If you bring your experience – may that be formal academic knowledge and familiarity with the subject or situations and conversations from your life – into your interpretation of research objects and findings, it is much more likely you are able find and to compare to similar works.
Of course, this concept also applies to everyday life as learning is the foundation of improvement which, ultimately, is the goal of our evolution; survival through fitness and adaptation.
In Hermeneutics (the art of interpretation) and in the Humanities in general, there often is the notion that the more background information you bring to the table, the easier it gets to accurately and comprehensively interpret a found document or historical artifact.
- Keywords: reading, research
- Source: Taken from discussions in this seminar 2022-11-08 History “as it really was”
- Related:
- This is similar to the idea that Proficiency comes from repetition since you need to be very experienced to become very good at interpreting artifacts and document.
- Interpretation can be a form of empathy: elementary-vs-full-empathic-understanding