In the popular imagination, archives remain dusty, hidden, forgotten places; in fact, they are increasingly likely to be digital and available online. By changing the form that archives take, technology also transforms the ways in which they can be searched and the types of questions that can be asked of them. This shift affords opportunities for more extensive, data-rich and quantitative approaches to literary historical scholarship. But it does not negate – it actually increases – the potential for what we find in the archives to challenge and transform the way we understand the past. That, in a nutshell, is the premise and the aim of Reading by Numbers. By mining, modelling and analysing data in a digital archive – AustLit, a comprehensive, online bibliographical record of Australian literature – I present a new history of the Australian novel: one that concentrates on the nineteenth century and the decades since the end of the Second World War, and aims precisely for the more ‘extensive’ and ‘democratic’ historiography encouraged by the epigraph.