Mesa M
Lawwrence J. McCrank
M. Interdisciplinarity under debate
It is difficult to conceptualize, package, and present an
interdisciplinary program in academic curricula and universities because
of the traditional classification of the disciplines. Yet, History is
itself interdisciplinary, so much so that it has defied a strict
classification as a Social Science or a Humanity in the organization of
knowledge in libraries and in university academics. And within History,
regardless of its assigned home, lies a full array of methodological
specializations and theoretical positions within the spectra of
quantified-qualified research, nicro- and macro-focii from local history
to global/world history, textual-aural-visual, documetary or archival and
records-based research and literary text and artistic/cultural object
oriented studies, and philosophical positions of every kind, which makes
History known to everyone and identifiable as a coherent discipline to
none.
In the specialization of classification within Library Science,
in the major systems such as BLISS, DDC/Sears descriptors and their
international counterparts, and LCCS/LSCH History has been treated both
as (1) a class onto itself (in DDC as a synthetic world overview and
summary at the end of the decimal classification scheme; and in LCCS as
an engulfing Social Science which acts as a theoretical rather than
applied field of study; and (2) as a subset of all other disciplines, for
background in each. It is therefore, both fragmented and unifying
simultaneously. The judgement call for proper placement in either scheme
is complex and sometimes tedious, which often defies pure rationality.
The reason often given for this predicament is that History
is interdisciplinary, which is to beg the question of History as a
discipline itself, and critics also question whether it has discipline
within the discipline because historians themselves have difficulty in
defining the field, its methodology, basic assumptions, mission and
goals, and membership. Any attack upon interdisciplinarity seems like an
assault on History. One counter-ploy is to attempt multi-disciplinarity,
or to develop History expertise with an equal mastery in a cognate field.
A third alternative has emerged in the last decade, namely the
unidiscipline, which attempts to highlight the synthetic, symbiotic, and
global nature of History. Moreover, recent trends in some of the
sciences, as in Information Science, have justified the formation of new
hybrid disciplines, not as specializations or intra-disciplines, and
something more unique than inter-disciplinarity, but still less
comprehensive than unidisciplinarity, when in 3-dimensional thinking more
than two fields are interfaced by scholarship existing at the interstices
of multiple disciplines. Information Science itself has been described as
an intersticial science.
Does such an approach to the classification, description,
and positioning of History have any appeal to historians? As scholarship
in the next millenium becomes ever more complex, intensive, and
interactive, does it make sense in a multi-dimensional framework to see
History as intersticial? And if so, how might historians who ascribe to
such a view begin to redescribe History, redefine its scope and
parameters, purpose, and character? Or does such an approach introduce
even more ambiguity to the classification and description problem History
has always faced as a metaform rather than a concrete, easily
identifiable discipline?