content: It's a powerful engine, steered by idiots. Its power ensures its implementation. The average academic is (at this point) no smarter than the average person and will prefer precision over accuracy nearly every time, especially when they barely understand what is happening.  TFA predicts that "there’s little chance of a big data revolution in the humanities" but this presumes the revolution is useful. I can imagine a slow gumming of the gears of research. In some historical studies, the primary sources are rarely consulted and the secondary literature is thick. There are entire events (nearly fields of study) about which some historians launch into a wrote speech about the need for funding of missing sources, but... it never happened. The first translations of the primary sources were bad, or the contemporary commentaries explain preposterous claims. What do you do? There's no alarm bell to ring and most of the academics engaged on the topic only care about the next two years of funding. And yet, the secondary literature grows in a thicket of citations, which becomes like some para-scholasticism. Circular citations are the norm. Citations are passed along but never checked. Some cannot even be identified. Big data will give those conclusions the glossy sheen of statistical propriety. In case you've ever wondered what I look like...