This will be an old-fashioned, shamelessly opinionated, 1000-word blog post.
Anyone who has tried to write literary history using numbers knows that they are a double-edged sword. On the one hand they make it possible, not only to consider more examples, but often to trace subtler, looser patterns than we could trace by hand.
On the other hand, quantitative methods are inherently complex, and unfamiliar for humanists. So it’s easy to bog down in preambles about method.
Social scientists talking about access to healthcare may get away with being slightly dull. But literary criticism has little reason to exist unless it’s interesting; if it bogs down in a methodological preamble, it’s already dead. Some people call the cause of death “positivism,” but only because that sounds more official than “boredom.”
This is a rhetorical rather than epistemological problem, and it needs a rhetorical solution. For instance, Matthew Wilkens and Cameron Blevins have rightly been praised for focusing on historical questions, moving methods to an appendix if necessary. You may also recall that a book titled Distant Reading recently won a book award in the US. Clearly, distant reading can be interesting, even exciting, when writers are able to keep it simple. That requires resisting several temptations.