>We talk of “making discoveries” as if forming them out of clay. As if we craft discoveries from the malleable world with our own two hands

I don't get this opening. Do we? Isn't this more like "invention"?

My understanding of the word "discovery" (today) is exactly as what "the 18th-century lexicographer Samuel Johnson" defined in his dictionary, (cited in this article), “the act of finding any thing hidden,” or else, “the act of revealing or disclosing any secret.”

Lovely piece—subject matter wise and for the authors subtle reasoning on meaning of discovery. Not so delicate you can’t follow along.

Personally, I learned to collect things in my younger days-—actual objects. Always at a monetary cost, so decisions hade to be made. I would console myself, leaving something behind, with the idea another person will find this something later and experience the joy of discovery. And I, this time will satisfy myself with the bitter sweet feeling of letting something go.

This project was publicly funded. However, I cannot find any downloadable version of this database.

https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/blog/copyright/ suggests they don't want you to download it

Of course they don't, but perhaps they ought to allow it, or even to make it easy to do.

Most likely they don't feel comfortable enough with the quality of their extracted data. The original text is in the public domain though, so it's only a matter of time before other replicate this work and make their version more easily accessible to others. For example, Wikidata is a publicly downloadable, general-purpose database which provides a way to enter detailed, referenced information about "lexicographical" entities, including sense definitions and quotes. So anything that's in the Johnson could easily be posted there.

Writing things into a computer lets you forget them, because you can search for them later.