Because I get to have conversations with people like this.

We’re in the middle of this Writing in the Quantitative Disciplines workshop, which is absolutely fascinating–from a technology standpoint, from an ethnographic standpoint, from a pedagogical standpoint–just fascinating.

One of my favorite moments came at the reception when Bryan and I began talking about tagging. And we’re both pretty excited about it and we’re explaining it and basically riffing off of each other. We were already on one side and the faculty on the other, but the space between us seemed to widen a bit. They weren’t quite ready for folksonomies yet. It was quite amusing.

Lots of good conversations have taken place and it seems like people are really processing a lot of ideas here. One of the things that a group of us were talking about later was that we (being humanities people) don’t always understand what the Quantitative Discipline folks meant by writing. Which sounds weird, but it seemed like they were trying to make a distinction between the kind of text-based writing that humanities people do and some other kind of writing that science people do. Writing is writing, right? It’s just the conventions and style that change? What’s your definition of writing?