Why research is fun

Well, OK, it isn’t always. I don’t know what longueurs and anxieties go hand in hand with splitting the atom or curing cancer – or any of the equally worthy but less glamorous forms of science research. But anyone who does the library rather than the lab version of pushing back the frontiers of knowledge can tell you about the tedious days of reading pretty unappealing material (just try reading an ancient dictionary) looking for some particular gem that isn’t there. Even worse is the low level panic that the clever idea that set you on this particular month of reading is going to turn out to be a blind alley.

No academic autobiography that I know ever discusses this. In published recollection and authorised versions research tends to go right.

But actually, “going right” is itself a bit more complicated than it seems. Because the best days are not when you find what you’re looking for, but when you come across something completely unexpected.

In the Cambridge University Library there’s one predictable route to the unpredictable. It was the library’s nineteenth-century practice to bind up short books and pamphlets together, perhaps as many as ten or twenty in a single volume. So you order up the thing you’re wanting, and you get a load of what you weren’t expecting too.

The chances are that it’s one of the other things that takes your fancy.

At least that’s what happened to me the other day. I was on the hunt of a short book called The Comic History of Rome, and the Rumuns, published in about 1847. When I do my lectures on laughter in the autumn, I’m wanting to explore not just why the Romans laughed, but also at why we laugh at the Romans (the sort of thing I mean is on the left). So this was obvious material.

But when the book arrived, it came bound up with nine others, two of which were just as interesting. One was a book I’m sure I ought to have known already, but didn’t. It was called Facetiae Cantabrigienses, an 1820s collection of jokes and bons mots about Cambridge. What particularly caught my attention were not the anecdotes about Porson, but the spoof exam papers, which were obviously the ancestors of the famous one in 1066 and all that (“Do not write on both sides of the paper at once”).

The questions went like this.

“Are you anywhere informed by Herodotus, which were the thickest, the heads of the Egyptians or the Persians?”

“Oxford must, from all antiquity, have been either somewhere or nowhere. Where was it in the time of Tarquinius Priscus . . . ?”

“Mention any instances that occur to you of ancients visiting any part of the United States . . .”

“State logically how many tails a cat has.” (This one had a model answer too. “Cats have three tails – no cat has two tails – every cat has one tail more than no cat – ergo, every cat has three tails.”)

Ok – not side-splitting, I grant you. But it’s hard to get much of an idea about how the takers thought about exams (classical or not) in the early nineteenth century. This kind of stuff is one way into their “exam culture”.

The other was a satiric Lancashire dialect account of a visit to the Great Exhibition…O Full True un Pertikler Okeawnt o wat me un maw mistris un yerd wi’ gooin to th’Greyte Eggshibishun e’ Lundun. Satiric it may have been, but still a way of thinking differently about that extraordinary mid-Victorian spectacular

Now if you’ve clicked on the links, you’ll have seen another joke here. Both these rare books are available on Google books, which is why I’ve been able to share them with you. So I could have got them on my screen all along, without bothering to arm myself with a pencil (no pens in the Rare Books Room) and hoof off to the University Library.

But the fact is that I wouldn’t have know about this if I hadn’t ordered up the Comic History and flipped through the rest of the volume. That’s where the UL and its funny nineteenth-century habits  is always likely to score over Google books.

Comments

[Mary]

Thanks david derrick. I had read that bit of Diodorus, but your post made me go back to it.. and to see that it is much more interesting than I remember, m

[David Derrick]

Apropos Roman laughter, I assume you know a passage from Diodorus about an event at Asculum at the beginning of the Social War. The link below is to an entry in my blog which rounds up several of my posts about Roman theatres, including the Asculum one. Non-indented text is by Arnold Toynbee, or translated by him.

http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/2008/07/20/strange-events-in-ancient-theatres/

[jeff maughan]

"Are you anywhere informed by Herodotus, which were the thickest, the heads of the Egyptians or the Persians?”

Well yes, he says the heads of the Egyptians are thicker than the Persians because the Egyptians shave their heads and the Persians wear Turbans. The action of the sun makes the Egyptians heads strong.

This is written in Herodotus, I don't know why this is lumped in with those other unanswerable questions

Research is fun, research is drudgery but ultimately research is necessary in science and in the arts. Anyone who takes upon himself or herself the task of uncovering, describing, Interpreting and contextualising data that has previously been undiscovered, 'misinterpreted'' or ignored is adding another building block to the the great never-to-be-completed edifice of human knowledge and therefore has a heavy burden of responsibility to those who in the present and in the future may come to rely upon the results of his or her 'serindrudgerous' discoveries.

[Mary]

PL...I chose them for the looks!

And Gustav, I am a huge enthusiast for card indexes -- or even better old 'guard books' as well as (or instead of) the electronic versions - for exactly your reasons and because in most cases they are quicker the use.

