The Construct

I think I am not alone in saying that it is frustrating to be young academic at a university in a third world. Thanks to the Internet, we know that there are so many exciting studies and researches being done elsewhere. The reality that we are lagging behind has just become even clearer.

Even in the humanities, institutions elsewhere are factoring in technologies in their studies, even acknowledging the convergence, intersections and overlaps with the other fields. They have long employed trans-disciplinary researches.

But here are, continuing to dwell in Ivory Towers. We continue to claim exclusivity and authority while the rest of the world is thriving in collaboration. Some of us still even justify our pursuance of the field with our personal abhorrence for numbers and formulas.

It is 2010. And it is a damn shame if we still stick to 20th century thinking.

Check out Bennington president Liz Coleman on her call for a cross-disciplinary approach and the reinvention of liberal arts education.

Part of the tasks of descriptive linguistics is to seek out patterns which shouldn’t be that much of an effort since humans are said to be innately equipped with capacities to seek out patterns. And the task seems to be easier with analytic languages like English where logic is tied to word order.

Some people are more equal than others in this regard though. Remember those scenes in A Beautiful Mind where numbers just pop out of all the chaos for John Nash? That’s just a visual depiction of everyone else’s inadequacies. And “everyone else” includes me.

I have to go through hundreds of sentences of GMA’s SONAs in an effort to extract patterns. I’ve already observed some but recently, ever since January struck, I just seem to be at a loss of what to make sense of all of these sentences.

Well, the biased social commentator in me would probably go medieval and say, “I see patterns! Lies! Lies and slander! And dead people!”

Maybe I should stop looking at it for a while. Yup. Maybe that would work. Just like those magic 3D images where it does help to relax your eyes. Only if I don’t have a deadline for my first draft at the end of the month.