New Literary History

Culture. Theory. Data. In that group of three terms, the obvious interloper is data—a word not widely used in the humanities until this century. Not that humanists ever lacked data. Our sources and archives are data in the oldest sense of the word. Daniel Rosenberg's careful history of data concludes that it has long been "a rhetorical concept," meaning simply "that which is given prior to argument."¹ Of course, evidence is never given in an absolute sense. As Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson have reminded us, every number in a table is collected and constructed by human hands.² But these constructions are converted into data when someone provisionally accepts them as given for the sake of a particular argument. Historical sources play a similar rhetorical role, and Rosenberg shows that the seventeenth century discussed them in a similar way, writing about "historical data" and even "scriptural data."³

By the late eighteenth century, however, data was specializing to contexts like "medicine, finance, natural history, and geography."⁴ By the twentieth century, it had become strongly associated with the sciences and with systematic, numeric recordkeeping. Economists certainly had data. But historians believed they had data only when they were working with a document like a ledger or a census. The word felt alien enough that it was often invoked to mark a divide between the humanities and social sciences. In 1979, for instance, Tony Judt pushed back against social-scientific work in history by remarking that such projects "resort to quantified and quantifiable data to compensate for the lack of an argument and the glaring absence of conceptual insight."⁵ If "conceptual insight" is akin to theory, Judt saw data as a poor substitute.

By the 1970s, data was becoming a metonym not only for the evidentiary procedures of science but for computers in particular. Lawrence Stone, criticizing quantitative work in the humanities around the same time as Judt, envisioned a scene where "squads of diligent assistants assemble data, encode it, programme it, and pass it through the maw [End Page 519] of the computer."⁶ Computers may seem less alien today than they did in 1979 (at any rate, they less commonly have a "maw"), but they are still strongly associated with the word data. So including data in the title of this special issue is probably enough to suggest that its essays will discuss the role that computational methods and digital media play in contemporary research on culture. Which they do.

On the other hand, as computers become increasingly embedded in daily life, data has expanded to cover a much wider range of things than it did forty years ago. The word still tends to imply that the information it describes is numeric or can be turned into numbers. But these days, what can't be turned into numbers? Even our recipes and home movies are transmitted digitally. Moreover, contemporary statistical models are no longer restricted to overtly quantitative problems with a small number of variables.⁷ Machine learning can create variables as needed to model images, social networks, and unstructured text. Most of us regularly use models created this way to answer questions and find documents. Studying culture with data is no longer a specialized practice requiring "squads of diligent assistants" who "encode" variables for analysis. It is something most scholars already do, consciously or not.

For that reason, the title of this issue is not something like "Culture, Theory, Digital Humanities." Instead of advancing a subfield, we hope to explore theoretical questions that may be relevant to anyone studying culture, whether they use computational models explicitly in their research or "only" to translate unfamiliar languages, navigate social networks, and find sources. In shaping the event that brought these authors together (a symposium in Charlottesville, Virginia in May 2022), we invited people who work in media studies, information science, sociology, and anthropology, as well as historians and literary scholars. Literary history was often the center of our conversation, as you might expect from the title of this journal. But we came to...