How I Work--Listening to a Seminar, Reading a Promotion Dossier, Working in a Field New to Me [19,21,25 July09, 7Aug09]

How do you approach a new field, and get a sense of the lay of the scholarly land--trace out what is in the literature: see the forest for the trees? What's up here?
Listening to a Seminar, Reading a Promotion Dossier, Reading an Article or Book outside a field I know well.
I assume that I can understand anything, at some limited level to be sure, but anything. It is like something I know already.
1. There must be a story here. What are you up to? What is the punchline? What is the claim? (What is a "story"?)
a. How does X work, where X is an argument or an object or a process or . . .
b. What is the method of inquiry and study? How do you go from the materials you work with (and what are they?) to your claims?
2. Is the evidence and theory potentially adequate to the claim? A matter of comparable levels of detail.
3. Is the argument I am reading or hearing experiential? That is, the punchline is less important than the process of going through it. A mathematical proof, poetry or a novel or some forms of criticism and belles letters.
4. What is at stake here? The field of argument in this discipline or arena.
5. Nothing is new, all is a repetition and variation. Analogy is destiny. Models and Metaphors: mechanism, typology or archetype, structure, narrative, form.
6. Am I being snookered? What is hidden, left out, inconsistent? Does it make sense as a whole? Are the special arguments really special? Are the outliers ignorable, should they be trimmed off, are they part of the story?
7. How does the work deal with arguments within the field, and with matters of truth or reliability or credibility? I do not concern myself much with whether the claim is empirically true or supported by the evidence or whether the argument has flaws. (I assume that I can be effectively lied to on matters at this level of detail. Stuff is outside my ken. Arguments must have apparently-fatal flaws.) I leave this to the experts on the archives, the statistics, or the internal issues within the field. So, for example, there are others who can better sniff out problems with claims about citation statistics or with teaching evaluations or with charts and diagrams or with technical philosophical arguments.
8. Would you buy a used car from this dealer? In the end, Are you being given a fair representation of the facts and judgments and arguments so that you could make your own decision? Can I supply (from other sources?) what is missing, and so make a judgment?
9. When I ask a question, I am trying to find out what is really going on. Am I on track?

How do I choose problems to work on, whether in my books, in my photographic and now aural documentation of Los Angeles, in teaching? How do I know about disparate fields?
1. I try lots of topics, and only some prove fruitful for me. Hence, the topics that characterize my work may be diverse, but, as in evolution's species, there is continuity with the past, but much of the intermediate materials are no longer much available. What is apparently incommensurable and diverse and discrete is actually historically linked. Topics may come up by chance, but they are not likely to be pursued unless they fit into a larger agenda.
2. Whatever the topic, I explore the scholarly literature, finding the authoritative works, often going backwards in time, and ground myself in what is known or understood. I rarely if ever master the subtleties of many of the subfields and subjects. I do want to avoid making egregious mistakes, and to be sure that I am decently grounded in scholarship. Has this topic been so well explored, there is little I can contribute?
3. I was trained in physics, but also had an undergraduate education that emphasized the Great Books, and thinkers about politics and society. It took me many years of subsequent reading and thinking to have any decent critical sense of the Books and thinkers, but the origin is in my first two years of college as well as high school.
4. Over the now-many years, I have developed an informed sensibility, reading bits and pieces of scholarship. More to the point, there is lots I have no real feeling for (biology and medicine, history), but others ignore that because they see only what I do know. In any case, I seem to have no reluctance to trying to figure out foreign material. I assume all is understandable, there is a story here, it's like something else I do know. And, if I really don't know anything, or have no feeling for the problem, I find people (or sources) who can help me. Or, I make an informed guess, and have others correct me, or I read further and get corrected by what I read.
5. In any case, the topics that capture my attention for more than an instant are almost always informed by past experience and scholarly knowledge. When I was starting out, I surely went down less fruitful paths (mistakes?). But, in the end, even the diversions prove useful, often years later. (In effect, I make them useful.) What I recall is that by the time of college I had some sort of taste that was reliable enough for me. I was brought up in a working-class family, smart but not highly educated, with a strong political interest. I was an outsider, my nose pressed against the glass, and I wanted in.
6. When I think of my books, and other research, there are several big themes:
a. Structure. Mathematics/physics. Models (drawn from diverse humanistic fields such as religion)
b. Design. Why there is order in the world
c. Decisions and leadership

In each case, what I am trying to show is how the world makes sense, how what might seem esoteric or unavailable is not so foreign to one's everyday knowledge and examples.

7. In my photographing and Los Angeles media (sound, video) work, the topics are typically what is everyday but ignorable. I like topics where there are many many examples (patterns, types). And I am informed by major topics in the study of cities: work and worksites, worship, street life and public spaces and traffic, environment and background ambiance, commerce and commercial districts, infrastructure, housing, and "how the other half lives." My techniques and styles of work are usually unashamedly borrowed from artists (photographers, painters)--I am a documentor, not an artist. I do not worry about originality or the artworld. I am concerned with the depth and sensibility of my documentation, its reliability and future usefulness. Can I tell a good story about what I am doing, have I done a good job in indexing the corpus, does it look or sound interesting?
8. I record public (aural) ambience, where ambience refers to what might be called background sound, usually unavoidable, pervasive, varying, and to be ignored if possible while you are up to your tasks. To attend to public ambience is to be up to a new task, attending to what is to be ignored, the emperor's new clothes. Public ambience may include industrial noise, conversations, traffic and infrastructure, HVAC, people playing basketball or shopping, commerce, sounds of bells and pings of ATM machines (not church bells), other people in the room when in a restaurant, the sounds of worship coming out of a church, worksites, flatulence, . . . Of course, in other places it may include animal sounds, wind and rain, plants rubbing against each other, . . . To record public ambience in Los Angeles is to create a documentary record of the place, to be interpreted and listened to in decades hence. I am interested in patterns, in the everyday, in cases where there are many examples.
What is remarkable is that in public, there is almost no expectation of privacy. Conversations are loud, cellphone conversations are broadcast. Everything is shown, displayed,... Not always, but often...

I have documented public and private Los Angeles, what you can see from and on the street and what is behind closed doors. The profane and the sacred. I am interested in commerce and merchandising, services and real estate. Industrial worksites and people-at-work, utilities and ports and rail yards and warehouses. Public life includes conversations heard out loud, life of the bus and transit, and people gathering together to each. As for the streets there is background ambience, commercial and wholesale districts, neighborhoods, residential and industrial streets, and traffic and people using transit. On those streets are thousands of places of worship, and some of the time I go inside as well. Infrastructure provides the nerveways and arterials that link it all together.

Every detail matters as it is, so we want to have lots of resolution and accuracy.
What I want to do is to make you stop and look and listen: my work has sensitized to what is there, in front of you. So you stop to confirm and enhance your now trained intuition.

9. (I am informed by W. H. Whyte, although less with human behavior than with the background and signs of behavior, but also by a long tradition of photographing cities and city life--Marville, Atget, Evans, Friedlander. Also, Diderot on worksites; Ruscha on the street, Sanders and the Beckers on typologies. RM Schafer on soundscape.)

10. I am like the fieldwork anthropologist or linguist, trying to document a vanishing culture. Here, what is vanishing is the now and casually-made records of the now (perhaps of low quality, but as likely they are not preserved, nor are they locatable).

11. More generally, I find topics because my eyes and ears and mind are open enough, things come along, and as mentioned earlier many topics do not pan out. I am always in business.