My mate came home from a brutal twelve-hour day at the office today and promptly laid down on the clean laundry on the bed, where our son and I assaulted him with hugs and perky news of our long summer day. In the midst of all this, I congratulated the offspring on having eaten three different fruits and vegetables today, and, being my son, he corrected me, pointing out that he had actually eaten three fruits. You see, he had eaten (1) a banana; (2) cherries; and (3) edamame (i.e., soybeans steamed in their pods). He pointed out that a fruit is that which contains a seed, so edamame must be a fruit, like the banana and the cherries.
That categorization bugs me. I hate the idea that rhubarb is a vegetable and zucchini is a fruit. It just ain’t right. So I got to thinking what the distinction between fruits and vegetables should be, and I finally got it: Fruits are that which, if you had to either sugar or salt, you would sugar. Vegetables are that which, if you had to either sugar or salt, you would salt. THAT is how you know whether something is a fruit or a vegetable.
Because I spent much of my day (when not engaged with finding parts for Lego boats and trying to get the kid to eat fruit) working on getting three different papers finalized and out the door, the evening meditation brought me back to my daytime meditation on the two cultures, and how my papers seem lately to be going in the direction of the sciences rather than the humanities.
That is to say, lately I’m co-writing. I’m working on four (and possibly soon five) co-authored papers, one of which even has three authors total. This is just Not Done in the humanities. And it is nearly Always Done in the sciences.
Co-writing can be really challenging, but for the most part I don’t let it be, because I’ve learned enough over the years to know you have to lay out ground rules at the start, and stay flexible in terms of content. And then it works pretty well. The great thing about co-writing is how much you get to learn from it. Not only do you learn things from your co-authors, writing with others forces you to really hone your arguments and gather up your evidence. You end up learning more from yourself than you do when you write alone. It’s peer review, 24/7, without the anonymity.
The other major difference between publishing in the humanities and publishing in the sciences is speed. It is not uncommon for it to take three years for a piece I write for a humanities journal or anthology to show up in print. Meanwhile, in the sciences, it’s a matter of months.
I’ve been wondering why the speed difference. Maybe it’s partly about length; papers in the sciences are typically orders of magnitude shorter than papers in the humanities. This means everything in the sciences is apt to go quicker: the write-up, the reviews, the editing.
But I wonder if it’s also about collaborative writing. Perhaps getting all that peer review as you write means the papers you submit are just that much closer to being done with the peer review process?
In any case, I have to say that lately I’m really appreciating the way science publishing works. The practice among scientists of publishing the “smallest publishable unit” does bug me sometimes–there’s nothing like a good, comprehensive read like you get in a fine, long humanities article–but quicker/smarter feels good. It feels….well, quicker and smarter.
All this leads me to believe that the difference between the sciences and the humanities really is about two cultures. I don’t think there is an inherent difference between disciplines in the humanities and disciplines in the sciences. They all (if they’re good) care about accuracy, originality, coherence, clarity, etc. I think the difference is a practical one. Literally one of practice. One asks you to be a loner, one asks for more ideas per paper, one asks you to wait and wait for publication….
One is the sort that, if you had to sugar or salt it, you would sugar it. And the other is the sort you’d want to salt. I can’t say why, but I’m pretty sure the humanities would taste better in a pie, and the sciences would taste better in soup.
Great. Now I’m hungry.