research as leisure activity

  • “my favorite form of entertainment is downloading PDFs” ⤴️

  • “’ll describe Are.na in the plainest possible fashion first: it’s a website where you can privately or collaboratively save images, text, PDFs, website links, and more into “channels.” It’s kind of like Pinterest for artists, researchers, and academics.” ⤴️

  • “the best software products aren’t just assemblages of functionality” ⤴️

  • “hey organize and shape how you think, and they create or sustain a particular lifestyle:” ⤴️

  • “It’s about what software promises us—that it will help us become who we want to be” ⤴️

  • “research as leisure activity” ⤴️

  • “a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials.” ⤴️

  • “Research begins with a desire to ask and answer questions, thereby contributing to the greater sum of human knowledge and culture.” ⤴️

  • “Research requires commitment to evidence, broadly defined.” ⤴️

  • “The important thing is that there’s a commitment to some concept of truth and accuracy; there’s also a recognition of how partial and circumscribed truth and accuracy can be.” ⤴️

  • “Research requires understanding the history, theory, and practices of the discipline(s) you work within. Each discipline has its own particular history, and contemporary researchers are often elaborating upon, responding to, and reacting against that history.” ⤴️

  • “situate them in existing bodies of knowledge.” ⤴️

  • “Research isn’t just about collecting references and evidence and the ideas of other people. It isn’t even about synthesizing them in an interesting way. Research is about advancing new arguments and ideas in some form” ⤴️

  • “Research ideally has contemporary relevance, but should not exclusively devoted to contemporary concerns.” ⤴️

  • “There’s value in basic research that seems to have no immediate relevance to society, but can be useful later.” ⤴️

  • “Research is strengthened by a social and intellectual community. It typically requires mentors, peers, and mentees whose ideas and perspectives bring new energy and perspectives into the research project.” ⤴️

  • “Research is conventionally understood as occurring within academia—and potentially in government or corporate research labs, think tanks, and similar institutions.” ⤴️

  • “Research as leisure activity is directed by passions and instincts. It’s fundamentally very personal” ⤴️

  • “if one topic leads you to another topic that seems totally unrelated, that’s something to get excited about—not fearful of.” ⤴️

  • “It’s a style of research that is well-suited for people okay with being dilettantes, who are comfortable with an idiosyncratic, non-comprehensive education in a particular domain.” ⤴️

  • “research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined or antidisciplinary” ⤴️

  • “Research as a leisure activity isn’t constrained by these disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms. Any discipline can offer interesting ideas, tools, techniques.” ⤴️

  • “Research as leisure activity involves as much rigor as necessary” ⤴️

  • “Who is doing this kind of research as leisure activity? Artists, often.” ⤴️

  • research for those who (think they) would rather create

  • “Maria Popova, who started writing a blog in 2006—now called The Marginalian—which collects her reading across literature, philosophy, psychology, the sciences. Her blog feels like leisurely research, to me, because it’s an accumulation of curious, semi-directed reading, which over time build up into a dense network of references and ideas—supported by previous reading, and enriched by her own commentary and links to similar ideas by other thinkers.” ⤴️

  • “disappointed by some of the actual interfaces being produced by the ivory tower” ⤴️

  • “There’s Geoffrey Litt, whose independent research lab publishes well-researched, thoughtful online articles about computing, software, and interfaces. And Andy Matuschak is an interesting example; he’s an independent researcher who solicits community funding through Patreon to conduct research on novel user interfaces.” ⤴️

  • “pretty much every writer, essayist, “cultural critic,” etc—especially someone who’s writing more as a vocation than a profession—has research as their leisure activity” ⤴️

  • “the best content on the internet is created by people who have turned research into their leisure activity.” ⤴️

  • “When I was a young teenager on tumblr, basically everyone I followed and looked up to adhered to the following archetypes:” ⤴️

  • “A woman who just wanted to buy a bra and ended up becoming an expert on Edwardian corsetry (and, by extension, early 20th century sartorial techniques, the labor struggles of the English garment industry, and all kinds of vaguely related topics)” ⤴️

  • “Someone who started off posting scans of obscure Japanese fashion magazines and ended up, essentially, becoming an amateur archivist of 1990s fashion editorials that are exclusively preserved on an obscure tumblr or Livejournal” ⤴️

  • “autodidacts are responsible for all that is good and great about alternative culture.” ⤴️

  • “in the discourse of our times, people with “autistic special interests”—but I kind of hate this term, as it implies that the desire to autodidactically develop expertise in a field and share it with others is an unusual desire, instead of a deeply human one…and it seems part of a broader cultural trend to restrict and even pathologize fairly common human experiences into discrete identity categories” ⤴️

  • calling something autistic does NOT dehumanise it — and yes overpathologisation can be a problem — but a better framing of this might be that neurodiversity produces different forms of research and that we can better enable these methods that are engaged with more by marginalised identities. you are equally producing a new discrete identity category of ‘autodidacts’, you’re just uncomfortable with being compared to autistic people, perhaps?

  • “telescoping out into bigger-picture concerns.” ⤴️

  • this also speaks of known autistic thinking styles

  • “you’ll end up making connections between your existing interests and new ideas or topics. Everything gets pulled into the orbit of your intellectual curiosity.” ⤴️

  • “ou can go deeper and deeper into a narrow topic, one that seems fascinatingly trivial and end up learning about the big peer:” ⤴️