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I found Jockers and Underwood’s discussion on how to find meaning in digital text very interesting. What particularly stroke me was the following quote that “no amount of counting can produce meaning”. Shedding light on the fact that although digital text can do a lot of things such as rearranging words and grouping them together; ultimately the power of interpretation and meaning still lies in the hands of the individual. Nonetheless, text analysis and visualization help us achieve that meaning, as it allows us to experiment with the representation, and isolate different factors that can highlight connections and relationships that we would have otherwise missed if we weren’t able to visualize the data.

The idea behind this reading strongly reminded me of the “Alien Reading”. PE expresses in their post on this reading that they found happiness in the fact that computers cannot so easily understand the written word, that it “takes more than a software to understand humans and their written thoughts”. I thought this was a beautiful takeaway from the reading, and a thought I strongly agree with. Computers more and more these days allow humans to shortcut a lot of things, except derive meaning; preserving human’s ability to think and be conscious, a characteristic that defines us in the animal world and makes humans.