How/We select: Difference between revisions

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Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=How}} <h1>We browse & we reap</h1> <p>OK, ask it—why say we browse in discussing how we study? Isn't browsing sort of casual; studying really serious. According to Google, to browse means to "survey goods for sale in a leisurely and casual way" and to study means to "devote time and attention to acquiring knowledge on (an academic subject), especially by means of books," and somewhat more generally to "look at closely in order to observe or read..."
 
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<h1>We browse & we reap</h1>
<h1>We curate & organize</h1>
<p>OK, ask it—why say we browse in discussing how we study? Isn't browsing sort of casual; studying really serious. According to Google, to browse means to "survey goods for sale in a leisurely and casual way" and to study means to "devote time and attention to acquiring knowledge on (an academic subject), especially by means of books," and somewhat more generally to "look at closely in order to observe or read."</p>
<p>If reaping gathers and preps cultural resources for for effective use, curating assesses and presents those resources to their potential users, promoting discrimination and efficiency in their use. </p>


<p>Google gives us good, ordinary usage, meanings conditioned by current, everyday life. We might wonder why Google thinks that browsing primarily involves goods for sale, but let's skip over that and note how it links study to acquiring knowledge on academic subjects through books. Indeed, most of us encounter study as something that happened, or should have happened but maybe didn't, in our schooling. Even when we did it well, study in schools often seems heavy, a bit oppressive, a chore, something we did because we had to do it, something some times, even often, we wouldn't do because having to do it made little sense to us, relative to other possibilities. Why does the ordinary meaning of study have all these implications?</p>
<p>Curating creates a stream of commentary by diverse persons—others, yet like ourselves—to inform, orient, and inspire how we engage with our culture. Good curating should not tell others what to think about a work, nor merely impart information to them about the work. Rather it should help others situate the work in a context meaningful to them so that they can decide how they want to engage with the work and experience it firmly and fully.</p>


<p>Think back. Those academic subjects, how did we encounter them? Through our lessons, our assignments, the textbook; prepare this Monday, that Tuesday, the quiz will follow. That's how we, <b>billions</b> of persons, have encountered what it means to study. Let's ask whether that encounter has something unusual, incomplete or limiting in it. In the rest of life, many will continue having to study in much the same way whenever our boss requires a full report tomorrow on whatever his boss requires of him. School sometimes does prepare for the prevailing modes of work. Is that the sum of possibility?</p>
<p>On {{apts}} we seek to promote engagement with the resources of our cultures in and through the digital commons. To do so well, we need to think clearly about how engaging cultural resources takes place in the context of the digital commons. The challenges there may differ significantly from those encountered historically in contexts where material objects embody the cultural resources.</p>


<p>On occasion, a person will get interested in studying something, not prompted by some assignment, but drawn to it out of curiosity, interest, taking it up freely, for its own sake. If we compare that to the typical form of study in schooling, we see that the latter short-circuits much in the process of study. When directed by assignments, study becomes predictable, constrained, orderly, and testable. Our schooling habituates us to bypass the foreplay of study, to limit its passion, to mandate and modulate our engagement in it, to convert it into fungible units that publicly aggregate into an education or career.</p>
<p>Let's leave moot, for now at least, the question whether people can more productively create cultural resources by using material or digital tools -- in both cases the human will and mind may be the constant limiting factor. Once a work has been created, it gains its cultural power and significance as others reproduce, store, transmit, retrieve, apply it in shaping their lives. The capacities and limitations of these functions in the material marketplace and the digital commons differ radically, at the root, which creates profound problems for understanding how to curate cultural resources in the digital commons. How can and should we curate cultural resources to promote their fulfilling use through the digital commons? On {{apts}}, we should make that question a central concern.</p>


<p>In the fullness of life, a person does not spontaneously know to devote time and attention to studying this or that, especially through books. In the fullness of life, one commits time, and directs attention, and acquires books and other cultural resources, through extensive activities that constitute integral parts of a place to study in our lives. It encompasses browsing in a leisurely and casual way, surveying not merely goods for sale, but the possibilities of life. Study, examining life lived for its own sake, starts with browsing -- with surfing the waters of the world, learning to judge the swell, to catch the wave. In real life, lived well, browsing, feeling at ease, slowly getting serious about this or that and having a sense of what comes next: all is essential to good studying.</p>
<!--<p>Let's say that good curating enhances the quality of judgment that persons can bring to bear upon the resources of their culture. That may be a fine statement as a general proposition, but in lived experience judgment <i>takes place</i> — it happens, not in general, but in a defined time and place, exercised by a definite person about something in particular. </p> -->
 
<p>And the person who browses will find it preparing her to reap. In browsing, we attend lightly to many things, registering possibilities. Rarely do we see a full and fix purpose at first sight. Purpose emerges as we perceive nuances and stake out what's sustainable among alternative paths. All that, browsing makes possible and as purpose firms our prior scoping out the field of possibility then enables us to make choices directing our attention with conviction and verity. Having browsed well, we we reap richly.

Latest revision as of 20:58, 27 April 2026

This site is is a project prototype, developed over several years ending in spring 2023. It remains online, open for reference, Read Only, with the comment links active for visitor input.

We curate & organize

If reaping gathers and preps cultural resources for for effective use, curating assesses and presents those resources to their potential users, promoting discrimination and efficiency in their use.

Curating creates a stream of commentary by diverse persons—others, yet like ourselves—to inform, orient, and inspire how we engage with our culture. Good curating should not tell others what to think about a work, nor merely impart information to them about the work. Rather it should help others situate the work in a context meaningful to them so that they can decide how they want to engage with the work and experience it firmly and fully.

On A Place to Study we seek to promote engagement with the resources of our cultures in and through the digital commons. To do so well, we need to think clearly about how engaging cultural resources takes place in the context of the digital commons. The challenges there may differ significantly from those encountered historically in contexts where material objects embody the cultural resources.

Let's leave moot, for now at least, the question whether people can more productively create cultural resources by using material or digital tools -- in both cases the human will and mind may be the constant limiting factor. Once a work has been created, it gains its cultural power and significance as others reproduce, store, transmit, retrieve, apply it in shaping their lives. The capacities and limitations of these functions in the material marketplace and the digital commons differ radically, at the root, which creates profound problems for understanding how to curate cultural resources in the digital commons. How can and should we curate cultural resources to promote their fulfilling use through the digital commons? On A Place to Study, we should make that question a central concern.


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