Unpacking the language of the field

Whenever you go into a new field, or otherwise extend yourself a bit beyond your usual comfort zone, you run into all kinds of terms and language and jargon and terminology that is unfamiliar. Sometimes it's entirely new words or acronyms that need to be figured out, hard enough. But when it really gets difficult is when it's perfectly ordinary words that are reused in ways that make perfect sense to six or twelve or twenty people and which are utterly baffling to outsiders.

There's a few lists I'm on where people in a field, or maybe they aren't all in the same field but they are all on the same mailing list, are trying to figure out what they have in common. The field of "information architecture" seems to go through this periodically, and recently the six species of information architect were enumerated (graphic designer, project manager, reformed techie, library dude, copywriter, and usability IA). Similarly, the nascent field of "community informatics" has a list where they're trying to figure out whether it's "the social appropriation of ICTs", "social impact of ICTs", "ICT4D", "social informatics", "la informática de la comunidad", etc etc. 34 messages on this in a few days.

Heaven help the poor person who tries to merge two fields together. Though I suppose if you are the only one doing whatever you are doing you can call it whatever you please and no one is the wiser for it.

Comments

[Bill Tozier]

You'll be hard-pressed to get a degree in it, though....