It is also much more concrete than “Methods of Discovery”, an earlier book of Abbott’s which zooms the camera out a bit too much. He edits the American Journal of Sociology and his books include The System of Professions, Department and Discipline, Chaos of Disciplines, and Time Matters, all published by the University of Chicago Press. And 450,000 items over 2,920 days means that more than 150 times a day some scholar found something he or she wanted to charge on the shelf—not in storage.

There were scattered discussions of Mach (in Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Deacon’s biography of Elsie Clews Parsons, and so on), but nothing sustained. Nowadays we have these beancounters running everything so everyone is writing everything, including graduate students who certainly have nothing or not much to say, so much of the emphasis on writing is purposeless, and exists mainly for personal advancement, which is a whole separate issue. The majority of pages are undamaged with minimal creasing or tearing, minimal pencil underlining of text, no highlighting of text, no writing in margins. Without a hint of trendiness, this manual will reliably guide novice scholars into a new world of materials for study and will help their mentors keep up as well. At a time when being up-to-the-minute is touted as a virtue, what does it mean that one reviewer praises the book for being “without a hint of trendiness”?But what we do is trace one particular thread that is not excessively complicated, and use reflection about that thread to discipline our thinking about an abstract, theoretical issue.

For one thing, it depends on international politics—the world could be under a single authoritarian government in a hundred years, with the power, like the Chinese emperors, to destroy all preexisting learning. We are no closer to revolutionary improvement in library-based and “found data” knowledge than we were thirty years ago—more likely the reverse. You don’t need to memorize the entire Bible - but you do need to know the important names because then, if you’re reading it, the entire page will ‘turn blue’ like hyperlinks. And of course, that scholar probably looked at three or four more books before choosing the one charged. Now that number is down to 2%, and what’s clear is that the vast majority of people citing Kuhn have probably never read the book.Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. It’s very hard work to keep really focal attention on detailed material where you are looking for rare things.

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I occasionally sang with Andrew Abbott in choir — he was the bass in suspenders.The problem with project-specific files is that each project makes sense, but your overall biography starts to lose coherence — you don’t anymore have a personal library or personal notes, its just one bloody project after another. His readers, like his students, are often frustrated by an information world where everything is equally accessible and equally inviting. A historical sociologist with strong quantitative skills, he’s produced books on the history of academic disciplines and the dynamics of their formation and professionalization.