D. L. Dusenbury, “Data and Detection”, forthcoming in Slow Reading and the Shock of Recognition, ed. Andrea A.

Robiglio (Cordoba: University of Cordoba Press, 2019)

Data and Detection

Homage to Carlo Ginzburg

D. L. DUSENBURY

Institute of Philosophy, University of Leuven

There is something uncanny about one of the first scenes of A Study in Scarlet, the 1887 novella

in which Arthur Conan Doyle introduces his hyper-iconic consulting detective, Mr Sherlock

Holmes.1 The setting is of course late-Victorian London, “that great cesspool” – as Conan

Doyle writes – “into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained”.2

In the scene I have in mind one such idler, Dr John Watson3 – a recently discharged military

surgeon – is seated beside Holmes in a hansom cab which is taking them to a vacant house on

Brixton Road where the Metropolitan Police have identified the corpse of an American

1 According to Ernst Bloch, the first word on the detective genre is this: “Something is uncanny – that’s how it
begins.” (Note, however, that the first line of this essay was written months before I learned of Bloch’s essay.) See
E. Bloch, “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel”, Discourse 2 (1980), 32–52, at 32.
2 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:145 Baring-Gould. Citations of the Holmes canon refer throughout to The

Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Four Novels and the Fifty-Six Short Stories Complete by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2 vols.),
ed. and ann. by W. S. Baring-Gould (London: John Murray, 1968).
3 In the Sherlockian literature, there are doubts concerning Watson’s name. This is because ‘John’ is called ‘James’

– by his wife, no less – in “The Man with the Twisted Lip”. Is Watson a ‘John‘, or a ‘James’? This discrepancy leads
to charming talk of a “proto-Watson” and a “deutero-Watson” in R. A. Knox, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock
Holmes”, Blackfriars 1, no. 3 (1920), 154–72, at 155–56.

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gentleman.4 Asked by Watson what he is thinking, Holmes snaps that he has “no data yet”.

“You will have your data soon”, Watson says soothingly.5

Watson’s reply now reads like a sort of prophecy. In the last decade, IBM has invested

roughly one billion euros in a front-wave computing platform named – Watson.6 Whatever

IBM’s Watson may lack – a mind, or a will – or in corporeal terms, a blood-suffused brain in a

warm body – this ‘cognitive’ entity can mine, and scan, and sift, and analyze titanic, oceanic

amounts of data. And crucially, IBM’s Watson can itself generate new data – which is to say,

novel and meaningful configurations of the data it has encountered. Or, as IBM’s brand-

consultants prefer to put it, “Watson can ingest, enrich and normalize a wide variety of data

types”.7

Data is of course a plural form of the Latin word datum, which originally referred to a

gift, a testamentary disposition, or a symbol of high office.8 In premodern terms, then, data

were things given, or willed, or attested. ‘Data’ entered English in the middle of the 17th

century,9 but only seems to settle into its current meaning – a “mass of information”, as Edgar

Allen Poe writes in his 1842 true-crime tour de force, “The Mystery of Marie Roget”10 – towards

the end of the 19th century. The Holmes canon anticipates the meteoric rise of ‘data’ as a term,

and a concept, in the years between 1900 and 1920.11

Data are central to Holmes’s signature style of reasoning. In the first of his fifty-six

Holmes stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia”, Conan Doyle revisits the Brixton Road scene of A

4 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:184 Baring-Gould. “The deceased was an American gentleman who had been
residing for some weeks in the Metropolis.”
5 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:166 Baring-Gould.

6 From a sub-screen of the IBM domain – https://www-935.ibm.com/services/ai/. Accessed on 27 February 2018. For

the recent investment figures see T. Walsh, Android Dreams: The Past, Present and Future of Artificial Intelligence
(London: Hurst, 2017), XIII. Note that IBM’s Watson is not named after Holmes’s memoirist, but, rather, after the
founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson (Walsh, Android Dreams, 33).
7 From a sub-screen of IBM’s Watson domain – https://www.ibm.com/watson/about/. Accessed on 27 February

2018.
8 Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 485 s.v. datum; Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon

Minus (2 vols.), ed. J.-F. Niermeyer et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), I:302–303 s.v. datum.
9 The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition (20 vols.), ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1989), IV:264–65 s.v. datum.

10 The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, in Four Volumes (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1849), I:218.

11 Consult the Google Ngram Viewer for a graph of the frequency of ‘data’ between the years 1800 and 2000; there

is a spike between 1900 and 1920. (This marks the beginning of a steep rise that lasts until the 1980s.) I am grateful
to James J. O’Donnell for this reference (personal communication, 1 July 2018). An assessment of the use and abuse
of the NGram Viewer in Victorian studies is F. Gibbs and D. Cohen, “A Conversation with Data: Prospecting
Victorian Words and Ideas”, Victorian Studies 54 (2011), 69–77.

