I just saw this amazing presentation in TED Talks about an application called photosynth. It allows photos taken by anyone and uploaded to the web to be synthesized together. Together, these can give us a multidimensional view of a building or an event using images collected by people who may not even know each other. The ability to assemble random photographs to construct the big picture had me totally stunned.

I have been wondering now and then what the explosion of digital information will mean for a historian in the near future. Without doubt historians in the future will have a lot more materials to work with. But I imagined that, thanks to information overload, history in the future will not be radically different from how it is done today. Today, I feel that I have grossly underestimated the potential such technologies have for historians in the future.

One radical way of producing a work of history in the future would be to do it interactively – where the historian would be a technologist who can synthesize digital information that will be widely available. More than anything else, this would enable us to see history from so many angles in ways that were not possible before. Even when information is available, putting them together is not a simple business; but the evolution of technologies that can even identify similar pictures and put them together gives me the feeling that we should be able to develop very complex ways of sharing and synthesizing information in the future. With these, writing history in the future is bound to be an exciting new enterprise.

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During my recent field work in India, I was impressed by the depth of social understanding by common people I met in the villages. Often, their views on the society were more sophisticated than many works I read in the academia. This has made me question not just what we learn in the social science disciplines, but also how we learn. I feel that the process of disengaged reading comfortably away from the hustle-bustle of the society compromises our learning. I have been thinking about how we can “teach” social sciences better and this talk by John Seely Brown was stimulating.

Brown talks about the use methods of learning that involve less of instruction and more of tinkering around with critical inputs from instructors and peers. He points out to a range of exciting education technologies & practices that will help students not just to know [the social sciences] but also to be [social scientists]. This hour long exciting presentation entitled, “Teaching 2.0 – Doing more with less by John Seely Brown” is well worth a watch.

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Recently I spent 13 months doing field work near Pondicherry in India. Apart from meeting a lot of people on a daily basis, I continued to read and listen to podcasts of programmes in universities in the West. In this period, I was constantly amazed at the sophisticated social thinking of large numbers of people I met in villages. When I got back home into the world of books and academic podcasts, I found that the debates I encountered there were often less impressive in terms of their sophistication – and sometimes outright childish. The lingo of the speakers and the discussants made me feel that lack of sophistication was mainly due to their sophisticated academic training in disciplinary programmes.

One of the functions of disciplinary teaching is to restrict thinking. The school kid who would have thought about human behaviour in a much wider framework is brainwashed into thinking of it in much narrower terms. Most economic thinking, for example, is about atomised selfish individuals facing scarcity of resources and trying to make the best of the situation. If this were considered just an aspect of human behaviour, it’s fine. But when we make it the exclusive basis of understanding, it is liable to make our understanding of the world highly distorted. What is particularly unfortunate in the social sciences is that we have developed rituals (called “research methods”) that substantiate these narrow understandings and exalt childish ideas into unassailable truths.

Some of this could have been avoided if the academic community were not divided. It’s incredible to see one building that houses social science departments in Universities where students and teachers divided by disciplines without meaningful interactions with each other. This practice enables insular intellectual growth wherein a scholar knows a priori that only a certain aspect of his or her work will be challenged. This is what is refreshingly different in the social world. Local politicians and other scholars I met during field work had engaging discussions. In these it was impossible to hide behind narrow ideologies and sweeping assumptions. Tamil Nadu also has a great culture of political discussions and social thinking that seems to permeate the landscape. Thanks to this, many of my bus rides ended up in stimulating conversations with completely random individuals.
University life cuts off from social life elsewhere and disciplines insulate us from the need to think of the world in sophisticated terms. We have created a world of books, journals and conferences that restricts our community, and reduces the intellectual challenges we face. The demanding disciplinary rituals take most of our energies and discourage us from thinking beyond restricted norms. The world is complex and simplistic theories will not enable us to understand it. Unfortunately as we go up the disciplinary ladder, we grow in comfort of our narrow worlds and narrow understandings with the paradoxical result that better training makes us less able to understand the social world.

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