Big History Research Agenda?

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  • Sunday, July 22, 2012 12:36 PM
    Message # 1016687
    Donna Tew (Administrator)

    What should be on a Big History Research Agenda?

    We have a number of major texts on Big History by David Christian, Fred Spier, and others.  What should Big Historians research at this point?

    Moved from IBHA Discussions: Thursday, April 20, 2017 7:53 PM
  • Sunday, August 12, 2012 1:38 PM
    Reply # 1045050 on 1016687
    Deleted user
    Since research on the historical facts is being done by specialists in a variety of disciplines, astrophysicists, astronomers, abiotic chemists, geologists, geneticists, paleontologists, as well as the well-known array of historical (in the old sense of the word) researchers, it seems to me that the primary area of research would be in the effect on learning that the larger context of Big History will have.  Do students learn psychology better knowing how the human brain/mind evolved over the last few million years?  Are students more interested in chemistry after learning where and how the chemical elements are synthesized?  And maybe a more important but more difficult one: do students understand themselves better (psychologically, physiologically, cognitively, etc) after learning the history of the evolution of life and the human.
  • Monday, August 13, 2012 6:22 AM
    Reply # 1045608 on 1016687
    Lowell Gustafson (Administrator)
    Research on learning outcomes assessment for Big History courses will be important.  Perhaps the Dominican University program and the Big History Project have been working on this.  Are students in those courses more likely to ask, "How do they know this?"  And go on to take natural science courses to find out?  Having seen evidence for our common origin, does this have an effect on political identity?  (Do students develop more of a human as well as a national, kinship, etc identity?)  Is there an effect on attitudes toward the environment?  What questions in such an assessment need to be answered?
  • Monday, August 13, 2012 10:25 AM
    Reply # 1045753 on 1016687
    Some preliminary ideas on BH research. 

    It is clear to me that this is an area we need to work hard at.  I would love to see Big History emerge as a major research field.  I think what that means is that the big history perspective will acquire legitimacy as a valuable perspective for scholars in many different fields.  My guess is that, by and large, scholars in big history will 1) be keen to defer to the expertise of specialists, but 2) at the same time they will argue that the very broad perspective of big history may suggest new approaches, perspectives, questions and research agendas to specialists.  In other words, I think it is the breadth and trans-disciplinary nature of big history that will distinguish it as a a research discipline.  We need to show the fundamental role that big history can play in the project that E.O. Wilson described as 'consilience'.

    I can see two main ways of pushing this 'consilient' research agenda. 

    First, I think it will be important for scholars interested in big history to publish about big history in journals in their own specialist ways so as to generate interest in the big history perspective and establish the significance and scholarly credibility of the field. 

    Second, I think it may prove valuable to organize conferences around themes such as information or energy or entropy or collective learning, themes that cut across many fields and can attract papers from scholars in many fields.  The main research agenda, at first, would simply be: how do these ideas change across disciplines, and do they have a role to play across different disciplines.  If the answer is 'yes' (and surely it often will be!), then we will be beginning the task of showing that big history provides a superb framework for unified, trans-disciplinary research that can link the achievements of different disciplines.

    Finally, I think that the teaching wing of big history may prove a powerful driver for the research wing, as more and more students enter colleges, universities and postgraduate research programs already prepared for the big history perspective, and finding it missing!

