This lab was a change of pace in the lab experience for me. It took an even more scientific approach to the analysis of literature. It is still strange for me to refer to pieces of literature as data, but I can see how having a corpus will be helpful. Since the data I was collecting was pre-1922, I did not run into any copyright issues. All of the texts I used were in the public domain. Before this lab, I did not even know that that was an issue that English scholars and researchers ran into when trying to use different texts. It is understandable that authors need to protect their works, but it is a shame that pieces of literature published in 1922 or later are not able to be intimately used by the public. If a researcher wishes to use pieces under copyright, they must go through extensive methods to use it. Collecting data like the way we did in this lab is the way that some researchers spend their life’s work because it is the only way to possess some pieces of literature. Since there were no copyright issues in the works I uses, the data collection was fairly simple. This lab also enlightened me further into what literary data is. It is important to turn literature into plain text so that the computer can read it. From there, the computer has the ability to analyze the text to a greater scale than the human mind does. Lab 2 showed us the capacity of the machine to analyze literary data, while Lab 3 has showed the process of manually collecting that data. Taking it a step further is the collection of the metadata information. The reason that we use the metadata to collect information about the background of the author is so that we can have the most information possible about the context of the piece of literature. Ted Underwood talks about the importance of quantitative methods in relation to English literature. Quantitative methods are not usually associated with English literature, but these methods are of use to researchers. I did not realize the importance of machines in the English world until this class. Ted Underwood explains how quantitative data can help us to understand history. By tracking the history of certain texts and authors, readers can be on a deeper level with literature. In addition, by cataloging literature we can visualize it in different ways, as shown in Lab 2 as well. Literary data is of great importance for many reasons, yet it is still something that few people recognize as an importance in academia. The copyright restrictions on literature stunt our ability to have access to a great many works that are of value. Literary data can not be fully used because of this. However, there is no solution to this problem right now. Authors do not want to give up legal rights to their work in order to help researchers analyze it more easily. For this reason, researchers and scholars must go through the tedious process of data collecting.