[Xjy]

Further to my little rant...

Chomsky has a pretty good take on the basics of academic work, boiling down to what, how, and why. The first as accurate a description as possible of an object or phenomenon (say a plant), the second the mechanics of a system (say Linnaeus's classification and systematization of flora in general, subsuming the particular earlier descriptions, and the third, the historical and developmental contextualization of various systems in relation to their place in the scheme of things (say Darwin's theory of evolution).

So the third and highest level explains why things are the way they are and change the way they do, the second middle level presents how things work by themselves and together, and the first and lowest level describes things as they look outside and (hopefully) inside.

All these work together, and each level needs the underlying one to make sense. Otherwise the explanatory level will be pure superstition and metaphysical speculation - like Newton's ideas on the why of things, or Swedenborg's, or Linnaeus's (written of course like Newton's work in Latin and great fun, too, with its emphasis on the war of each against all, and God creating a world of constant youth and vigorous beauty cos the old and weak die up and are gobbled up by Nature's cleaners, the scavengers).

So, to take archaeology as an example, research could involve describing finds as accurately as possible at a particular site, or classifying similar kinds of find at a variety of sites, or explaining the relationships between finds in a classifying system in terms of developing technologies, why these developed and their more general purpose in human (or other) ecology.

As I said, examining a given material and discovering something new.

I forgot to add that if I remember correctly the only formal requirement for a Cambridge dissertation is (or was) that it should be clearly written (presumably so the examiners could have a shot at pretending to understand what it's all about).

I also forgot to mention that the Germans, as always, have a term to differentiate between scientific science and "mind science" (like maths, as AA mentions). The knowledge or science involved is a "Wissenschaft" (knowship) and science science is a "Naturwissenschaft" (nature knowship) and mind science is a "Geisteswissenschaft" (mind knowship).

It's all in the method. Logic, clarity (Occam's razor), relevance, insight into relationships of a systematic and recurrent kind (gesetzmässig), all applied to the given material, as predetermined by some mandarin, or as determined in the course of the investigation by the researcher. (Rule no 3, don't let your enemies decide how you present your own case.)

[Written in wind and running water way past bedtime...]

[Gustav]

Great story about the element of serendipity in research.

A similar thing is with old-style library catalogues on cards; as you flip through them, you often come upon things you would miss when searching an electronic catalogue.

Also, the books as physical objects bound together quasi-randomly vs. clinical links to a single book on Google is a great point. Happens sometimes in used book stores; wandering about among the shelves/stacks, you find something you didn't know about and buy it (or order it at the University library).

[Tony Francis]

Concerning AA's comment: When I was in grad school, there was a joke floating around: "If it has any possible application to reality, it can't be real math." Of course the American chemistry grad students were saying this of people in the Math Department. There was another one:
Engineering Major lim GPA -> 0 = Business Major
Concerning ancient humor: Good fields to research would be the changing meanings of the Latin words "satura" and "ironia". Of course, large parts of Greek philosophy are based on irony. Once a person becomes wise, they realize they know nothing. Once Socrates became a threat to no one, he was given the choice to renounce himself or commit suicide, etc. A situation was both tragic and humorous at the same time. By the middle ages, irony had changed. Aquinas refers to it a falsely belittling oneself. It was a vice, although not as great a sin as falsely boasting. The philosopher is Aristotle:
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3113.htm
Elsewhere, Aquinas claims that things said in "ironia" (joking fashion) are not sins of themselves, but rather part of good company. The height of medieval writing was the double or triple entendre, which was both tragic and amusing. Shakespeare had his puns. All this changes. My mother commented before she died, "I used to think Bob Hope was funny. Now I can't see what we were laughing at." One wonders if the jokes of the ancient intellectuals were the same as those of the field hands. Probably not.

[Morgan]

At my university we have not had the main stacks conveniently available for quite a while, and while it's very easy to order the books I know I want from the library, it's obviously much harder to find the books I don't know I want. This is definitely something to consider in terms of changing research methods and the dissemination of academic work in new formats.

And on that note, as I was reading this morning and thinking about your being the Sather professor in Berkeley next year, I wondered if you had considered turning the lectures into podcasts or something similar? I know that the topic is fascinating, and that the Sather lectures are published, but thought I would put the thought out there.

[Richard Baron]

Here is an account of the UL Paperchase mentioned in my recent comment (I got the volume of Mathesis wrong).

http://home.comcast.net/~david.elworthy/paperchase.htm

My apologies for not finding this before commenting. It must be the Internet which encourages us to post incomplete research and then add to it! There is scope for a new version of Phaedrus 274-275, on the disadvantages of the digitised written word.

