Perhaps no human activity has as big a gap between private and public texture as "research". Research in private is a an endless stream of sketches, vague ideas, random experiments, jokes, nerdy OCD behaviors etc. Research in public is unreadable bureaucratic papers.
Conversation
It's a point every researcher knows but surprisingly few have articulated well. Only good example I know of is Karl Weiss' "What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is" (it's about management research, but applies to any kind) jstor.org/stable/2393789
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My "research" from back when I was doing the academic kind is in the form of half a dozen journal papers and a dozen or so conference papers. But the real thing was in the form of about a dozen 3-ring binders of handwritten notes on 1-sided used printer paper.
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Unfortunately, I recycled all those notes at some point because they were occupying too much shelf space. Wish I'd kept them. Re-reading my papers, I can't actually reconstruct my thinking path towards them, which was 90% of the value for me personally.
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In a way, for my current interests, twitter has replaced my 3-ring binder notebooks. So it's going to be preserved for better or worse :D
It's an awful place to keep a research notebook, but it's better than many other places you could keep one.
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If the shitposting doesn't segue into utterly irrational levels of OCD and rigorously magical thinking, it isn't science :D
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