I spent part of today doing what I tend to do when I’m supposed to be reading Merleau-Ponty… tinkering with the machinery around the reading.
What started as an idea to build my own Obsidian theme turned into Understory, a warm, quiet theme for long-form reading, research, field notes, and writing. It grew out of the visual language I’ve been using for the Black Walnut Field Notes: parchment, walnut, moss, autumn colors, serif typography, and an interface that tries to stay underneath the work rather than becoming the work. I’ve published it on GitHub under an open-source license in case anyone else finds it useful.
That experiment naturally led to something I’ve wanted to do for a while: create a public GitHub repository for my research on ecological intentionality.
I’ve been publishing the curated field notes themselves at ecologicalintentionality.org, but GitHub gives me a different kind of public space. The website is primarily a place to read the field practice. The repository is a place to see the research changing over time: field notes, concepts, methodological documents, sources, links among thinkers and questions, and the revision history that comes with trying to make an argument while remaining willing to change it.
I’m increasingly interested in public scholarship that shows some of the process rather than presenting every idea as though it arrived fully formed. That doesn’t mean putting my entire private research environment online. My Obsidian vault still contains the messy laboratory: transcripts, private field notes, unfinished arguments, family notes, reading notes, and plenty of things that turn out to be wrong. The GitHub repository sits downstream from an intentional public boundary. Material enters it only after I’ve decided that it belongs in the public research record.
That distinction has become part of the method for me. Research involves choices about what we see, what we claim, what evidence warrants those claims, and when something is ready to become public. GitHub gives me a way to preserve that history of revision and connection without pretending that scholarship is ever really finished.
There’s also something fitting about doing this while working on ecological intentionality. The project keeps returning to questions of relation, difference, attention, and accountability. Making some of the research process visible feels like another way of practicing those questions rather than only writing about them.
So, as of today, there are two new little public spaces in the ecosystem:
Ecological Intentionality: Public Research Layer
Both are works in progress. That’s rather the point, I think 🙂