First, I really wish I had listened to your earliest warnings about how much mental energy and passion blogging takes. Your work and a few others inspires much of my own excitement about this particular site, even if it is chewing up so much time! But it’s all worth it — right?

You know, after I wrote the earlier post about predictions, I did think that geographers and other social scientists are more equipped (and most important, trained) to speculate about the future. When I was writing the earlier post on predictions, I was not thinking of your work directly, and I should have mentioned that and added more subtlety to the argument. When I wrote the earlier post I really had in mind the practices of historians (both social-historians and architectural), who use historical analytical techniques (and data) to gaze into the crystal ball – I think it’s a slippery slope.

As for the last points, as someone who is trained in the humanities and social sciences this is something I think about often. I do not necessarily think the science part of our backgrounds has to automatically be equated with the instrumental/predictive aspects of historical data. There are, I think, other possibilities that are (exactly as you say) interdisciplinary. For me, the geographical training enabled me to pull things from certain archives that I think a more traditional architectural historian would find weird and out of place.

But as for the very last points, I think your choice of global warming is an apt one. I do think, and I guess I agree, that crises enable us to suspend disciplinary strictures, and force us to predict. But I think that is also the danger; I recall being inspired by David Harvey’s labeling of environmental crises as a crisis without clear boundaries or predictive limits. That frightens me when the environmental crisis is used as a framework for big disciplinary and academic realignments.

I’ve been following your posts about predictive practices with great interest. I appreciate being a “favorite texty type,” even if perhaps prediction is frowned upon in this space. Your posts have inspired quite a bit of thinking, given your definitions of the role of the historian, about what these texts then say to other academics (i.e. social “scientists”, geographers, etc). I also must have some kind of an identity crisis, as should be expected. I mean, I was and in many ways still am an architect (and architects inherently imagine futures, which shouldn’t be confused with predicting them but certainly there is an element of that). I also write histories of places but I’m not nor would I ever call myself a historian. As a geographer (or at least a “candidate” to be one), should I repress desires to predict? In fact, don’t geographers need to predict in order to operate in society or, that is, in order to fulfill a social responsibility? Why would that not apply to historians also?

As far as I could tell, the writing above seems to implicate your colleagues within the history discipline, so I won’t assume that they should apply to geography (or anthropology, sociology, architecture…; some clarification in that regard would be certainly welcome). Nevertheless, I also think that once we start throwing up these disciplinary boundaries, then we might as well forget about experiments in any discipline. What else might experimental geography or experimental htc be if it doesn’t somehow borrow from others. (As an example, what else is Trevor Paglen’s own brand of geography if not some creative borrowing from traditions of landscape representation, ethnography, and performance).

What seems to be underneath my own identity issues here has to do with the idea of ‘science’ in the social sciences, an issue that historians don’t need to worry about. While the historian can and, if you’re correct, maybe should refuse to engage in gazing into crystal balls, the rough idea of science is that there is some imagined future in which hypotheses are tested. An example from the phycial sciences is global warming. Scientists have made cautious predictions about it for a long time. Some in their own community go as far as to say that those predictions were even too cautious and have given too much ammo to the warming deniers. In other words, physical science maybe has made too cautious a prediction to actually impact the future in significant ways. Scientists are supposed to yoke closely to their evidence and that traditionally allows only a near-future prediction. But the unprecedented changes in our environment have perhaps forced physical scientists into another more theoretical practice as social agents for alternative futures. And maybe that’s something else that experimental historians can chew on when considering their role in the present.