Memo+3+Habits

• **Do you have more trouble articulating your frame (social theoretical questions) or object?** Usually the frame is easier for me to articulate, if in a broader sense.

**• Do you tend to project-hop or to stick to a project, and what explains this?** Once I choose a project, I tend to stick with it. I spend a lot of time brainstorming in the beginning to try and find the best thing.

**• Do you tend to be more interested in internal dynamics, or external determinations? In the terms laid out by Keller, do you tend to focus so intently on the object of your concern that context falls away (i.e. are you obsessive compulsive, rather than paranoid)? Is your desire is to name, specify and control your object? Is your desire is for figure, its ground your annoyance? Or are you paranoid, context being your focus and obsession? All is signal. Only begrudgingly will you admit that something is noise, outside the scope of your project? Figure is hard to come by. Its ground has captured your attention.** Actually I tend to like both, in a way. I tend to focus either very small scale (details of a design), or very large scale (the culture, why it would be used). It's the middle ground I've found I sometimes have trouble with.

**• What do you do with unusual or counter examples? Are you drawn to “the deviant,” or rather repulsed by it?** It depends on the type of research I'm doing. If I'm doing a scientific experiment and that data point really matters, yes I want an explanation and will go look for one. If I want to find out what the general culture is, individual anecdotes aren't going to be particularly useful, but they might be if I'm looking for something else.

**• Do you tend to over-impose logics on the world, or to resist the construction of coherent narratives?** I think I tend more towards the resisting.

**• Do you tend to over-generalize, or to hold back from overarching argument?** I don't think I over-generalize, but I don't want to rely on anecdotal evidence either.

**• Do you like to read interpretations different than your own, or do you tend to feel scooped or intimidated by them?** It depends on what would be intimidated. If it's something I feel is fundamental to myself, it isn't exactly pleasant for anyone to accept their world view might be wrong. But I do like to know what's out there, because if you are right and you want to explain why to someone, you have to understand their views and opinions first.

**• Do you tend to change an argument as you flesh it out, or do you tend to make the argument work, no matter what?** I adapt, if my opinion is wrong I do want to find out, and find out why.

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">**• Do you tend to think in terms of “this is kind of like” (metaphorically)? Do you hold to examples that “say it all,” leveraging metonymic thinking?** <span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">More metaphorically I think.

<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">**• Do you like gaming understanding in this way? Does it frustrate you that your answers often don’t fit easily on either side of the binaries set up by the questions? (Jakobson suggests that over attachment to a simple binary scheme is a “continuity disorder.”)** <span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">One of my favorite parts of the critical thinking course I took at RPI was coming up for other possible answers besides the two implied by faulty arguments. So yes, I am frustrated by binaries, if sometimes overwhelmed by possibilities in non-binary systems.