This project aims to progress a central insight of cultural criticism: that meaning is not carried by texts but produced in situated interactions of texts and readers. Conceptually, it investigates the relationship between human reading and computer modeling and asks how theories of reading in literary studies might help us to understand practices of data construction and analysis in digital humanities, and vice versa. This theoretical inquiry occurs alongside - both enables and is enabled by - a data-rich one. Using massively expanded digital evidence of reception of Australian literature (in academic journals, newspapers and social media book reviewing platforms such as GoodReads and LibraryThing), the project explores reading and modeling in terms of emerging and intersecting assemblages of human and nonhuman actors.