On a spur-of-the-moment decision to travel with a posse of graduate students, my advisor invited my friend and I to an odd think-tank-type meeting at the Santa Fe Institute. The whole weekend consisted of a series of surreal conversations in which biologists, computer scientists, and humanists (us) attempted to figure out if we actually had any kind of shared language with which to discuss digital research and quantitative methods. In other words, a group of…