April 7, 2008
Are we now into more methodology development than in idea creation ?
Posted by nisheedhi under BlogrollSunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?
tags: no_tag
Late 19th and early 20th century scholarship was dominated not by big ideas, but by methodological refinement and disciplinary consolidation.
the 19th and early 20th century, by contrast, took activities like philology, lexicology, and especially bibliography very seriously. Serious scholarship was concerned as much with organizing knowledge as it was with framing knowledge in an ideological construct.
I believe we are at a similar moment of change right now, that we are entering a new phase of scholarship that will be dominated not by ideas, but once again by organizing activities, both in terms of organizing knowledge and organizing ourselves and our work.
The new technology of the Internet has shifted the work of a rapidly growing number of scholars away from thinking big thoughts to forging new tools, methods, materials, techniques, and modes or work which will enable us to harness the still unwieldy, but obviously game-changing, information technologies now sitting on our desktops and in our pockets.
All of these things—collaborative encylcopedism, tool building, librarianship—fit uneasily into the standards of scholarship forged in the second half of the 20th century.
“Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?” by Tom Scheinfeldt
The process of knowledge aggregation through the open source technologies and use of new digital technologies is slowly taking place without our being aware of it always, except through the historians of science like this .But it is through the aggregation of individual bits of ideation that the process shall move forward .It is not merely the new tools or methodologies that shall take the humanity ahead in its journey towards mastering the world but the faster and more consolidated process of giving shape to new content developed through the innovative genius of the human mind .The role of methodologies is to facilitate giving shape to and bringing forth newer content which will add to the sum total of human knowledge.
April 8, 2008 at 6:52 pm
What you have stated is correct. During these past periods of time of heighten innovations or progressions of methodology, there have always been a combination of both. It depends on what our society emphasize. At a given time I believe one is always regarded higher than the other. It seems a like a circulating pattern once one over developed in contrast to the other the tide changes.
We are coming out of an corporate methodology era where companies such Sony, Walmart, and Microsoft were king. Only recently in the business world “Innovation” is plastered everywhere. Any company with a unique idea is revered such as Apple and basically any new Web 2.0 company.