Solving problems, telling stories

In light of a session on interdisciplinarity in research I attended yesterday, I've been thinking about the nature of my work and the approaches I have been taking towards it. Where, as in my own research, the history of the book and modern digital concerns and developments are discussed in the same breath, one takes an interdisciplinary approach for granted. However, when terms such as 'transdisciplinary' and 'cross-discilplinary' are introduced the pictured becomes muddled.

In her article Cultural Philanthropy, Gypsies, and Interdisciplinary Scholars: Dream of a Common Language (PDF), Regenia Gagnier explicates what it means for an institution to foster research working among several disciplines. Taking as an example the case of the nineteenth century cultural philanthropist Charles Godfrey Leland, Gagnier writes:

One uses other disciplines insofar as one needs them to solve the problem or tell the story that must be solved or told. Research that tries to do it all is hubristic at best and shallow or wrong at worst. But work that comes out of dialogue with specialists from a range of disciplines, and that comes out of a shared commitment across the disciplines to understand real problems like that of philanthropy in liberal societies, gender inequality, race or religious hatreds, or beauty in the built environment is the ideal form of scholarly engagement with the world.

It was suggested at yesterday's session that interdisciplinarity is a given in all works of scholarship produced at modern English Departments - how can a work not be interdisciplinary? Gagnier's argument complicates this picture because it distinguishes between the scholar who cherry-picks from another discipline and the scholar who thinks the way a scholar from another discipline does. She rightly states that "disciplines are more than ideas: they are institutionally embedded practices" (18), but whilst she doesn't overlook the problems inter/trans/cross-disciplinary work raises in terms of differences of style, presentation, civility, discussion and so on, Gagnier does recognise the inherent value in bringing together academics from across disciplines to solve a common problem or tell a common story.

In light of this, my concern is that my current ideas were born out of interest as opposed to inquiry. What I mean by this is that I didn't start out with a problem to solve or a story to tell but a simple yearning to combine two areas of profound interest to me: early modern English literature and modern computing.

I work on instinct, and I believe that when connections are effortlessly inferred from the material under examination, then it follows that a story is already in the process of being told. Of course we are getting ahead of ourselves if we explain what it is we seek to prove before it is proven, but the necessity of asking questions before and during the process of inferring connections is undeniable. And so when I brazenly declare that my research is interdisciplinary in nature, the question naturally follows: what problem am I trying to solve, or what story am I trying to tell? Ultimately, this question must be answered with the further questions forming the very basis of my thesis, questions I now seek to ask as I address the fundamental issues which challenge any pursuit of interdisciplinary work.

There'll be more to follow on this as I work through these ideas, and I hope that in the coming weeks and months I can ask the right questions as I endeavour to solve the problem or tell the story of the relationship between seventeenth century English literary culture and modern concerns and developments in electronic media.