“Any reading of a text that is not a recapitulation of that text relies on a heuristic of radical transformation,” writes Stephen Ramsay. Yes. so much yes. In part, this observation is what research into analog and digital procedural making (e.g. making things from others’ texts) hinges on. Even when we only use our eyes or other technologies of reading (like highlighters, or the boxing tool in Adobe PDF Reader), we are selecting texts and isolating words and phrases that appear to our minds to be the keystones of the text we are attempting to “understand.” We all have our programs of reading. Some of those programs are more involved or more constrained, or are more deliberate than others. For example, when I’m reading I almost always write down what I perceive of as key terms in the margins next to particularly meaningful passages. My key terms might not be exactly the author’s, and they might be mine but not anyone else’s key terms for the same article. As I look through the key term results for my data set for “machinic” I am struck by the knowledge that these key terms are author-generated, while the other data represent repeated terms as computer generated, and include things like “of the.” But when you think of the rhetorical moves necessitated by using “of the” a reading emerges. Someone is trying (at least in one portion of the thing) to compare or narrow. We need not know what is on either end, we only need to reflect on how such a combination of tiny words is used. Certainly the program finds what the eye is not capable of and the eye is interestingly fallible, but largely the programs Ramsay discusses and the program JSTOR has created to do this search for me are matters of scale and redirection. Either version — me scanning the results and coming to a reading just from that glance, or the programming we’re about to write to deal with these data — are programs of reading.