Timeline for What if you love your field but can't take the heat of academia?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 27, 2015 at 13:47 | comment | added | Ooker | @jakebeal that's what I'm looking for. I think you can embed that into your answer | |
| Nov 27, 2015 at 13:32 | comment | added | jakebeal | @Ooker A few of (many) examples: you can make a career out of it in science journalism or publishing. You can get a comet named after yourself as an amateur astronomer. You can improve your parenting of your children by being better able to find good advice and ignore bad advice. You can participate politically in a better informed way and improve the community in which you live. There's really no end of ways in which amateur engagement with science might be of value to a person, depending on their individual mix of goals, desires, and circumstances. | |
| Nov 27, 2015 at 13:19 | comment | added | Ooker | @jakebeal can you name some benefits? I guess money is not one. | |
| Nov 27, 2015 at 12:46 | comment | added | jakebeal | @Ooker Yes, there can be many practical benefits as well. But is not satisfaction enough? | |
| Nov 27, 2015 at 4:45 | comment | added | Ooker | is there any benefit to engage with the first level? Of course besides the satisfactory of gaining more knowledge | |
| Nov 19, 2015 at 3:15 | comment | added | SAH | The goal may be to see how the text is working, how it achieves its ends, how it is using language, how it establishes its internal order, and so on. Much of this requires language and philological expertise as well as training in the skills of reading. ..Not trying to suggest I'm not interested in the other goals of humanities scholarship, too, but I realize I have to pay my dues in order to get there. | |
| Nov 19, 2015 at 1:36 | comment | added | jakebeal | @SAH Not sure what you mean by "reading texts themselves"---typically "a reading" is actually an examination and interpretation of a text in service of some goal, even if that goal simply be to construct an experience for the modern reader that is equivalent of what contemporaries would have had. | |
| Nov 19, 2015 at 1:15 | comment | added | SAH | Humanities scholarship need not be about the things you mentioned (although it often is). Reading texts themselves is a huge part of what humanitarians do. (Just see page 2 of your link!) | |
| Nov 19, 2015 at 1:12 | comment | added | jakebeal | @SAH Loving Chaucer, learning everything you can about Chaucer, and even reading Chaucer in a different way is not the same as leading scholarly research on Chaucer---everything you described is the first "exploring ideas" category. Scholarly research on the subject is more like these references you might find on Google Scholar, which dig deeply into the relationship of the Canterbury Tales to other aspects of the era, development of ideas, or the human experiences in general. | |
| Nov 19, 2015 at 1:07 | comment | added | SAH | Thank you. I wonder how this all would translate into humanities disciplines. Let's say my great love is Chaucer. I know Chaucer front and back; all my time goes to Chaucer. My goal in life is to learn everything there is to know about Chaucer. Additionally, I think I have a new way of reading Chaucer. So I suppose I want to "lead my own investigation" in a sense. How do I do that? Can I? | |
| Nov 18, 2015 at 22:09 | history | answered | jakebeal | CC BY-SA 3.0 |