Mapping the Field

We’ve entered one of the major thematic sections of my 601 course this semester, where we talk about “mapping the field,” particularly as it presents a challenge for folks who are new to it. One of my favorite passages in this regard comes from Carol Berkenkotter’s and Thomas Huckin’s Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication:

For writers to make things happen (Le., to publish, to exert an influence on the field, to be cited), they must know how to strategically utilize their understanding of genre. Their work must always appear to be on the cutting edge. This means that they must understand the directions in which a field is developing at any given time and possess the rhetorical savvy necessary for positioning their work within it. An academic writer needs to possess a highly developed sense of timing: At this moment, what are the compelling issues, questions, and problems with which knowledgeable peers are concerned? What is the history of these issues in the field? In the humanities, and the social and natural sciences especially, knowing what winds are blowing in the intellectual zeitgeist is essential to good timing (Miller, 1992).

This sounds intimidating, especially for scholars who are relatively new to a field. But it’s something that we practice all the time in our day-to-day conversations: although it feels a little dated as a reference, especially these years, the stock image of this kind of activity is water-cooler talk. While getting a friend to watch a particular tv show doesn’t sound nearly as momentous as “exert[ing] an influence on the field,” the difference here is one of degree rather than kind.

But there’s an obvious catch-22 to this process that new scholars face: how can we develop a sense of the field without spending years familiarizing ourselves with it? And this is particularly acute in an industry where creeping demands of “professionalism” seem to grow by the year. One answer, I suppose, is “start reading!” and that’s not entirely wrong, but as I’ve written elsewhere, that attitude has always felt evasive to me (and a little irresponsible). So, here’s what I do (and did in class this week):

For roughly an hour or so, we spent class entering data about books onto a shared Google spreadsheet. The data must be structured in a particular way, but that’s actually pretty easy to set up and communicate. What we do is pull information from Amazon: we start with a single book, input some basic information (Author/Editor name(s), title, year of publication) on one page, and then on another page of the spread sheet, define connections, using the “people who bought this book also bought…” list — we only take the first 4–5 listed. Then we just build the map out from there — each of those initial connections becomes a starting node with 4–5 connections. Do this with enough people and over enough time, and what results is a pretty legible diagram with clusters of related books. (I’ve used part of our map from this week as the graphic above.) I’ve used various tools to do the visualizations — right now, I use Kumu, which has the virtues of being easy enough to learn, flexible, and extensible.

There are lots of reasons why this “map” of the field is insufficient, but those reasons are a big part of the discussion that follows this activity for me. There are books that don’t appear on Amazon, lots of people who (rightfully) don’t use Amazon, ways that personalization have shifted site recommendations, and a massive number of publications (journals, e.g.) that aren’t captured on it. And to be honest, the site itself has declined in terms of the value of its data — there is no simple “people who bought x” list anymore. Sometimes those lists refer to sponsored products, products from the same overly general “category,” items from your wishlist, lists generated by browsing habits, etc. What used to be a fairly simple and sufficiently accurate recommendation system has been all but drowned out by noise on the site. It’s still possible to try this exercise, but I had to warn the students to use their best judgment as they pulled data, which wasn’t necessary in previous iterations.

And yet. There’s a lot to recommend an exercise like this as well. Once we talk about the limitations of the data (and how “data” itself reflects, selects, deflects), we have a good conversation about the kinds of data that might be capturable. We used publication year as the variable to color-code our map, but there are plenty of others (Press, Home Institution, method, etc.) that might yield interesting results. And we talk about how we’re defining “connections.” On Amazon, one book is connected to another through a preponderance of purchases, but citation is a much more obvious form of connection that we’re taught to observe in academia. There’s an old piece by Dan Wang that maps out the emerging subdiscipline of economic sociology by looking at course syllabi and tallying not only how many times given articles and chapters appear on them, but connecting them to the texts that are taught during the same week as well.

If there’s one thing that I’d like someone to take away from this exercise, it’s how constantly cartographic our activities in the field are. In addition to building our own map this week, we read a couple of older articles from the mid-2000s, each of which purported to offer a view of the discipline as it existed at the time. But otherwise, they couldn’t have been more different, and a big part of that was the approach each took and the choices they made with respect to their data. The result was two very different “maps,” neither of which was “wrong” per se, but with distinct sets of implications for the field (and new scholars looking to enter it). My point here is that we tend to think of “mapping the field” as an activity that treats the field as this stable object and mapping as the work we must do to enter (and ultimately shape) it. The quote above from Berkenkotter and Huckin does nothing to dissuade us from this attitude. But there’s a flip side to that phrase, one that sees “mapping” as the activity that we’re constantly engaged in, every time we purchase a book, cite a text in our own, recommend an article to a colleague, assign a reading on a syllabus. The “field” is the sprawling, ever-shifting aggregation of all those activities, activities that every scholar, old or new, is practicing daily, around a water-cooler or no.

And each of them has the potential to be the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings, which I find pretty cool. One of the people in that room this week may publish a book ten years from now and one of the ideas in that book may have been sparked by a connection that someone else made during discussion, or the confluence of a couple of readings across classes, or a recommendation from a colleague after class. For me, the “field” is the consequence of what we do, not the cause. Or perhaps both, but I find it useful in my course to emphasize the former when so much of what they’re hearing about is the latter.

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ps. there used to be a website where you could type in the name of a book and it would automatically scrape Amazon data to generate a map for you. I haven’t been able to find it, but to be honest, I think there’s virtue (and a sense of accomplishment) in having to do it ourselves, at least the first time.