The Nomadic Academic, Part 2

I've gotten some good responses on my first post, and a nice link from my old classmate Graham Webster on his blog infopolitics. He poses a very important question, one that I hope to address in more detail in a later post. Much as I may use food and energy as extended metaphors for knowledge or information, the nomadic academic does not live on books alone. How then, Graham asks, are academics to buy real food and real gas while they are off in the metaphoric steppe herding diffuse information? His answer, in short, is to combine academic and non-academic (a.k.a. "real world") employment. You should go read it in full. But how much useful work will this produce? And can it compete with the work produced by those fully in the academe?

As I said, I hope to tackle these questions at more length in a later post. But I have spent the week thinking about something else, so first this:

Part 2: The Secondary Products Revolution

In the previous post, I qualified nomadism as a strategy of mobility. Real-world nomadism as an economic-ecological adaptation required the horse and certain horse technologies (bit, stirrups) to allow people to cover more ground and control more animals than they could on foot. By analogy, certain computer technologies (full-text searching, translation software) allow the pioneer generations of nomadic academics to cover more ground their their precursors. It used to be the work of a career to read a major corpus (say, six or eight Dynastic Histories) looking for specific topics or terms (yogurt, for example). Nowadays, it is possible for a Young Turk who barely reads Chinese to write a masters thesis on yoghurt covering Sima Qian to the Northern Wei and the Southern Song (that's 14 centuries, for those keeping track at home). I know this because I wrote such a paper.

Horseback riding is only one of several critical technologies on the way to nomadism. Superior coverage of diffuse information is a new productive paradigm, for sure. It enables quicker and easier access to a broader base of information that we would otherwise have. However, the end product is the same. To extend the metaphor, the old way to write a book with broad coverage was to expend a huge number of person-hours gathering in all your sheep to sell them at market. The new alternative is to ride a horse (i.e. search engine) for fewer people to expend fewer hours bringing those same sheep to market. This still does not allow the academic nomad to range that far.

So what additional technologies are needed? In the neolithic, there was a critical second step in the domestication of animals, one of major importance to the development of nomadic pastoralism. This was the so-called Secondary Products Revolution, an idea due to Andrew Sherratt on the importance of non-meat animal products like milk, wool and labor. The importance of this to pastoralists is the ability to glean small profits from their animals during the long and expensive process of raising them to maturity. Eventually, many animals came to be raised primarily for their secondary products.

The importance of this to nomads should be obvious. Nomads use animals to gather the sparse produce of marginal zones. If they were to eat entirely from the meat of their animals or by exchanging animals for other food and goods, pure pastoralists would need truly enormous numbers of animals to survive. These animals in turn would require even more enormous pastures. The feasibility of raising large numbers of animals exclusively for meat by specialists (i.e. people who didn't also farm) is almost certainly limited to the modern CAFO, which, by the way is a density-based (not mobility-based) strategy.

Secondary products, however, allow nomads to survive off their herds for long periods of time without reducing their numbers by primarily consuming their milk and blood. In most modern nomadic societies milk and blood products - combined with grain foods obtained by trade - are their staples. Meat is a special-occasion food. This was almost certainly the case historically as well.

Essentially, secondary-products give a way of storing animal-based food energy. Meat cannot be stored without salting or refrigeration. Grain can easily be stored, but not easily transported. Storing meat on the hoof is not a great option because you have to keep feeding it. But once you can get milk from that hoofed-meat while it is in storage, it becomes a desirable option. More importantly, these milk-producing meat-storage units can move around. They're called cows.

In other words the secondary products revolution gave herders an energy storage option that was, in many ways, superior to grain. It was still impossible to store large numbers of livestock in one place (because they would eat all the grass), so grain remained the preferred "density" strategy. But it made specialized herding a plausible "mobility" strategy.

So how does this metaphor extend to academia? I would argue that standard research is a lot like growing grain - you sit in one place and plant a bunch of seeds (read other people's books), water them (attend seminar) and then you harvest them (write your own book). Other people can then take your seeds (book) and plant it in their field to grow some books of their own. Search-based research methods are more like hunting or herding - rather than working a known patch of soil, you cast a wider net (ok, it's also kinda like fishing) and pull in sparse resources from a large area. Here is where the metaphor breaks down however, because in our transitional generation we have been writing books. That's kinda like turning our meat (or fish) into grain. Or something.

The metaphor has broken, but I hope the point is made. If we, as mobility-choosing academics, want to range wider areas, it doesn't make a huge amount of sense for us to keep writing books. That's like killing all our sheep to sell at the farmer's market. Our mobility strategy has only taken us a small distance beyond the pale. What we need are secondary products. So what do milk-cows and yoghurt look like in the realm of information?

In short, we need technologies that continue to produce as long as they are fed, that give us years of milk instead of days of steak. This means developing databases that integrate with the material they describe. It means machine-learning. It means transferable publishing standards for methods as well as content. It means network methods and complex systems. Again, the food analogy is entirely worthless here because the idea is of recursive rather than iterative methods. It means any type of research that produces semi-autonomous systems of generating questions (that will generate answers when fed), rather than one-off conclusions.

This made sense in my head and a mess on the screen. Tell me what you think.