This sort of thing does nothing to undermine the very real criticisms raised by literary theory. I understand that it's confusing and frustrating for people not

This sort of thing does nothing to undermine the very real criticisms raised by literary theory. I understand that it's confusing and frustrating for people not versed in the theory (much like the code made to process the texts would be to somebody who does not know how to program), but the naive turn to "objectivity" in this case isn't just a step back from today's theory- it's a step back from New Criticism, which peaked in the mid-20th century. That's not to say that NLP and things like this aren't vitally important. It can be convincingly argued that they're more productive and important in terms of immediate social good. However, I'm pretty sure we already have a field (besides computer science) that does this sort of work: it's called forensic science.