I didn't see a problem with it. The magazine is "The Atlantic" which has a general readership. If one writes a program to analyze Shakespeare text, he might d

I didn't see a problem with it. The magazine is "The Atlantic" which has a general readership. If one writes a program to analyze Shakespeare text, he might describe it as "converted the text into a multi-dimensional vector space" or "mapped ngrams into a point cloud" -- and that would be acceptable lexicon for a Dr Dobbs Programming Journal or possibly ArsTechnica. However, for The Atlantic, it seems reasonble for a journalist/editor to write that as "convert the plays into data." Yes, Shakespeare the text itself was already "data" so in a pedantic analysis, saying "converting data to data" seems pointless but that's not the level of indirection the general readership is at.