The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

Currently re-visiting and re-describing old tumulus tombs in my area where the last survey was decades ago and where no current description exists. Also, I found tombs via Lidar maps that have been unaccounted before and I am cataloguing them. All that as a hobby and as a member of an association of local history.

Things can be done and should!!

What a wonderful article! Thanks for sharing!

I’ve been thinking a lot about how research — as both leisure and serious inquiry — is making a comeback in unexpected ways. One sign of that resurgence is the huge interest in so-called “personal knowledge management” (PKM) tools like Obsidian, Roam Research, or Notion. People love referencing Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method, because it promises to structure and connect scattered notes into a web of insights.

But here’s the interesting part: the tools themselves are often treated as ends in their own right, rather than as vehicles for truly deep research or the creation of original knowledge. We end up collecting articles, or carefully formatting our digital note-cards, without necessarily moving to the next step — true synthesis and exploration. In that sense, we risk becoming (to borrow from the article) “collectors rather than readers.”

I read Mortimer Adler’s "How to read a book" 30 years ago. It mentions severl levels of reading-ability. The highest, he says, is “syntopical reading”, which is a powerful antidote to this trend mentioned above. Instead of reading one source in isolation or simply chasing random tangents, syntopical reading demands that we gather multiple perspectives on a single topic. We compare their arguments and frameworks, actively looking for deeper patterns or contradictions. This process leads to truly “connecting the dots” and arriving at new insights — which, in my view, is one of the real goals of research.

So doing research well requires:

1. *A sense of wonder*: the initial spark that keeps us motivated.

2. *A well-formed question*: something that orients our curiosity but leaves room for discovery.

3. *Evidence gathering from diverse sources*: that’s where syntopical reading really shines.

4. *A culminating answer* (even if it simply leads to more questions).

5. *Community*: sharing and testing ideas with others.

What stands out is that none of this necessarily requires an academic institution or official credentials. In fact, it might be even better done outside formal structures, where curiosity can roam freely without departmental silos. In other words, anyone can be an amateur researcher, provided they move beyond the mere collection of ideas toward genuine synthesis and thoughtful communication.

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"How to read a book" sounds like a ridiculous premise for a book, but I can't recommend it highly enough. It's one of the best introductions to academic skills I've ever read. I assimilated much of Adler's advice at university through trial-and-error, but seeing the reading process analysed and systematised into an algorithm was genuinely enlightening.

Worth noting that Adler was also the editor of Encyclopdia Britannica's Great Books Series:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...