Discussion & Conclusion

The story told by Defactoring ‘Pace of Change’ is that of methodological data transformation made material through an exhaustive, line-by-line, reading and execution of the bespoke code used in Underwood and Sellers’s historical literary analysis. Code is the engine of intermediate representation. What we mean by this is that the computational narrative told by the Pace of Change code underpinning the publications by Underwood and Sellers is one of transformations. Transformation of data (and metadata) into new data. Code is the material representation, the record, the documentary residue of methodology. But code, when executed, is also the engine of these transformations.