Historiarum

New words catch my eye in nearly everything I read, but often I’ve forgotten them shortly after examining their definitions, since generally speaking there is either little opportunity to use them or they are words with no real distinction from other words or phrases except to make the author seem more intelligent than he or she really is. Jargon has its place, but I find it all too regularly used as a crutch for the author and an impediment for the reader. Essentially if we want to reach an audience outside of the discipline, it should be used sparingly at most.

Reading John Lewis Gaddis’s The Landscape of History this week was my first encounter with the word consilience and it seems to me to fill a gap in our vocabulary. Certainly it qualifies as jargon, since its usage is essentially only relevant to academic disciplines. It is not specific to any one discipline, however, but instead is a term that spans all of the disciplines, which I find more useful. Gaddis quotes two definitions of consilience: “unexpected coincidences of results drawn from distant parts of a subject” and “a way of asking whether, in the gathering of disciplines, specialists can ever reach agreement on a common body of abstract principles and evidentiary proof.”(49) Barring the final chapter (in which Gaddis waffles on the ultimate value of history while setting up some arguably false and created ambiguities of historical research), the rest of his book operates with consilience as the as the basis from which he draws comparisons between historical and scientific methods, finding utility in some and fault with others.

These metaphors he drew with disciplines such as astronomy and biology were particularly useful in thinking about what historians do, and how it is done. Gaddis highlighted cartography largely as a vehicle to show the impossibility of true representation, as well as the arbitrary, but importance of decisions made by the representers. This is a familiar idea to many students of history, but an important one to keep in mind. More to the point, for a class such as this one which combines the disciplines of history and cartography it seems greatly important since we will be dealing with a mode of representation which we are familiar with in very limited senses as users, and almost wholly unfamiliar with creatively. History has usually been represented via words and text. Images are secondary. But the other part of Gaddis’s argument, that much can be gleaned from examining other disciplines can be put to work here.

Rather than setting history apart from other disciplines and holing up in our own methods and practices, it seems better to look at how other disciplines approach problems, and how they render conclusions, and what we might recognize, borrow, or discard from them. Maps have always held a place in historical analysis, but often in a very limited sense. By thinking about their potential and looking at the process of cartography, perhaps we can explore new approaches to historical research and representation.

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