This paper will share insights from a range of projects that I have worked on, sharing the challenges and affordances of working with data of radically different scales and formats. Its larger purpose, however, is to make a case against the oppositions that have been drawn up between close and distant reading: of humanistic versus scientific modes of epistemology, small versus big data, and human versus machine-driven insights. Rather, I will contend that digital methods offer a complementary lens on culture that allows the scholar to shift between different scales of analysis, and modes of knowledge creation, sharpening their insights in the process.