A common university joke goes that in order to complete the first-year program at a faculty of philology, one has to read not less than a thousand pages daily during the academic year. The number of works and commentaries increases every year and catalogues are swelling, putting modern philologists in an ever more difficult position. The rapid digitalizing of old texts and the exponentially growing number of new ones during the last decade hardly allow any works to escape the professional eye.

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... ccessibility is turning into information overload, and philologists are becoming unable to see the forest behind the trees. The abundance of texts, provoked exclusively by technology, cannot be conquered merely by recommending perseverance or cultivating the love of reading: there is a need for a whole new way of being a philologist. This article examines the new quantitative formalism from a historical critical perspective. Formalism did not evade "biological bias" even at the time of its formation and specification as a method: it would be odd to expect that it could be evaded at the stage of the hybridization of literary science and methodological convergence.