If you read \u201cHistorical Botany in the Carolinas\u201d and erroneously thought \u201cscience,\u201d you\u2019re not alone\u2014so did the Andrew Mellon Foundation. May X and preconceptions sometimes don\u2019t get along, but Furman\u2019s Chris Blackwell is happy to mend fences.<\/p>\n
\u201cMellon doesn\u2019t fund science,\u201d Blackwell, the Louis G. Forgione University Professor of Classics and class creator, said. \u201cBut this is a set of questions that you will never get to answer if you take a purely scientific approach to them. This is a liberal arts problem because it\u2019s a problem of science, it\u2019s a problem of history, and it\u2019s a problem of language because these guys were naming plants back before there were standard names for plants . . . We had particular arguments about how the data related to identification of plant specimens ought to be captured, which is different from what the regular biologists tend to do, and they have failed to notice that what they do has never worked.\u201d<\/p>\n
That sales pitch was enough to convince the Mellon Foundation<\/a> that the work Blackwell and his class were doing met its higher education and scholarship program requirements, resulting in \u201c$50,000 to experiment with work on historical botany as a liberal arts project,\u201d Blackwell said. \u201cThese guys\u201d were the first English and French settlers on the east coast of North America, and many of the plant species they documented can still be found in European museums.<\/p>\n Blackwell and his wife, Amy, who owns a Ph.D. in plant and environmental science from Clemson, ran across some of these displays during a visit to the National History Museum<\/a> in London and were surprised to see that many had been plucked from South Carolina in the early 1700s. With that, the seeds for a May X were planted. Pun intended.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause of my work (with) dead languages and manuscripts I\u2019m really interested in grammar and language and syntax, which is the same kind of data-organization problem. How can you capture relationships among things where you might have many different views of what that relationship means?\u201d Blackwell said. \u201cIt is a mistake to treat this identification as an actual description. It\u2019s much more like a series of commentaries where people have different opinions, and peoples\u2019 opinions change over time. You may think the old guys are wrong, but you don\u2019t want to get rid of that.\u201d<\/p>\n Kara DeGroote \u201916, a biology major, signed up for the class because it represented an opportunity to do plant research. She also got a crash course in how much the English language has changed over the past few centuries.<\/p>\n