[Richard Baron]

The Cambridge University Library, being largely open-shelf, was able to host one of the greatest ever tools of serendipitous "research". This was the Paperchase. You started with a specified volume of the journal Mathesis (I forget which, but a fading neuronal connection says volume 10). A slip of paper therein directed you to another book, most likely at the other end of the building, and so on until it was time for tea.

[Richard]

Some aspects of classical scholarship (and of other humanistic scholarship) can be called research even according to a very narrow definition drawn from the natural sciences. But all the same Michael Bulley is right that lots of what classicists do is not really the same kind of thing (although to me the usual sense of the word "research" seems broad enough to cover both).

Good words for lots of humanistic research might include "description" and "translation". I think that the Prof. herself along with Michael Crawford described their book about the Roman Republic as a kind of "thick description". And "translation" helps to think about the kind of double "truth to x" procedure that is involved in talking about the past: "true to them/ then" in the sense that scholars must try not to misdescribe what they are studying, just as a translation should aim to be be true to the text it represents, but also "true to us/ now" because in the end it is not the ancients that classicists are talking to, but rather their contemporaries. Likewise, translation must be true to the language into which it translates (and the audience for which it translates). So when somebody suggests that people are helping the texts to speak in their own voice or something like that, by this way of thinking one could reply "but they are speaking in their own voice anyway! What we need is to make them speak in *our* voice, so that we can understand them..."

This helps to show why it is that a book about an author or other cultural phenomenon written a hundred years ago will usually seem somehow inadequate now, even if many of its findings have become totally accepted: not because Wilamowitz and co. were stupider than their modern counterparts (rather the contrary!), but because they are speaking of the past to their own times, not to ours.

Ergo, we will always need more classicists, even when the last manuscript has been collated, the last papyrus fully published, the last correction of a corrupt text completed. Phew!

All best,
Richard

[AA]

Many thanks to Mary for this engaging account. As to the nature of research, it is a fact ignored by humanists and scientists alike that work in pure mathematics exhibits all the same features that Mary attributes to research in the arts and humanities: the frustration of winding down the wrong path, the months of work expended on the wrong idea, the serendipity of coming across just the right concept of tool, all the way down to the total disregard for the applicability of whatever one is working on (the fact that much of the work does in the end turn out to be applicable often plays very little role within the context of discovery). A little perusal of Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy's "A mathematician's apology"shows what it's like to do this kind of work.

[Tony Francis]

Some appear to consider empiricism the only legitimate research. Research defined: "Go to the lab. Do A, B, C, and D under conditions defined by E and get results F. Do B, A, C then D and get results G. This should be reproducible everywhere in the world." This is empiricism.
Examining existing literature is a legitimate form of research. The name of my company is Legal Medicine Reseacrh. I am not in the lab researching anything. The medical and surgical literature is huge, and filled with inconsistencies and conflicts. This is of value when cross-examining opposing experts. Sometimes medical practice is more superstitious than rational. When I was in my residency, it was considered substandard care to give antihistamines to asthma patients. Now it isn't. Aspirin is a perfectly good drug for children, but because of a few reports of Reyes Syndrome, it isn't used anymore.
When astrophysicists say Big Bang occurred because two 11-dimensional membranes collided in a 23 dimensional space, they aren't engaging in empiricism. They are trying to be theologians practicing metaphysics. The same is true when we define public and tax policy based on computer models of global warming.
I was given the impression that eveyone believed the world was flat until Columbus sailed in 1492. But the first page of Aquinas' Summa Theologia tells us the world is round. That was written in 1260.
I wonder what in Judith specifically leads to Jansenism.
Re OPN: It is not necessary to make a comic Bracton. The sad joke was on the generations which followed, and ignored Bracton's recommendation for easy liberality and genteel interpretation of the law (virtues found in the best US federal judges). Unfortunately, the English Common Law became harsh and rigid. Too bad for those who lived in those years.

[PL]

I'm tantalized by the leather-bound volumes displayed at the head of this post. Their titles are not quite legible. Did you care what they were, or did you choose the picture just for its looks? If the latter might there be serendipity in them?

[Nicholas]

Research may be deliberate and purposeful but it can also be a way of life. In another blog on plagiarism, I wrote about all my ideas coming from somewhere else. Specifically I wrote about discovering incipient Jansenism in the apocryphal Judith and wondering if such a passage (IX 5/6) might justify its exclusion from the Vulgate. I have subsequently traced that thought thusly: my awareness of Jansenism was awakened by the biographical introduction to the complete works of Racine. I cannot attribute this because those volumes are still in unpacked boxes. Next there is tangential stuff on Jansenism is Saint Simon. Gibbon provides a healthy introduction to early mediaeval heresies the temporal Church was passionately swatting.

Due to family circumstances too delicate to disclose, I am, if at all, self-educated and have been obliged to follow a self-set path. I read Livy and then probably all the classical historians before leaping to Gibbon, then I found an edition of Talleyrand, then lectures by Neibhur, and Mommsen. All these books are about the same people and the same events and draw, largely, on the same materiel. By this time, I had come upon R G Collingwood and began to be meaningfully aware of something like the history of History.

