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Definitions across the Disciplines: Surveying Primary Sources in the Classroom

In C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures (1959) the divide between scientists and humanists is described as both practical and cultural. That is, scientists and humanists not only perform different jobs, but they also understand the world differently. Humanities for STEM: Using Archives to Bridge the Two Cultures Divide, a two-year research collaborative funded by New York University’s Center for the Humanities, re-investigates Snow’s thesis through the study of primary sources and archival research.Archives, often thought to be squarely in the domain of the humanities, also contain primary source documents from the sciences and, therefore, can be used to enhance the understanding of STEM. Because this research collaborative posits that primary sources can aid STEM education and research, it becomes important to define what scientists and humanists understand primary sources to be. Is the term “primary source” part of the conceptual and cultural divide Snow describes?In order to understand how a primary source is defined by various disciplines, research collaborative members created and disseminated a survey to faculty at New York University. The results of this survey led to an awareness that what is considered to be a primary source varies between disciplines. Although the notion that primary sources contain first-hand accounts of actual events was established across the disciplines, there was disagreement as to which formats were considered to be primary sources. Practitioners in STEM and social sciences considered journal articles and data sets to be primary sources. Humanities professionals were unique in their belief that “physical documents from an archive (eg., correspondence, photographs)” were one of the top forms of primary sources. With two working definitions of primary sources, it becomes clear that while faculty in most disciplines insist they are using primary sources, faculty from across the divide may disagree as to which documents are in fact primary sources. The differing definition of primary sources could lead to potential projects for either side: raw data and journal articles in historical contexts for humanities classrooms or innovative uses of letters, journals, and objects in STEM classrooms.