Sure it CAN be original, but I can’t imagine why having “too much information” would be a problem if a particular project had a practical goal aside “being original”. The problem is, so many academics refuse to drop the “pure research” goal which has no real criteria aside originality to qualify it.

Get involved in a project people are truely connected to, and all of a sudden all that material to read is a great thing. Maybe some academics could stop forcing their students to do projects alone, – as a group we can consume ALL that information.

Issues:
1. Emphasis on single researcher.
2. Emphasis on “new ideas” as opposed to “practical ones”.
3. Refusal to care if people read what they write. It’s becoming acceptable practice to say “no one will read it anyways”. If this is true, don’t !@#!@# write it.

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I believe they call that “choking it to death”.

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That sounds good as a starting point. But couldn’t we get a bit more specific?

For example, for disciplinary reasons we assign readings and expect students to write papers citing work done by anthropologists. Suppose, instead, that, both in our own work and what we expect from our students, we insisted that all research begin with a topic-focused search using Google or some other search engine. A classic topic like “marriage” will yield a huge trove of material from all sorts of sources and immediately pose that challenge of how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Repeatedly working through this kind of problem may cultivate critical thinking and study habits more effectively than reading and regurgitating only what the instructor assigns. It will also challenge the instructor who is an anthropologist to think harder about the relevance of the anthropological sources with which he or she is familiar.

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I agree that the decline of disciplinary filters is a big part of the problem. At the same time, I read a study some where (can’t remember where) about how major innovations have often come from people who sat on the borders between disciplines. Anthropology has always drawn from other fields: linguistics, psychology, etc.

So perhaps a better way of framing the problem is not in terms of technology, although the technology makes the problem more apparent, but in terms of how to balance developing core expertise with wide-ranging foraging. It is a balance I’ve never been very good at maintaining!

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This isn’t, I’d suggest, a simple function of anthropology’s holistic hubris. It is, instead, a predictable outcome of what Andrew Abbott calls _Chaos of Disciplines_ (a process that resembles in some respects the one Clifford Geertz described in _Agricultural Involution_). In all sorts of disciplines, specialization is driven by scholars’ need to distinguish themselves, the easiest way being that old human standby “Not like them!” What the _Chaos of Disciplines_ model adds is the notion that much, if not all, of this specialization involves the recursive use of familiar oppositions, e.g., quant/qual, explanatory/interpretive, that sort of thing.

Be that as it may, a fruitful approach might be to reconsider the nature of the those old disciplinary filters. In an era in which a topic or problem driven Google search is likely to turn relevant information from all sorts of disciplines, the old academic boundary feuds make less and less sense. The question is how to replace them.

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What I think is more difficult for a “informavore” than anything else isn’t the volume of knowledge – but the awareness that it must be out there and that a proper Google search will yield the results. The thing about large libraries is that they just aren’t that efficient. You quickly get the feeling of diminishing returns on your search for more information. What is different now is that you get a large number of highly relevant results – and quickly discover related and highly productive veins of exploration. You are not limited to the card catalog, but have access to full text search inside the books, as well as of all the scholarly articles written about those books, and the bibliographies of those articles which list all the related books, syllabi of scholars teaching those books, and auto-discovery services like Amazon’s “people who bought this book also bought…”

I think an equally important issue is the web 2.0 effect, by which via blogs, twitter, LibraryThing, etc. one is daily made aware of new books and articles “one should read.” In your recent post on your methodology syllabus, for instance. This list contained some very useful texts which are in no way irrelevant to my professional development.

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Sure, barriers to finding information have been lowered, and we now bundle writing technology onto the same platform as content-discovery technology (you didn’t used to be able to read books with a pen and a piece of paper) but I these speak to changing research strategies — in particular, the need to periodically put yourself ‘on top’ of things to learn about them and then contract your focus to be ‘on the bottom’ and writing about one thing.

The right thing to do is not fool yourself into thinking that you’re getting anything done by making all those databases – which is particular problem for gadget- and website2.0- obsessed people, Kerim (cough cough) :)

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Where did this approach come from? I once read somewhere that Max Weber was so chronically clinically depressed that he could only write two hours a day—but look at all that stuff those two hours a day added up to. I read somewhere else that the No. 1 mark of a professional writer is that he or she sits down and writes at least x pages a day, come rain or come shine, feel like it or not.

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