Perhaps my most significant later discovery was Peter Green’s Alexander to Actium. I adore Peter Green. Had I had an education, I would wish it might have been with him. In the lists of his publications there is a lacuna where his biography of Sulla should be. This is tantalising to me because it was the first of his works I ever read. I still have it as an ancient Penguin in one of the boxes. However, I embarked on this immense work and, at every point where he made respectful reference to a source, I paused and obtained the volume(s) from Amazon or Abebooks. This led me through Syme, Groeb and countless others. It took me three years to reach the final page.

Apropos the bound volumes with serendipitous addenda, I used to record late night films and because the tape would rewind if one let the recording run beyond its end, I let it, and later found several cherished titbits, A Taste of Honey was one. Dora Bryan. What a lady. I knew her. She lived in Brighton. She was just like herself. Her genius lay in a very real undercurrent of vulnerability.

Research? How can one avoid it?

[Ray Hobbs]

I hope you have all read Terry Jones' book " Chaucer's Knight." This is, in my view, literary research at its finest. He reads a passage of Chaucer... he thinks about it... a bit of serendipity pops along...and suddenly the entire "chaucer brigade" have their view of the Knight turned on its head. How satisfying. But, admittedly, it hasn't cured any diseases or enabled us to reach any stars.

[anthony alcock]

Funny you should mention academic autobiography. I'm just re-reading Barry Kemp's book "Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization", in the first few pages of which he indulges himself by giving us a glimpse of what goes on in his head when looking at the ancient world: " I also know that the more I try to make sense of the facts, the more what I write is speculative and begins to merge with the world of historical fiction, a modern form of myth." The book is not a work of academic autobiography, but the introduction contains a few passages that are pretty readable.

[Xjy]

Examination of given materials to discover something new. What else do you bloody want to define "research"? A po-face and a stiff upper lip and a lobotomized imagination and sense of humour? Or the say-so and approval of the prof?

Well, now Mary's the prof so she can say and do what the hell she likes, and good luck to her!

I'm not, so you can ignore me completely ;-)

[PL]

Michael Bulley: I'd go even further and say all intellectual disciplines since the early 19th century have been distorted by imitating the methods that are effective in the sciences.

[Thomas, London]

When starting out in my career as an archaeologist, I started a research paper thus: "Serendipity often plays a role in research. By sheer chance some piece of evidence turns up that fills a lacuna in current understanding."

Perhaps not my finest opening two sentences, but I was accused of not taking the research process "seriously enough". When I asked my senior colleague whether he believed what I said to be true or downright nonsense, he said it might very well be true but that that was not the sort of statement to be making in a "serious academic publication".

[Michael Bulley]

I have my doubts about research in some areas of the arts. I have, stacked against my boiler, dozens of very old copies of the Journal of Hellenic Studies, that I became the owner of when a municipal library threw them out. Now and again, I dip into them and there are some fascinating articles, but it's hard to see those articles as part of a development of knowledge in the way you would expect with scientific research. I think it's appropriate to pay people to be academic experts in universities on Latin and Ancient Greek literature, but I'm not so certain that "research" is the right word to describe what they should be doing.

[Tony Francis]

Egyptian mummies have been found with traces of cocaine and nicotine which has led to speculation that there was trade between North Africa and South America. It remains an unanswered question. I think it is likely that people in boats travelled between Europe/Africa and the Americas for centuries before Columbus. I really don't have any reason to believe this, other than it seems likely. American Native Tribes were always thought to have been the lost tribes of Israel. But there is little fact to support this. Also, there is little similarity between ancient South American cultures and Egypt.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/israel/losttribes2.html
http://www.native-languages.org/iaq9.htm

[Nelson Heresiarch]

“Mention any instances that occur to you of ancients visiting any part of the United States . . .”

I wonder if this was a random fantasy on the part of the author, or a reference to something. You say 1820s. This was before Joseph Smith came up with the Book of Mormon, which was mainly about ancients visiting the USA, but the ideas themselves were older. I think one of the earliest speculations along those lines was Thomas Thorowgood's "Jews in America, or Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race" which came out in 1650.

Of course, there are people still around today convinced that the ancient Egyptians crossed the Atlantic and turned into the Mayas (wasn't Thor Heyerdahl of that opinion at one point?) but more pertinent, surely, is the sheer number of American towns with classical sounding names. There's even a city in Illinois called Cicero. I can't remember if he refers to it in any of his extant writings, but he must have made quite an impact.

[Brian Ogilvie]

N.B. The Google Print version of the Facetiae Cantab. is missing pages 8-9, one of an all too common set of problems with Google's book digitization project.