Digital "Close" Reading

So I'm testing out a theory. I recently read Stanley Fish's article on The Digital Humanities and interpretation entitled Mind Your P's and B's. If you haven't read his three article series on the Digital Humanities, you are seriously missing out. Major kudos to my classmate Kaleigh for getting in touch with him about her project!

Anywho, in this article he asserts that we can begin our interpretation by using the tools of the digital age (i.e. a simple computer search for the number of p's and b's in a passage) as the spring board for our interpretation, by doing some very quick text mining, seeing what the numbers reveal, and interpreting those numbers. In Fish's reply to Kaleigh's email, he says the reverse might also be possible, which is what I've always considered text mining useful for: "If you had formulated a reading of Shakespeare and wanted to know whether certain formal patterns would lend it support , it might well be useful to run the numbers."

Might nothing, Mr. Fish. I say we come to the text with our interpretation pretty much already in our heads according to our life experience. Certain things are going to jump out at us and we're just mining the text for more support for our position. Hence, the digital tools we have just speed up that process.