research as leisure activity

When research is your leisure activity, 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. You can go deeper and deeper into a narrow topic, one that seems fascinatingly trivial and end up learning about the big topics: gender, culture, econ... See more

Concretely: researchers need to do a literature review that is simultaneously comprehensive and specific, that helps situate them in existing bodies of knowledge.

Wildenhaus’s description has stayed with me because it reflects how the best software products aren’t just assemblages of functionality ,exposed by particular formal elements (links, buttons, icons, menus). Rather, they organize and shape how you think, and they create or sustain a particular lifestyle:

• How you think: In 1985, the writer and critic

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Research culminates in some output . 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—typically a conference presentation, paper, book, etc.

the orbit of your intellectual curiosity

Research is strengthened by a social and intellectual community .

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

Research as leisure activity is directed by passions and instincts . It’s fundamentally very personal: What are you interested in now ? It’s fine, and maybe even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. And if one topic leads you to another topic that seems totally unrelated, that’s something to get excited about—no... See more

Research requires commitment to evidence, broadly defined. In the sciences, this might involve running experiments and quantitatively analyzing the results; in the humanities, this might involve translating or transcribing primary sources and qualitatively interrogating them.