Algorithmic mining of large electronic databases has been quietly central to the humanities for two decades. We call this practice “search,” but “search” is a deceptively modest name for a complex quantitative technology that scholars use to test hypotheses and filter evidence. Although the fields of data mining and machine learning are widely framed as novel "tools," they might better be understood as a philosophical discourse that can help humanists think more rigorously and creatively about interpretive problems we already solve (...) with algorithms. (shrink)