I’d like to propose a session on exploratory data analysis. While it’s also useful to consider “confirmatory” analysis and visualization when making an argument, I’m interested in the messier, earlier stages of research. The first thing we might do when getting a new text, or corpus, or dataset is to graph/visualize it, map it, cluster it, and so on. What then? We might do a close reading of some of the intriguing passages or concepts turned up by the initial phase. But how can we redo our analysis and visualization in light of this close reading? This isn’t a process that I think any field, in the humanities or social or natural sciences, does very well at teaching. Could digital humanities perhaps become a leading field in practicing — and teaching — this cycle of playing with and remolding data and models?