Presentation given at The Ends of the Humanities (10-13 September 2017, Belval, Luxembourg) Abstract: http://www.maxkemman.nl/2017/09/abstract-interdisciplinary-ignorance/

1. Interdisciplinary
Ignorance
@MaxKemman
www.maxkemman.nl
University of Luxembourg
The Ends of the Humanities, 11-13 September 2017, Belval, Luxembourg

2. Digital History
Methodological interdisciplinarity
Improving research by incorporating methods,
concepts, or tools from another discipline (Klein
2014)
Characterized by interdisciplinary collaboration
(Fickers 2012)

3. Trading Zones
“[A]n arena in which radically different activities
could be locally, but not globally, coordinated“
(Galison 1996)
Dimensions (Collins et al 2007)
• Contact & Participation
• Cultural Maintenance
• Coercion

4. DH Trading Zones
Homogeneous Heterogeneous
Collaborative Inter-language
A new discipline?
(McCarty)
Fractioned
A dual citizenship for
practitioners & research objects?
(Svensson, Klein, Hunter, Rieder
& Röhle)
Coercive Subversive
Historians assuming the
practices of computer
science, but not the
expertise (or vice versa)?
(Mounier)
Enforced
A power struggle of who decides
what the digital technology will
do?

5. Knowledge asymmetry
Information asymmetry – not knowing what the
other does
Knowledge asymmetry – not knowing how the
other does something
“This creates an asymmetry in which the
professional agent is in a more powerful position
than the less knowledgeable principal”
(Sharma 1997)

6. Question
What is the effect of
knowledge asymmetry on a
supposedly heterogeneous-
collaborative trading zone?

7. Method
Interviews
2 case studies (10 participants)
3 more projects for comparison (6 participants)
In the following: each slide is a different project

8. Observations
• Historian broker:
• ”So what you get is that those [humanities] people say
’yes hello I want to be served’, and [the computer
scientists] say ’yes no that server is for multiple
experiments, you are one of the experiments, [end of
discussion].’ ”
• Historian PI:
• “[During writing] you are highly dependent on what the
computer scientists as experts, which they are, say and
think should be in the project proposal”
• ”But in hindsight I think they should have said more
about matters such as the really practical things such as
computation capacity, server space, the stability of
software, how that is managed, you need money for that
too. We didn’t [allocate] budget for that in the project, as
idiotic as that seems now.”

9. Observations
• Historian MA broker:
• “I think that every humanities scholar will know how
humanities scholars want to search books or
something, and apparently IT people don’t know
that.”
• “[We didn’t expect them] to tell us what we need,
but that if we would ask we want this extra
application, we thought that they would have the
experience and that they would know what we
meant. We never actually considered that it could
be interpreted differently, because we were gullible
perhaps.”

10. Observations
• Historian test-user:
• “[W]e're supposed to be advising the team
developing the tool. And trying to then carry out
research on a specific case study. And so originally
it was like wow we're going to be able to use the
tool, but very quickly it became clear ok actually
probably we're not going to be able to use the tool,
so we're now being asked to do research using a
tool developed by other people, which we don't,
which we know even less about. Not that I would
say that I know particularly much about the tool that
we're developing, but also we haven't yet seen any
funding to continue it. So that the whole tool that we
developed is kind of like a nonstarter.”

11. Observations
• Software engineer:
• “[The PhD candidate] lives in the world of this, all I see is
truth that appears on screen […] that is a caricature,
[they] know that I create links in a way and that they are
not always correct, but to add corrections or to play with
that, that is the challenge, or that is the research.”
• History PhD candidate:
• “The basic subdisciplines of computer science are still
not entirely clear to me. I would say the programming
work, to put it bluntly, is more the facilitating work […] all
that happens ultimately has the goal that I can do my
research better.”
• “To put it bluntly, it is not always entirely clear to me
what [the computational linguist] does […], [they] have a
lot of good input, but often I wonder how that would work
out concretely, which is in fact the next step.”

12. Discussion
• We see knowledge asymmetry in both
directions
• Historians not aware of how computer scientists set
up their work
• Computer scientists not aware of how historians
want to use a tool under development
• For both directions, it appears the historians
end up with undesirable results
• There is a power asymmetry with respect to
the technological aspects of the project

13. Conclusions
• Interdisciplinary ignorance: the ignorance of
how collaborators from other disciplines do
their work
• Collaboration does not imply information
symmetry
• But knowledge asymmetry leads to power
asymmetry
• If a trading zone includes power asymmetry,
can we still speak of a heterogeneous-
collaborative TZ, or does it become coerced?

14. Conclusions
• Possible outcomes:
• Homogeneous-coercive: subversive
• Heterogeneous-coercive: enforced
• The knowledge asymmetry becomes a
problem when parties no longer get desirable
results
• Sharma points to joint development
• Participatory design
• Homogeneous-collaborative?

15. Conclusions
To what extent do the different
disciplines need to learn another’s
practices?

16. Thank you for
listening
www.maxkemman.nl
@MaxKemman
max.kemman@uni.lu