research as leisure activity - by Celine Nguyen research as leisure activity

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—n

Virginia Woolf, writing in her diary in 1933, expressed essentially the same thing: “What an odd coincidence! that real life should provide precisely the situation I am writing about!”

People who read widely and attentively—and then publish the results of their reading—are also arguably performing research as a leisure activity.

I truly think that autodidacts are responsible for all that is good and great about alternative culture.

Research begins with a desire to ask and answer questions, thereby contributing to the greater sum of human knowledge and culture . Research often involves some hypothesis, question, or avenue of inquiry. Why is this plant a particular color? Why is this plant species a different color in different soil conditions or ecosystems? How is this color

research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined or antidisciplinary .

• 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.

Our brains have evolved to detect patterns and attribute significance to events that are entirely random, imagining signal where there is mostly noise. This tendency is probably hypertrophied in writers, who are constantly seeing the world in terms of narrative. In fact, for a while, encountering this very sentiment in books became yet another doub

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. (But this is oversimplifying things: the “sciences” and the “humanities”

it discourages a certain form of dilettantism—peering into an adjacent field that you don’t have the “right” background for, using techniques you aren’t “qualified” to be doing, introducing references and sources that are nontraditional and even looked down upon in your primary field. Research as a leisure activity isn’t constrained by these discip