In a January 23, 2012, New York Times Opinionator column on digital humanities, Stanley Fish explores Stephen Ramsay’s new book Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism.

“At times [Ramsay] argues that however alien algorithmic criticism may seem, it is really a technologically ramped up version of what literary criticism has always been. Although the rhetoric of traditional literary criticism emphasizes getting at the truth about a text as its end point, in practice what critics do is try out one hypothesis, and then another, and in the process re-characterize or deform the text.