Playing With Our Food

Don’t have time for a longer meditation right now, but I’ve been meaning to link to this delectable post from Maciej Ceglowski. Here’s a taste:

For as long as there has been writing, there have been cabalists eager to quantify, rearrange, and play with texts to reveal hidden inner meanings. The humanities have an understandable suspicion of such textual games, and a less understandable reluctance to explore the many worlds that fast computers and the mass digitization of texts are opening up. But as natural language programming techniques improve, the humanities are going to have to come to terms with computers, whether they like it or not. We geeks are going to eat all of their favorite books.