From the interesting submitted article: "'Traditionally, literary history was done by studying a relative handful of texts,' says Mr. Jockers, an assistant professor of English and a researcher at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska. 'What this technology does is let you see the big picture — the context in which a writer worked — on a scale we’ve never seen before.'" This is interesting. Simply considering more data is likely to improve the inferences about which earlier authors were read by and were influential on later authors. And "big data" insights into patterns that are hard to notice when reading one book at a time in the usual practiced manner of a literature scholar will produce hypotheses that can be tested by going back to the familiar texts and looking for details that were not noticed before.
As this work expands to include writings first published in languages other than English, it will be interesting to see how turns of phrase from (for example) French entered the English language when English-speaking authors read translations of French literature. This will give a much more complete picture of worldwide influences on the development of literature.
Another interesting data driven Digital Humanities project is the InPhO project at Indiana University. The project has produced a network of influence between philosophers and thinkers and some other interesting work.
As this work expands to include writings first published in languages other than English, it will be interesting to see how turns of phrase from (for example) French entered the English language when English-speaking authors read translations of French literature. This will give a much more complete picture of worldwide influences on the development of literature.