perceive and maintain distinctions at the level of use practices, including reading strategies?  Again, it seems plausible that moments when these distinctions are cast into doubt are going to be associated with technological changes, and are going to invite attention. 

Our intent, then, is to deploy and refine these themes to arrive at a framework for a systematic examination of the technology/discipline nexus both in the history of disciplines and in their present state.

Organization

The University of Chicago is an ideal location from which to launch a project of this kind.  Since its foundation in the late nineteenth century, it has consistently regarded the critical examination of the foundations of intellectual and academic culture as one of its central purposes.  This regard has been honored by successive generations of scholars who have had an influence both within and across the disciplines.  They have repeatedly challenged conventional disciplinary identities to produce new ones.  In this generation, the Franke Institute for the Humanities has housed a succession of projects devoted to the disciplines, culminating in the ongoing Center for Disciplinary Innovation.  The Disciplines and Technologies project emerged partly from this tradition, and will be closely associated with it for its duration.  The research project will be shaped by three PIs.  These collaborators bring complementary skills and experiences to this project, and will be well equipped both to coordinate researches and provide mentoring to the scholars.

James Chandler is Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities.  At the Institute he has been instrumental in directing attention to the changing disciplinary structures of modern higher education, in a series of projects some of which have been supported by the Mellon Foundation.  His own trajectory from studies of Romanticism to accounts of cinema and the sentimental exemplifies some of the disciplinary questions surrounding a new media technology that inspire this project.  He has served on the steering committee of the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) for the last three years.  He is also a founding member of the group established by SCI to promote joint projects in digital humanities between the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) and CenterNet (the consortium for digital humanities centers).

James Evans is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science.  He is an expert in the sociology of biotechnology, and in the sociological, epistemological, and cultural uses of digital communications and computing systems.  He has published widely in Science, American Journal of Sociology, Social Studies of Science and other venues.  His interests center on how new practices of archiving, publishing, data analysis and experiment shape questions and answers in medicine, the sciences, and beyond.  

Adrian Johns is Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History, and Chair of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, which is Chicago's graduate science-studies program.  He has researched and published widely on the history of science communication and intellectual property.  His The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998) provided a detailed account of how the scientific revolution and the printing revolution were connected through the hard work of participants like Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.  More recently, he is the author of Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2009) and Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (2010).  He is currently embarking on a study of the history of scientific reading practices, and on an account of the industry that has emerged to defend intellectual property in the global economy.

Reporting

The University of Chicago will provide reports at the end of each of the two years detailing progress and contextualizing the impact of the scholars’ findings.  We expect to appraise the work of the scholars in terms of standard criteria for research and publication in their appropriate disciplines.  This will involve the production of high quality research, manuscripts for distribution and the creation of an online exhibit for online publication.

In addition, the scholars will be in regular contact with the D&T participants listed below.  We anticipate that they will participate in D&T meetings as regular members of the group.  Our intent is that they will be authors of their own empirical research—that is, the research itself will not be primarily a team effort—but the questions, approaches, purposes, and objectives will be refined in this collective setting.  The plan at present is to inaugurate the 2011–12 academic year for this group with presentations on the uses of computer gaming systems in political theorizing.  With budgets in place now to provide for regular meetings and invited speakers, the group should continue to meet in 2012–13 and beyond.

In the first report, which will be submitted by December 2013, we will discuss the process by which we selected and hired the two postdoctoral researchers, the impact of their investigations to date, and any D&T group additions or departures.  We will also present a more detailed plan for the coming year based on the researchers’ work to date and ongoing consultation with the D&T team. 

For our second and final report, to be submitted by December 2014, we will present the findings of postdoctoral researchers.  By the time of the grant’s conclusion, we anticipate that a conference, one or more journal articles, a website, or some other public presentation of their research will have already taken place, so we will report on the outcomes of those events in detail.  This second report will reflect upon the project—its successes as well as any unexpected challenges—with the goal of contextualizing the benefits of the research conducted within the broader academic community.  Additionally, we will share any future plans for publicizing and/or building upon the researchers’ work, and we will again provide an updated list of D&T group participants.

Summary

The nature of the interaction between technologies and disciplines is one of the most pressing, yet least understood, factors contributing to the present age of instability in our academic institutions.  We propose to initiate research into the technology-discipline nexus by recruiting two postdoctoral scholars to conduct pilot studies of empirical situations in which that nexus has been at issue.  Their work will be integrated into a larger project on Disciplines and Technologies that is already under way at Chicago, and the results of the collaboration will be presented at a conference after two years.  It will also be published, both as individual research papers (and perhaps books, as appropriate) as agenda-setting pieces and as online exhibits in a digital archive.  Support from the Foundation is sought for the salaries and benefits of the two postdoctoral scholars. 

Franke Institute Disciplines and Technologies Working Group

William Brown, Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, Departments of English Language and Literature and Visual Arts, Committee on the History of Culture, and the College; Fellow, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory

Margot Browning, Associate Director, Franke Institute for the Humanities; Executive Director, Big Problems Program; Lecturer, Humanities Collegiate Division

James Chandler, Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor, Departments of English Language and Literature and Cinema and Media Studies, and the College; Director, Franke Institute for the Humanities; Director, Center for Disciplinary Innovation

Arnold Davidson, Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor, Departments of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, Divinity School, Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College; Director, France Chicago Center

Lorraine Daston, Professor, John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College

Michael Dawson, John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Political Science and the College

James Evans, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College

Jo Guldi, Junior Fellow, Harvard University

Patrick Jagoda, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Instructor, Department of English Language and Literature and the College

Adrian Johns, Allan Grant Maclear Professor, Department of History, Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College; Chair, CCHSS

Leo Kadanoff, John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, Departments of Physics and Mathematics, James Franck Institute, Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College; Senior Fellow, Computation Institute

Karin Knorr-Cetina, George Wells Beadle Distinguished Service Professor, Departments of Sociology and Anthropology, and the College

Joseph Masco, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College; Director of Graduate Studies, Anthropology

W.J.T. Mitchell, Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor, Departments of English, Art History, and Visual Arts, and the College; Editor, Critical Inquiry

Robert Morrissey, Benjamin Franklin Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, and the College; Director, ARTFL Project; Executive Director, France Chicago Center

David Nirenberg, Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor, John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, Department of History, and the College

Jason Salavon, Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts, Computation Institute, and the College

David Schloen, Associate Professor, Oriental Institute, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Committee on Jewish Studies, and the College

Neil Shubin, Robert R. Bensley Professor and Dean, Organismal Biology and Anatomy; Professor, Committee on Evolutionary Biology; Provost, Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago)

Joel Snyder, Professor, Departments of Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, and Visual Arts; Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities; and the College; Chair, Art History

Jacqueline Stewart, Associate Professor of Radio/Television/Film and African American Studies, Northwestern University

Kotoka Suzuki, Assistant Professor of Composition, Department of Music and the College, University of Chicago, 2004–2011

Yuri Tsivian, Professor, Departments of Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the College

Alison Winter, Associate Professor, Department of History, Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College

Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor, Departments of Art History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College; Director, Center for the Art of East Asia; Consulting Curator, Smart Museum of Art

Lawrence Zbikowski, Associate Professor, Department of Music and the College

Please contact Mai Vukcevich for more information.