This past Tuesday, at the kind invitation of Wen Xin, I gave a talk at the University of Kansas, under the title “Data Is a Sandwich: Lessons from the Computational Literary Field.” My slides (PDF) might only be of use for pictures of the titular sandwich, but they do also contain R code for reproducing my figures demonstrating some of the lessons I taught out of my dataculture package of cultural data in last year’s Data and Culture course. The talk itself was a bit of a retrospective on different things I’ve tried to do in literary data analysis since I first started dabbling some 14 years ago (!?!), with gestures towards what I think are the lessons I learned about how useful data gets made and turned into evidence for meaningful scholarly arguments.