Gone Fishing for Turnips

The conclusion of a posting to Humanist that muses on the differences of a going towards and the being open to a coming...

What do these esoteric modes of reading or translating have to do with humanities computing? They begin to offer a glimpse of labels for a set of attitudes towards the act of processing text. The tools of humanities computing are for hunting and gathering: the going out. They are also for fishing: waiting to see what shows up. In a sense the tools of humanities computing can be set like traps or weirs.

The distinction between hunting and fishing breaks down when you consider the use of duck blinds. The distinction between gathering and fishing becomes moot when you consider harvesting a salmon run. Still there is some merit, I believe, in pondering whether one's orientation is towards aiming for a target, assembling a resource, or waiting to see what the network might bring.

I do like the idea of casting a net... gutting the fish not so much — though those guts do make good fertilizer for the garden.
And the words themselves lead us to different relations to the ecosystem of words.

And so for day 2362