Communicating Across the Academic Divide
Myra H. Strober writes:
However, while doing research for my new book, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought, I found an even more fundamental barrier to interdisciplinary work: Talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture. Differences in language are the least of the problems; translations may be tedious and not entirely accurate, but they are relatively easy to accomplish. What is much more difficult is coming to understand and accept the way colleagues from different disciplines think—their assumptions and their methods of discerning, evaluating, and reporting “truth”—their disciplinary cultures and habits of mind.
I rather like the line: Talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture.
That is the problem in a nutshell isn’t it?
What most solution proposers fail to recognize is that solutions to the problem are cultural artifacts themselves.
There is no place to stand outside of culture.
So we are always trying to talk to people from other cultures. Constantly.
Even as we try to solve the problem of talking to people from other cultures.
Realizing that does not make talking across cultures any easier.
It may help us realize that the equivalent of talking louder, isn’t likely to assist in the talking across cultural divides.
One of the reasons why I like topic maps is that it is possible, although not easy, to capture subject identifications from different cultures.
How well a topic map does that depends on the skill of its author and those contributing information to the map.