    David Christian
  • Wednesday, August 29, 2012 10:42 AM
    Reply # 1059585 on 1016687
    Anonymous
    An emergent stew of comments about the BH research epistemology, method, research question, reliability and validity:
    • I have been pondering the research agenda of the emerging Big History scholars getting their PhDs since the conference and asking myself what are the epistemology and methods of Big History.   How can they be made valid and reliable?  As a trans-disciplinary field, how do we bring the rigor of science to the socially constructed nature of the humanities. 
    • Having recently completed a dissertation (2010), the words epistemology, method, reliability and validity are still ringing in my ears. 
      • (FYI, I stumbled around under a social science adviser in a forestry department trying to conduct research in big history without ever labeling it as such.  It took me 8 years to finish.  I was literally kicked out of my adviser's office when I wanted to begin my lit review for sustainability with the Epic of Gilgamesh.  I ended up researching a phenomenon I called adaptive social learning (I hadn't heard of collective learning yet).  I defined it, looked for the presence of it at the institutional level, and found a kernel of it emerging before being snuffed out.  The power of this tiny bit of research was the ironic story it generated.) 
    • If I remember correctly, some of the graduate students are researching a physical phenomenon--such as waves or networks--and looking at them through time.  Others are doing the "little big history" of a place or a thing. 
    • So what is the epistemology, method, research question, and hypothesis testing and how are validity and reliability defended?  How do we defend against the slings and arrows of academic discipline dementors?  I am still battered and bruised by my battle. 
    • I was struck by an early Ted Talk from 1994 called Back to the Future I stumbled on yesterday.  In it, computer genius Danny Hillis gave a brilliant demonstration of how he Big History can trigger potent insights to understand a modern phenomenon.
      • Danny told a story with classic dramatic structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement.  If these 5 terms are consolidated into 3-- beginning, middle and end--a good story pops out to the listener/reader precisely the way three dots on a page pop out to the viewer as a triangle as gestalt theory predicts. 
      • The beginning of Danny's talk was exposition about a phenomenon he noticed.  The rising action detailed that phenomenon-- capacity in computer science was, unlike engineering science, was growing exponentially.  The middle of his talk contained the research question: why was digital capability increasing exponentially (climax) and the insight provided by BH (falling action).  At the end of his talk (dénouement) was the insight generated by Big History--that we were actually in the process of building the next level of information complexity in the progression that went from  nucleic acids to multicellular neurons to human language to...the next big thing (a digital multicellular organism). 
    • Is there some structure emerging from this bit of stew?
      • Research Question: Ask a question about perplexing modern phenomenon. 
      • Method: Use the explicit stages of dramatic structure to investigate the phenomenon.  Use the exposition and rising action(lit review) to arc toward the climax (research question) and falling action (data) from big history to shape the dénouement (results). 
      • Epistemology: Craft a good story to generate the near instantaneous "aha" that a sound dramatic structure generates--a means of communicating new knowledge that has been recognized as valid and reliable since Aristotle. 
  • Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:08 AM
    Reply # 1060459 on 1016687
    Anonymous
    My personal research approach (the little big history variant: I'm writing my Ph.D. thesis on the little big history of Tiananmen) is actually quite straightforward.
    I pose a question, any question for which there is evidence available that can help me answer it really, and then follow these simple steps:
    1. I try to connect my question to all the main stages in big history, which generates quite a lot of unrelated and sometimes downright absurd ideas.
    2. I scrutinise these ideas, look for those with potential and for patterns running through them and throw out what I cannot use. Based on my selection, I formulated one or more hypotheses that could help me answer my question.
    3. I collect data, usually from scientific papers because they are more specific, but sometimes also from academic books, that help me support, adjust or refute my hypotheses.
    4. If I have to refute my hypotheses or get stuck, I go back to phase 1, the brainstorming phase, to see if I can come up with some new ideas.

    I think that this approach often yields new insights, because it forces you to look at questions in a way not many people have looked before.

    I don't think this approach yields the ultimate answer to the question I asked. In fact, I think that you could probably write a number of very different little big histories, all equally valid, on the same subject, because different people may emphasise different patterns and trends. I'm not a postmodernist though: I think that different little big histories are usually connected and supplement each other. This may be the case because all little big histories hark back to some of the most fundamental processes we know about and through their connections to these processes, they are connected to each other.

    I hope this makes any sense.
    Kind regards, Esther
    Last modified: Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:10 AM | Anonymous
  • Wednesday, January 23, 2013 4:14 PM
    Reply # 1187192 on 1016687
    Deleted user
    In my view what's needed most is a search of Big History's resources to see what can help our species most in navigating its way through the current ecological crisis.
  • Friday, May 30, 2014 12:39 AM
    Reply # 1558803 on 1016687

    Part of the power of BH is the way that it forces a "through time" (i.e., diachronic) view of the world, in contrast to the largely "right now" (i.e., synchronic) perspective taken by most people on most things in current public discourse.

    As a futurist, I struggle with helping people (students, decision-makers, etc) start to see present things as being situated in a historical (diachronic) process, which realisation then allows them to start to think through what needs to be done to avoid futures we don't want, or to bring about futures we do want.

    BH causes this mindshift automatically, which is why I think it is a perfect scaffold for helping people think about World Futures and the future of humankind. (Indeed, Fred's recent book makes this point in the title!)

    This is one reason why a large part of my research agenda over the last few years is what I am calling "Profiling 'Threshold 9'" - to think about the coming post-fossil-fuel era of human history, and how we will face the challenge of that energy transition. More on this can be found in my Moscow Global Futures 2045 talk from Feb 2012 http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/216156, a chapter in the most recent volume of Evolution: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/366087, and from a talk at the Big History Institute in Sydney last December http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/369435 

    Cheers,

    JV

  • Wednesday, June 24, 2015 7:14 PM
    Reply # 3403139 on 1016687
    Anonymous

    I picture Big History developing into a series of Big History of blanks. For example, maybe someone wants to trace the Big History of Memory in order to see if there are principles that can be discerned from how nature created memory at different levels of complexity. Or maybe someone will do a Big History of Empathy, and piece together a timeline from the first instance of rudimentary empathy. I see the Big History strategy as an alternative way to understand almost any phenomena scholars study. Maybe its Big History of Economics. Big History of Art. Do you guys think that would fly?

  • Thursday, June 25, 2015 5:03 AM
    Reply # 3403574 on 1016687
    Anonymous

    I think that would work, and, to a certain extent, is already being done. Several people are working on big histories of specific subjects, like grass, rivers, silver and more. If the subjects of these studies are considered to be sufficiently small, such studies are generally called little big histories, whereas, if they are a bit broader, they don't really have a name yet. People are thinking along these lines though, and a couple of research proposals for these bigger little big histories ( :-) ) have already been written. Yet we need many many more.

    Kind regards, Esther

    Last modified: Thursday, June 25, 2015 5:05 AM | Anonymous
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