Klein’s idea of hunters and gathers for research makes it seem like he believes that people who go out and aggressively look for information get more out of what their desired research topic is. But people who go into say, an archives room, and really don’t have a specific idea of what they want to research then they to can gain knowledge on a topic as well but in a different way.
Personally, I have always been a hunter type when it comes to trying to find evidence for a research paper of project. I knew what I wanted to study and knew exactly where to go to find my information and would dive in looking for specific evidence to back up specific claims. Most of the time I had an outline and already had what my claims were pre-information gathering. But recently I experienced the other side of these two types of research. For this past English paper I wrote, I had no idea of what I was going to write about. Especially on something that had to be in the archives.
I had never even read something out of the archives, or at least I didn’t have a clue if it was an archive if I was reading one. So, I walked into this project blinded. I literally opened a book and started reading. In Klein’s words, I was in the gathering position of research. And it turned out that I very easily found what I was going to write this paper about. The idea just popped into my head as I was reading student newspapers from the 80’s.
Before this paper, I had always thought that I had to have an idea of what my topic was and what claims I was going to make. This proved that you can easily come up with ideas while doing research even if you have no clue what you are researching.