United colours of separation

Taxonomy – the science of classification – never lets anything escape its power and influence. More so today than earlier because almost every subject of study has grown horizontally and vertically over the last few decades such that there is no agreement on what a subject studies. Thus, there is no Physics but high energy physics, particle physics, solid state physics, theoretical physics, experimental physics, cryogenics, Thermal science and so on. Individuals working in these fields know, if at all, a smatter of what is being done in the other fields. This is true of every discipline, be it Economics, Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, History, to name a few. And it is not just that they are focused only on their narrowly defined area of study but that even these narrowly defined fields of study are deeply divided, with some debates turning and staying acrimonious.

Delivering the Max Weber Lecture Series on October 17, 2012, Jul de Vries, Professor of History and Economics, University of Californaia at Berkeley, he talks of the New Historical research ‘movement that began in the 1970s within which there were many ‘groups’ such as the French Annales School, the New Economic History, the British Marxist Social History, Historical Sociology in several forms and some contemporary schools. What is instructive is what he immediately goes on to say – “Needless to say, they disagreed with each other on nearly everything”. The ‘needless to say’ says everything. Each ‘school’ has produced a humongous amount of research such that even a specialist will need several lifetimes to finish reading all of them.

I have just mentioned History as an example. Anyone reading Professor Carlos Rovelli’s book ‘Reality is not what it seems’ will see how there are sharp differences within the subject of Physics. Or consider Mathematics. To those from the outside, Mathematics cannot but be a single cohesive subject but it is not, with extensive research in each field and sub-field such that Mathematicians don’t have time (or the energy) to look at anything else. Or Economics for that matter.

This gets further strengthened within the institutional framework that regulates and governs the study of and research into a subject. Strictly, there is no subject as such – there are only subjects as defined and taught by educational institutions. Students of different universities study the ‘same subjects’ with variations because that is how they are taught in the way education is organized. Evaluate the syllabi in any specific subject, say Computing, as offered by many Universities and notice the differences and shifts of emphasis. In fact, the reception to a research study often depends on which Department it is domiciled under, as educational budgets are invariably allocated department-wise. Academic careers are built on focus and not sweep and that, in itself, governs much of the way in which information circulates; publishing is critical to academic careers. No one does a PhD in foreign trade; they study the foreign trade of a country or in certain goods or services for a specified period, often not exceeding even 10 years. This is true of PhD in any subject.

It is not uncommon for researchers to tweak their research project so as to fall under a department which has sufficient budgetary allocation. And this is reflected in the various Journals that publish research. There are very few, if any, that are truly broad-based. Most navigate a highly specific area such that anyone not in that line of research work is unlikely to have even heard of these journals. You can check it out by searching for journals in any randomly chosen subject of study. Even in the case of journals which are genuinely broad-based, readership is specific to specific articles/essays and not across the entire journal.

This is how information (or research) is organized. Now you might ‘see’ information overload in a different way. Focused researchers first learn where and how to look for what they are seeking. Even open access journals are well categorized facilitating researchers to locate what they are looking for. And like the search algorithm itself, even individuals learn to search better, by paying attention to the ‘tag words’, which you can see at the end of any article or actually any piece of writing that you read on the internet. This is the technology world’s way of the classification system that libraries use, with a significant difference – in the internet world search can improve with use for everyone.

Let me leave you with a puzzling thought. Or perhaps it is not a puzzle, if we accept that, for all the information and the pace at which it grows and spreads, there is no one connected world except as a figment of imagination. There are researchers in robotics who have been working on developing all-terrain (wheeled) robots have been studying snakes to draw inspiration. And there are individuals who have been studying nothing but reptiles but are completely unaware of such research!

Takeaways

Information explosion is too general to be of any use
Interested individuals seek only what they want, which is always classified on some basis
Most interested people do not look for information outside their narrowly-defined area