To Science, or Not to Science?
What it’s like to be the only humanities person in a tech-y science group — and why it’s important that I’m here
These days, I’m in the middle: middle-aged (in my 50s), middle-class (by any definition), middle-educated (master’s degree). There’s one place, though, where I’m not in the middle. Not at all.
When I’m at work.
Team members here at NEMAC hold a lot of different degrees with a lot of different majors. Geography. Geology. Geophysics. Environmental studies. Pure mathematics. Computer science. Multimedia. Information technology. It makes sense: we are an academic applied environmental research center.
I’m an English major. The only English major. The only humanities major.¹ My departmental honors thesis was a Jungian analysis of a lesser Brontë novel. My master’s research, published in Southern Cultures, involved historical and material culture research on foodways and urban renewal in an Asheville neighborhood and led to an MLAS (Master of Liberal Arts and Sciences) degree. Like many of my colleagues, I have a framed map on my office wall — but mine is of Territorially Reconfigured North America from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,² complete with a slew of textual references. If there’s a great divide between science and the humanities, I’m a humanities person all the way.³
I’m surrounded by scientists.
I’m here because, as NEMAC’s director Jim Fox often says:
People don’t make decisions based on data. They make decisions based on their values.
To put the right data into the value proposition means adding appropriate context so that the decision maker can easily link it to his or her values. That’s where I come in. Cross-disciplinary research, writing, and editing are kinda my things.
I work with the scientists at NEMAC, and I work with scientists at the federal, state, and local agencies and organizations with whom we partner.
- Yes — during meetings, my eyes sometimes glaze over.
- Yes — sometimes I make references that no one else gets.
- Yes — I ask a lot of questions and sometimes I feel stupid asking them.
- Yes — I often find myself Googling things that a scientist already knows and has written about and just assumes that everyone else knows about too.
Hard stop.
I often find myself Googling things that a scientist already knows and has written about and just assumes that everyone else knows about too.
That’s also why I’m here. If I don’t get it, then there’s a very good chance that the user won’t either. And after I Google the thing, I go around to the scientist who wrote it and ask them to explain it to me. And we work out, together, how to explain it so that the user will get it, right away, without having to Google anything.
At NEMAC, our Principal Designer Caroline Dougherty⁴ and I are the closest we get to end users. We confer often: “Did you get this?” “Does this make any sense to you?” “Do you have any idea what this means?” If not, we go back to the scientists for explanation. Like most good things, it’s an iterative and collaborative process: draft, edit, revise, repeat.
Tech-y science groups like NEMAC need writers. And editors. And designers. Putting data into context, and making it understandable, often requires the skills of people who are not scientists. We help make sense of the tech-y science stuff, so that everyone can understand it — and use it to make good decisions.
[1] ^ In the interest of full disclosure, one other member of the NEMAC team does indeed possess an undergraduate humanities degree — in philosophy, no less. However, he went on to complete another undergrad degree in environmental studies and later a GIS certificate. He’s a scientist.
[2] ^ Yes, these footnotes are in honor of DFW.
[3] ^ Since what I’m really doing often involves information design, science interpretation, science translation, and science communication, my title at NEMAC — Lead Science Editor — is followed by the phrase “Research Scientist.” It makes me laugh. Does it make me a scientist? I don’t know. My MLAS degree includes the word “sciences,” so maybe it does. To be honest, though, I still consider myself a humanities person, albeit a humanities person who works closely with scientists.
[4] ^ It’s important to note that Caroline — a proud graduate of UNC Asheville’s program in Multimedia Arts and Sciences with a concentration in interactive design — also completed a minor in literature.
