Yet even as computers grew more sophisticated, some scholars resisted them. In 1970, Stephen M. Parrish, an English professor, described how when he "proposed to some of the Dante people at Harvard that they move to the computer and finish the job in a couple of months, they recoiled in horror." In their system, "each man was assigned a block of pages to index lovingly," and had been doing so contentedly for more than 25 years. But eventually, of course, concordance makers joined the ranks of all the other noble occupations gone....
But what about words not worth cataloging because they are so common? ...In the Miltonic metaphor, one of Cleveland's rejected words, "or," might be the most important [in: "Or Pilot from amidst the Cyclades / Delos or Samos first appearing kens / A cloudy spot."] ...
While Amazon's concordance can show us the frequency of the words "day" and "shall" in Whitman, "contain" and "multitudes" don't make the top 100. Neither does "be" in Hamlet, nor "damn" in "Gone with the Wind." The force of these words goes undetected by even the most powerful computers....
Once it would have seemed unnecessary to point out that a statistical tool has no ear for allusions, for echoes, for metrical and musical effects, for any of the attributes that make words worth reading. Today, perhaps it bears reminding.