There was an industrial revolution involving iron. There was a war in the 1860s and so on. What surprises me most, is that I am not more surprised. In part, I suspect the banal character of most ngrams and network analyses is a reflection >of the extent to which books, indexes, and text, have themselves been a very effective >technology for thinking about words.
And that as long as we are using digital technology to re-examine text, we are going to have >a hard time competing with two hundred years of library science, and humanist enquiry.
It's easy to forget that these have years of evolution behind them, designed for reasons; we have to be careful not to over estimate ourselves and the 'digital revolution'. As Hitchcock notes in the first quote above, we have been trained in these methods because they work. This is not random. There are reasons we do these things. The positivist outlook we should also avoid that Hitchcock implies is that the digital is what we have been waiting for to 'crack' the proverbial humanist code.
Hitchcock, Tim. "Big Data for Dead People: Digital Readings and the Conundrums of Positivism." December 9, 2013.