When I first started to meet humanities academics, it surprised me how many defined their interests in terms of nations: they were “Scottish historians”, their subject was “British cinema”, etc. There were even things like “American philosophy”—the idea that something as abstract as this can be influenced by something as concrete as nationhood still discombobulates me.

This struck me as rather odd. I’d assumed that this sort of characterisation would be super-naive. I would not have dreamed of asking a historian which country they specialised in: I assumed this would be like asking a mathematician which of the four basic arithmetic operations they specialised in, or (more controversial, this) a computer scientist which programming language they use.

I suppose I thought that at the research level, humanities would be characterised by larger, more abstract problems: the relationship between expressiveness and language, the common features of political systems throughout world history, the interplay between economic forces and art produced, etc., etc.

Of course, the humanities do deal with questions at this level of abstraction; but, largely through the lens of a particular example. There is a similarity here with biology. Biologists will characterise themselves as being experts in fruitflies or large primates or whatever; I have just about gotten over a sense of mild amusement at seeing signs on campuses for things like the “British Yeast Symposium”. Of course, they are using these as a means of investigating deeper issues about gene expression, development, virus transmission, or whatever. It is easier to focus on one organism, as the techniques vary so much for different organism types. Similar with history, but perhaps the issue is less one of techniques than one of accumulated knowledge.

Why did I make this assumption that this characterisation was naive? I suppose I am used to this from studying mathematics, where we leave behind concreteness at a dizzying rate. But, then, it is possible to study mathematics in abstraction; once you have defined a mathematical concept formally, you can deal with it as a formal object, rather than through concrete examples. This isn’t so possible in the humanities; theoretical points are usually argued via the concrete examples. Perhaps there is scope, in some areas, for “big data” methods to change this—for example, having tools that allow historians to take a concept and a database of its realisations in different historical periods and ask questions about that mass of realisations, rather than give a couple of examples and a vague hint that this is a large scale phenomenon.