One of the side effects of a distant reading of films or the cultural analytics of moving images is that their explicit commitment to large corpora usually means in practice an implicit alignment to a political economy of data where scale becomes both technically necessary and epistemically sufficient to account for meaning- making. We observed this economic logic at work in distant viewing, where distance becomes a condition for knowledge no less than an appeal to the authority of induction. The epistemic strategies of data and computer science, exported to other disciplines through their various techniques, devices and practices, pose in this way a challenge to theoretical frameworks and modes of critical practice that rely heavily on deductive reasoning, close readings of media texts, and hermeneutics.

The meta-disciplinary insurrection brought about by the rise of inductive computing is set against a historical backdrop of quantification, datafication, and their derived calculating devices and techniques – digital computers and machine learning included. Numbers themselves, as Porter reminds us, need to be understood as ‘technologies of trust’ (1996), which are very often used to exercise or resist power in different contexts. Quantification can be used, for instance, to constrain individual and personal authority by redistributing it to several quantification and calculation processes, and conversely, the more individuals are entrenched in positions of authority, the more they ‘can afford to be looser with numbers or even to block the intrusion of quantitative technologies that constrain their judgment and limit their power’ (Espeland, 1997, p. 1109).