Big data, as we all know, is what it’s all about. As the CEO of the AI company ImageNet has put it: “Data drives learning.”
Except it really, truly does not.
Consider a rock on the beach. It’s surrounded by data: from the local ecosystems, to the weather patterns on the horizon, to the stars that come out at night.
But that rock will never learn a thing.
Data doesn’t drive learning. Learning drives data. The capacity to learn—interpret, and understand—determines what even counts as data.
That’s where literature comes in. It’s just some marks on a page. But literature is what happens when some of the those marks, strangely, start to matter.
Since very ancient times, writers have been attracted to exactly this kind of moment: when we suddenly see where the data are headed. Even—the singular—a datum.
So, in this course, we will read and comment on some classic (and, mostly, very old) works of small data. Texts that do a lot with a little. Poems, lines, even single words that demand our attention. Plays and stories about the necessity of noticing, the challenge of interpreting, and the detail that changes everything.
Libber leeber 