Welcome! Distillations/Constellations #1
Welcome! It's 2024 and I'm finally hopping on the newsletter bandwagon.
Why the title, distillations/constellations? In 2017, I came across this paper: Research Debt, by Chris Olah and Shan Carter. It changed the way I think about my approach to learning and contributing.
Here's the basic idea: the way that (academic) research is currently structured means that in order to contribute to a field, you have to first "understand vast bodies of work that came before them...[before] throwing new stones onto the top of the mountain and making it a little taller for whoever comes next." They refer to this climb as a mountain of debt, and argue that we need more "paths and staircases" between mountains – "interpretive labour", as David Graeber named it, or as the authors here call it, research distillation.
Doing this distillation is more than just creating a summary of a piece of work - it requires deeply understanding the original idea, and creatively transforming it into something that easily makes sense to others so that they can take something useful from it to benefit their own work, potentially in a different arena. A kind of translation, if you will.
I believe this role is a crucial part of enabling people from different spaces to collaborate, weaving connections between disparate movements or fields. I've been part of so many conferences, meetings, workshops or even just large conversations where people seem to be talking at odds with one another, but only because they're using jargon specific to their fields, or assuming knowledge specific to their space.
It's here that my passion lies. I want to make it easier for people to collaborate, for bridges to be built between movements, for knowledge and expertise to be able to be meaningfully shared beyond a specific field.
I had this idea in mind when I signed up to write my book – the very format of the Inklings series ('Big Ideas To Carry In Your Pocket') is one of few places I've found that actually welcome that kind of distillation work. And I realised while writing the book that I really love doing that kind of work, though I will admit there's something very humbling about summarising an 87-page research paper I worked on for months with a team, into a single paragraph...!
So, this newsletter is where I'll do more of that distillation work, drawing on papers and ideas I come across, and also ideas and things I'm learning from my consulting practice – which right now is shaping up to be a fascinating portfolio of work ranging from disinformation to financial crime. I hope you enjoy it!
Some of my favourite examples of research distillation
The OG, Distill, where the original idea of Research Debt was published.
Explorable Explanations, by Nicky Case - one of my favourites is this game on trust.
Unravelling DNA – my zine project, an explainer on the political and social consequences of DNA testing and databases.
This visual introduction to machine learning, by Stephanie Yee and Tony Chu
Pretty much everything that A People's Guide To Tech do.
PS. I've got all link tracking tracking turned off so I can't see whether you've read this or not, because really, doesn't technology gather enough data on us already? But I'm very open to feedback – drop me a line on mail[at]zararah.net if you have thoughts!