...Literature is not Data: Against Digital Humanities by Stephen Marche
Take any meaningful line in literature and the same fugitive release from the status of information is there. Take my favorite line of Shakespeare’s, from Macbeth: “Light thickens, and the crows make wing to the rooky wood.” What is the difference between a crow and a rook? Nothing. What does it mean that light thickens? Who knows? The lines, as data, are more or less nonsense. And yet they illuminate their moment radiantly.
In Defense of Data: Responses to Stephen Marche's "Literature is not Data" by Scott Selisker and Holger S. Syme
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