My latest book haul from the UL

Book notes #2 - Vision

Andy: Do you have a vision for your book?
Me: ...Yes? As in do I know what I want it to be?
A: Not what you want the content to be, but what you want it to accomplish.
M: Yes.
A: Have you written it down?
M: No.
A: You should write it down.

Andy got this piece of advice from a book he's reading on software start-ups and entrepreneurship. The point of writing a vision down is that the particulars may change as you develop  your company, write your book, change your professional development plan etc., but if you have a consistent vision to refer back to, you will always be progressing in the same direction. The same is true, of course, with strategic planning within existing organisations. While you're slogging it out with the details, getting frustrated, getting sidetracked, you always have the vision to refer back to.

This will probably also help those of you that actually read my previous post figure out what the heck I was on about, and potentially provide me with a useful way to succinctly answer the question I keep getting: "Oh, you're writing a book? What's it about?" This has up until now been followed by a resigned sigh from me as I prepare to launch into a rambling explanation beginning with, "Well, it's a bit complicated to explain..." So I thought I should do this sooner rather than later.

At the most grandiose level, I suppose I want to live in a world where everyone capable of making decisions (especially through voting but also in general) is armed with the tools of critical analysis and information literacy in order to make informed and ethical decisions. I also want readers of my book to question the compartmentalisation of disciplines and not be afraid to make inquiries in unfamiliar territory, transferring the skills and knowledge they have to new contexts. In doing this, readers will challenge the idea that learning takes place only in academic spheres and instead feel empowered to explore and learn independently, and to ask good questions of experts such as teachers, journalists, writers and politicians.

At a more practical level, it should give readers of many different learning styles a primer for understanding how knowledge is constructed in many different disciplines and how it is used in many different formats, so that an artist can pick up a neuroscience article in a newspaper and can understand whether the conclusions are valid, and a mechanic can listen to a political speech and know whether there is an attempt at manipulation, just as two random examples.

The audience I have in mind is explicitly not an academic audience, though it could benefit people in academia. I haven't decided if I want to write it specifically for pre-teen students or keep adults in mind as well, but I think that's a challenge I can face later. The main thing is that I want it to be engaging, visually interesting (part text book, part infographics, part graphic novel), full of activities and humour as well as really challenging and surprising.

On a personal level, I just want to try to write a book that makes people as excited about learning and investigating as I am. I want to inspire the kind of wonder about learning and information literacy issues that books like the classic Dorling Kindersley books and other such books inspired in me when I was a kid. I'm looking forward to the challenge, and even if it never gets off the ground I'll have had a lot of fun researching it. But some day I want to hold this book in my hands, regardless of what it looks like, and know that I made it.

I hope this makes sense. I'm sure I'll write more on this soon as I appear to be a little bit in the groove of thinking about this stuff.

Book notes #1

In the autumn of last year I got an idea for a book. It's a book I want to read, but it doesn't exist, so, as many writers before me have done, I'm setting out to write it myself. I have only just begun really sitting down to think about it since my course ended at the end of December so these represent some of my first notes. I've written them out by hand and I think I might just transcribe them directly by way of backing them up somewhere other than a flimsy, eminently lose-able Moleskine notebook, in a city where Moleskines outnumber people 3 to 1. (Probably. I'm just making that up.) Feel free to skip this - it's for my own safe keeping, but together these entries may provide an interesting insight into my writing process, or a black box if the project fizzles out.

HWKWWK [my abbreviation for the working title "How We Know What We Know"] - 16/1/14

I spent the evening combing over the shelves of Waterstone's in Cambridge, looking for something useful, relevant or inspiring in some way to my endeavor, but found very little. In some ways this is comforting - apparently there is a niche, and given the prominence and recent proliferation of books on infographics, I think my book will look appealing to fans of that trend. However, I had hoped to draw inspiration from somewhere fairly directly. In the spirit of viewing nothing as a failure as long as it teaches you something, I did at least refine what my book is NOT, and the sort of sources I can safely avoid. I spent a lot of time in the popular science section, systematically disregarding books of 'facts', books about the internet, books about the brain etc. Dawkins' Magic of Reality still looks intriguing but perhaps more comparing science and mythology. One I did consider buying (and stupidly forgot to write down or take a picture of) was a collection of writings by scientists about their discoveries and claimed to be as much about the cultivation of a scientific way of thinking - insight into the scientific mind for 'outsiders'.

Overwhelmingly, however, anything that looked likely was either a compendium of scientific 'facts' designed to sell to the "Brainiac: Science Abuse" crowd with titles like Why Do Men Have Nipples? and taglines like "What your science teacher DIDN'T tell you!" The aforementioned books on infographics have a similar feel: dense with very visual information but with little to link them. It's like reading a novel abridged and posted on Twitter. Are you learning something? Sure. But is it deep learning you can transfer to other contexts? That is doubtful. In some ways, not only is this what my book is not, it's what my book sets out to remedy; the shallow, passive acceptance of facts presented in uncomplicated ways, which authors assume is okay because it's for the 'uninitiated'. Though I suppose it's likely to end up shelved here (or with philosophy?), my book should give people the tools to question this, social science books, news, political arguments, art criticism etc. Emma used the colourful phrase 'crap detector', which is partly true, but it is also about breaking down the idea/assumption that if you aren't part of the discipline you can't deconstruct an argument.

Emma helped me clarify what I mean by this. She said it's about allowing/enabling people to deconstruct an argument by a scientist, for example, on their own terms. As in, it isn't about a mathematician reading a social science paper and saying, 'Well, that was a logical leap and therefore invalid.' Rather it's saying these are the conventions and criteria for validity that this discipline has established. Does it meet those criteria? Y/N Where does the argument break down? Tied to this are the epistemological questions: are there really 'facts'? If so, why do 'facts' change over time? What is knowledge? What can we know? But there's also the practical element of giving people a key to the maps of different disciplines and conventions, such as academic writing, journalism, infographics etc.

This feels like an absolutely monumental undertaking and it is ambitious in the extreme, but it isn't intended to be a definitive work on any of the topics; I intend to provide a lot of suggestions for further reading. However, it should be a useful and engaging starting point. My own starting point may be with something like intellectual histories of disciplines - historiography, history of philosophy, history of science, history of criticism, etc. - as well as books on conventions for journalism, academia etc. and books on rhetorical techniques. I want to break down the imaginary barriers between disciplines and make readers feel empowered to investigate and question ANYTHING.
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[Written later:] Rather than 'peering behind the curtain' [of other disciplines], [the book is about] arguing that the curtain is a false construct and the only barriers to understanding linguistic and conventional assumptions perpetuated to protect specialist knowledge. This is not to say experts are useless or don't exist. On the contrary, [I believe that] they should have the confidence in their own expertise to both allow their work to be questioned and to be able to explain it clearly to individuals who are not aware of the assumptions made in that discipline [e.g. 'outsiders'].
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[In a list of areas to research:]
- History of epistemology: shows us that what we consider knowable ([within our] paradigm) shapes not only what is 'known' in disciplines but the very idea of disciplines and their relationships to each other [(their layout)]. Removing the assumptions that place FACTS at the centre of knowledge and disciplines at odds with one another allows one the freedom to investigate first principles and underlying assumptions within any framework. However, it's a 'threshold concept' and therefore very difficult to come to terms with, rather like identifying and subsequently questioning privilege. One could say that the current dominant epistemological paradigm privileges expertise and facts over trans-literacies, experiential learning etc. People working w/in that paradigm, e.g. academics, need to question that privilege.
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"How we know what we know" : The mechanisms through which knowledge is created, both within the current paradigms and how those paradigms came to be.