Crazy. You gave this to us in the DH class a couple years ago, and I’ve been using it to frame my (and Jana’s) presentation for Computers and Writing next week. It really is appropriate to questions of scale and “distant reading.” In fact, the core gist of of the presentation is that “distant reading” itself is an exercise in synecdochal reasoning—small parts to whole—but that it’s valuable because it allows for “maximum selection,” so to speak, in Burkean terms, of the parts from which one models the whole.

Of course, as you rightly point out in regard to the CCC program, the database from which we draw our hundreds or thousands of representative anecdotes (maximum selection!) is only as good as the anecdotes that have gone into that database, and the larger (technological) ecologies that have influenced the construction of that database. We have to be careful about what “whole” can actually be modeled or inferred from the “parts.” CCC program is great a modelling the affects of conference themes but not so great in modelling disciplinarity more generally.