I recommend reading Celine Nguyen’s post on “Research as leisure activity”.
I’ve been doing a lot of this leisurely research lately. Picking a topic I’m interested in, reading broadly, archiving and programming around the topic. And finally publishing the results. There’s a thing that happens over a month of doing this, which I call “Surfing”: your tiny research project build off one another until you gather a lot of momentum.
Want an example of how “surfing” works?
Writing about an obscure post-Soviet device from the 90s led me to Hugo Lyppens, the creator of a similar Western device. Hugo explained a key part of the device – Reed Solomon Error Correction – in Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Dr. Dobb’s website is barely functioning and you won’t find Hugo’s 1997 article anywhere online. After some research, my site is now the 2nd place on the Web where you can find an archive of Dr. Dobb’s articles from 1988 – 2009. I shared the old article with Hugo and he enjoyed the nostalgia. I then kept archiving Dr. Dobbs’ website material, and Microsoft Systems Journal and so on and so on…
A couple of quotes from Celine’s post:
research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined or antidisciplinary. In academia, you receive specific training in a narrow field of specialization, which creates certain opportunities for your work and forecloses others. Most notably, 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 disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms. Any discipline can offer interesting ideas, tools, techniques.
Who is doing this kind of research as leisure activity? Artists, often.
