The sceptic who states that data mining and pattern recognition in works of literature debases close reading ignores the prevalent mood of human action in a time of computational ubiquity – close reading has a role in the humanities, but it will not deal with the sprawl of textual information being produced daily and added to the incomprehensible deluge of textual information in the digital age. There will be no argument here that canonical texts should not be subject to close readings, but there is an underlying argument that digital humanities methods are necessary and appropriate as we attempt to grasp the information landscape available to us. It is this availability which is critical; we exist alongside, and interact with, computational devices continuously, and these devices offer easy, instant, and unhindered access to incomprehensible amounts of information. These conditions of availability have not been part of human life before, and hence the humanities require new, appropriate, and digitally focused methods to deal with this new condition of being-in-the-world.