Franco Moretti proposed that literary scholars stop reading. Distant reading, the method he named, treats the vast majority of published books — the ninety-nine per cent that no canon preserves and no scholar has time for — as data to be counted, graphed and mapped rather than interpreted one at a time. Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005) put the case in three forms borrowed from quantitative history, geography and evolutionary biology: publication curves showing genres rising and dying in regular cycles, maps plotting where narratives actually happen, trees modelling formal divergence. Distant Reading (2013), which collects the essays that built the argument, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He founded the Stanford Literary Lab with Matthew Jockers, producing pamphlets on genre classification and plot networks, and became the most visible advocate for the digital humanities as well as its most cited target. Earlier work — The Way of the World on the bildungsroman, Atlas of the European Novel — was already comparative and systemic. Moretti taught at Stanford and Columbia and now works in Switzerland.