Last year President Kim suggested an “Iowa style” graduate program in creative writing. I think this is a great idea for Dartmouth, especially in the area of creative nonfiction. This is an emerging field with no signature graduate program. We could do for creative nonfiction what Iowa and Stanford did half a century ago for fiction and poetry.
In an unrelated issue, I also wish that the College would stop running away from its identity as a north country school. We should be leaders in New England studies. Place has meaning. History has meaning.
http://strategicplanning.dartmouth.edu/working-groups/scholarship-research-and-creativity/in-what-areas-can-we-advance-scholarship-research-and-creativity
Dartmouth should seek to become a world leader in all variations of data research: data base collection, compilation, organization, analysis, pattern discovery, presentation design (alpha and numeric and visual), correlation with other databases, and so forth. Aim to be the generic leader in all fields—across burgeoning scientific and financial/business databases both cloud/public and proprietary (eg, pharmaceutical and hedge-fund) located. Organize relationships among institutions working in related pursuits.
One big database where the Med School will be involved : the human brain contains 100 billion neurons, I’m told, and each of them has thousand of connections with other neurons. We’re on the threshold of instrumentation to “map” this staggering ‘ scape, and we’ll want to know how to deal with what we find out.
But the sciences and economics and other conventionally numeric fields aren’t alone in being swamped by data.
Data collection in the social sciences is essential today—think human development: archeology, anthropology, DNA analysis, evolution, population genetics—and in public medicine: think nutrition, epigenetics, toxic environments— the list of transdisciplinary intersections where data synthesis will be crucial is growing.
And humanists will be important in the field. Core components of humanistic training include reading (interpreting), translating, decoding, recognizing patterns, acknowledging paradoxes and resolving ambiguities. After doing all that, the humanist imagines words and pictures to accompany tables and graphs that explain complex conclusions and persuade audiences of their importance.
Digital activity is about the only research venue where costs per effort are coming down, and where technical obsolescence is a relatively small problem. This situation is different from many bench -lab and wet-lab areas where equipment costs go up and new generations of research specialists squeeze past their tenured mentors.
What “is” data? What should/can/might be collected ? What paradigm controls recognition: human perception, available instrumentation, imaginable detectors, .....? How many dimensions should be in the database matrix? How does one “value” individual bits of data, how do we design the “clustering” of those bits, ....? Where do hardware and software considerations intersect in the tasks of amassing and “screening” data (there’s a metaphor from ancient technology!) ....?
It will be difficult to manage a long transition from our independent, competitive, instrument (or pre-definition)-based paradigm for research. Many superb discoverers will be worried , and rightly so, that their perceptual scaffolding is being threatened.