I had the day off today and as I sat in my studio painting, I listened to some videos in the background, a few of which dealt with how to do self-guided learning. One of the steps is to identify your research motivation. Why are you interested in studying this topic? Considering how many interests I’ve been obsessing over (with largely a feeling of getting nowhere, frankly), I figured it was high time to answer that question for myself.

I discovered the notion of the poetic web only this year, though the idea of “outdated” or “useless” websites has certainly been known to me for a long time. I grew up with computers and spent quite a few years in the pre-social media era browsing the web and finding weird and wonderful little corners. For some reason for the past few months the idea that the “useless web” was the standard nomenclature for such sites as they exist today crystalized in my mind and so I personally began to call it the “whimsical web” (if I actually read this text again, I will link to a blog post that I think I wrote on the subject, otherwise, assume I didn’t read this over before hitting “publish”) because it is definitely not useless. The fact that it is called the School for Poetic Computation should have clued me in, but it wasn’t until my Internet Phone Book finally arrived from its wild journey from Athens, Greece, then to some accidental random place then finally my house, that I realized that “poetic” was the most common name.

So, back to the research motivation.

For a long time (and probably still, for now, if I’m being honest) I’ve seen myself as an artist that codes. Software engineering is my day job, but creating art is my calling. And thus far in my life I have never been able to bridge the two. I’m currently trying to branch out by focusing more on the frontend side of things (user experience and how a website looks) rather than the backend, which is where my work expertise primarily lies (to that end I’m also studying graphic design, but that will be its own post in the future).

Let’s make a list actually, I think that will be better than long-winded paragraphs.

I want to study the poetic web because:

• I want to bridge the gap between my interest in art and my skill in coding
• I want to branch out in my software engineering career and have more fun with it, so I need to build these skills
• I want to create poetic websites for my own fun and enjoyment
• I want to create a body of work in an effort to build an independent career OR to show prospective employers
• I am bad at making friends online and would like to improve in this area and the poetic web seems like a good place for that sort of thing

Writing is thinking and so it was good for me to write out that list to actually see for myself what my motivations are. Next steps are probably to start compiling resources and applying my learnings and to outline my other research interests and the motivations therein.