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Marche's article criticizes digital humanists for a perceived failure to adequately address the human and interpretive nature of literature by treating it as data. Two core issues identified by Marche is that literature, unlike statistics, is terminally incomplete - that parts frequently are missing or shifting - and that data mining efforts fail to account for context in literature. Marche argues that current data mining efforts are flawed because "algorithms are inherently fascistic" and that "meaning is mushy." Marche does not oppose digitization efforts and in fact welcomes the translation of texts into digital formats, rather Marche argues that literary meaning cannot be as readily quantified as numbers - that "insight remains handmade."

"In Defense of Data" presents two articles, "The Digital Inhumanities?" by Scott Selisker and "Imaginary Targets" by Holger Schott Syme, in response to an article by Stephen Marche, "Literature is Not Data: Against Digital Humanities." Selisker's essay focuses primarily on dismantling the idea that digitization removes the human element from interpretation and enforces a quasi-authoritarian view of literature. Syme's essay addresses both Marche's misunderstanding of the motivations of the movement against Google Book's digitization efforts as well as Marche's inaccurate depiction of modern literary research in the wake of digital humanities.

This Article discusses the interests that Google and Yahoo have in Wikipedia. The story that Cohen claimsis being missed is the generosity exhibited towards Wikipedia by these two corporations with little or no apparent compensation. He then explains the benefits that Wkipedia can offer to the field of data mining.

This article reports on the ruling by Harold Baer, Jr. which held that the HathiTrust's mass digitization is fair use. The judge explained in his opinion that the HDL's project is not only fair use in and of itself, but that its potential for text mining and the facilitation of access for print-disabled persons are transformative in nature, and can serve an entirely different purpose than the original works.

In his blog, Dan Cohen decided to revisit a topic that was cover in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This data-mining related article discusses the issues with educational testing and growing technology in the humanities field. Devices that can browse an entire database of knowledge pin pointing specific facts. This device is then compared to the relationship between the calculator and math to this device and history. Just as the calculator has made memorizing certain mathematical principles pointless in testing, this device is said to make multiple choice test irrelevant for history. Similarly, cell phones, pdas, and tablets have been able to fill this gap already.

This is a follow-up article to a post Cohen wrote on Wikipedia and its relation to Google and Yahoo. In this post, he discusses the validity of Wikipedia as a tool to create text profiles of subjects for search engines.