Is a picture worth 10,175 Australian novels?

This chapter will explore the work behind the charting. This will include the necessary apologetics and methodological uncertainties that contextualise analytic labour, and it will put forward an alternative reading of new empiricism which suggests that internet and computing technologies are shaping the cultural grammar of the domain of Australian literature in ways yet to be fully understood but which need to be corralled methodologically. It will propose that in the contemporary humanities environment new empiricism should continue to provide important "reference points from which qualitative data can be understood" and a way for literary scholars to visualise quantitative research but from within the framework of an Australian Charter for the Computer-Based Representation of Literary History.