Humanists know the subjects we study are complex. So on the rare occasions when we describe them with numbers at all, we tend to proceed cautiously. Maybe too cautiously. Distant readers have spent a lot of time, for instance, just convincing colleagues that it might be okay to use numbers for exploratory purposes. But the pace of this conversation is not entirely up to us. Outsiders to our disciplines may rush in where we fear to tread, forcing us to confront questions we haven’t faced squarely. For instance, can we use numbers to identify historical periods when music or literature changed especially rapidly or slowly? Humanists have often used qualitative methods to make that sort of argument. At least since the nineteenth century, our narratives have described periods of stasis separated by paradigm shifts and revolutionary ruptures. For scientists, this raises an obvious, tempting question: why not actually measure rates of change and specify the points on the timeline when ruptures happened?
