Being Undisciplined; OrTraversing Disciplinary Configurations in Social Science and Humanities Databases: Conceptual Considerations for Interdisciplinarity and Multidisciplinarity

Within the domain of social sciences, various distinctive disciplines occupy positions of respective intellectual authority. Disciplinary orientations capture and configure scholarly research and eventual publication according to their respective definitions of what constitutes disciplinary knowledge. Using a typology of disciplinary definitions, this examination attempts to frame and utilize an approach to traversing various databases in the humanities and the social sciences to illustrate the need to both utilize traditional disciplinary definitions, and to thinking beyond demarcated disciplinary boundaries to capture the essence of scholarly research and publication. Examples from art, communication, and philosophy topics that fall within the purview of social sciences subject orientation, i.e. art markets, international news and information flow, or philosophy of technology and bioethics, form the basis for discussion. Intellectually traversing disciplinary boundaries offers richer approaches to seeking information, yielding richer results, and perforce greater utilization of disciplinary knowledge.International Federation of Library AssociationsUniversity of Toronto, LibraryUniversity of Toronto, Faculty of InformationUniversity of Illinois, LibraryTitle VI National Resource Center Grant (P015A060066)unpublishednot peer reviewe