{"id":375,"date":"2008-11-20T13:44:46","date_gmt":"2008-11-20T10:44:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.helsinki.fi\/kaislani\/2008\/11\/20\/finding-answers\/"},"modified":"2008-11-20T13:44:46","modified_gmt":"2008-11-20T10:44:46","slug":"finding-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/2008\/11\/20\/finding-answers\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding answers"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve usually not welcomed the question “what do you do?”, for it inevitably leads to “..so, what are<\/em> you?”. That is, to having to define the discipline I am in. However, I think from now on I will give the answer suggested by a friend recently:<\/p>\n

I am an Early Modernist.<\/p>\n

What has made answering difficult – what still makes it difficult, really – is the fact that there is no one simple answer for me; I can’t say I’m a linguist, for instance, or a historian. Despite being a member of a research unit of historical corpus linguists, I am not a linguist myself – although I do do a bit of linguistic research. I can’t call myself a historian either, not having the training, although definitely I seem to use and read more historical research than anything else. And then there’s the digital humanities aspect to my work. What does that make me?<\/p>\n

Recently, I attended a lecture on interdisciplinarity as seen from the viewpoint of an eminent medievalist, who pointed out that medievalists have been inter- and multidisciplinary from day one. In their research, they regularly combine (historical) linguistics, history, archaeology, and a whole slew of other disciplines. I think it’s time to copy this usage. Yesterday was the first time that in conversation with someone I’d not met before, I called myself an Early Modernist. I found that it was a much easier explanation than ones I’ve given previously.<\/p>\n

There is, however, another answer I could give – one also multidisciplinary in scope:<\/p>\n

I am a manuscript scholar.<\/p>\n

..but somehow I feel that “Early Modernist” sounds better than “manuscript scholar”, despite the fact that yes, the latter is also very much true. On which note, let’s have an image:<\/p>\n

\"Richard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve usually not welcomed the question “what do you do?”, for it inevitably leads to “..so, what are you?”. That is, to having to define the discipline I am in. However, I think from now on I will give the answer suggested by a friend recently: I am an Early Modernist. What has made answering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-phd","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samuli.kaislaniemi.fi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}