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Study in Scarlet. “I have no data yet”, Holmes again says to Watson, before he stresses what a

“capital mistake” it is to “theorize before one has data”.12 In the opening scene of the second

Holmes novel, The Sign of Four, he tells Watson rather archly that he has “hardly any data”.

(Irritated, Watson murmurs: “What data could he expect?”)13 In “The Musgrave Ritual”, by

way of contrast, Holmes is thrilled by the fact that his “data [are] coming more quickly” than

he “could have reasonably hoped”.14

Watson brags in “The Resident Patient” that there are times when his knowledge of

Holmes’s methods allow him to take in, at a glance, “the data” that inspire Holmes to make

his “swift deduction[s]”.15 In the concluding paragraphs of “The Speckled Band”, Holmes

sternly warns “how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data”.16 And finally, in

“The Copper Beeches”, Conan Doyle gives to Holmes this striking motto: “Data! data! data!”17

The thudding repetition of a word is uncharacteristic of Holmes – and for that reason, is

suggestive. Clearly, data are the emphatic precondition of Holmes’s dazzling performances.

“I examine the data”, says Holmes, “and pronounce a specialist’s opinion”. To his

mind, it is this pronouncement that makes him “the last and highest court of appeal in

detection”.18 But what are ‘data’ in the Holmes canon? There is nothing like a definition in texts

which Watson himself calls a “somewhat incoherent series of memoirs”.19 Yet there are

parallels that help us to sharpen the term’s meaning. For instance, we have seen that it is “a

capital mistake” – this is one of Holmes’s earliest maxims – to “theorize before one has data”.20

Roughly a decade later, in “The Second Stain”, Conan Doyle has Holmes repeat this maxim

with a couple of unimaginative alterations. Here, he stresses that it is “a capital mistake to

theorize in advance of the facts”.21 Obviously, then, data are facts.

12 Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” = I:349 Baring-Gould.

13 Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four = I:614 Baring-Gould.
14 Conan Doyle, “The Musgrave Ritual” = I:134 Baring-Gould.

15 Conan Doyle, “The Resident Patient” = I:268 Baring-Gould.

16 Conan Doyle, “The Speckled Band” = I:261 Baring-Gould.

17 Conan Doyle, “The Copper Beeches” = II:120 Baring-Gould. Note that in the same episode Holmes cautions his

client, Violet Hunter, “I have no data. I cannot tell” = II:119 Baring-Gould.

18 Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four = I:611 Baring-Gould.

19 Conan Doyle, “The Resident Patient” = I:267 Baring-Gould.

20 Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” = I:349 Baring-Gould.

21 Conan Doyle, “The Second Stain” = I:311 Baring-Gould.

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A fact, in the Holmes canon, is sharply distinguished from a theory. This is perhaps

nowhere clearer than in a scene from the third Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, in

which Watson is being sent in Holmes’s place to rusticate in Devonshire. Watson is tasked

with protecting the heir to the Baskerville estate, and with scouting the wild moor-country in

which, under weird circumstances, the late Sir Charles Baskerville died. “I wish you simply to

report facts”, says Holmes, “and you can leave me to do the theorizing”.22

Data are the raw material of hypotheses, then, and it is hypotheses which lead Holmes

– by a “method of exclusion” – to his diamond-hard theories.23 Theories reconstruct the

observed facts and posit the unobserved factors which become, in Holmes’s phrase, “as certain

… as if I had seen them with my own eyes”.24 This boast is slightly misleading, however, since

it blurs a crucial distinction that Conan Doyle makes between sight and observation. “You

see”, Holmes says condescendingly to Watson, “but you do not observe”.25 Compared to

Holmes’s granular power of observation, the natural-born powers of human sight are virtually

nil. For while sight deals in clouds of impressions, observation deals in tightly linked chains

of signs.

Holmes’s most unique gift is his “observance of detail” – coupled, of course, with his

“power of inference”.26 It is his faculty of observation that puts Holmes in possession of “signs

so subtle and minute”27 that they elude his chronicler, his clients, and the detective police of

Scotland Yard.28 In a city of spectators, only Holmes is an observer. This, at least, is Conan

Doyle’s winning conceit. Only Holmes is equipped to see a “suggestive fact” in what others

disregard as a valueless detail.29 This is not only what inspires the Holmes canon, but also

Holmes’s own tantalizing oeuvre.

22 Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles = II:35 Baring-Gould.

23 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:232 Baring-Gould.
24 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:192 Baring-Gould.

25 Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” = I:349 Baring-Gould.

26 Conan Doyle, “The Resident Patient” = I:267 Baring-Gould.

27 Conan Doyle, “The Resident Patient” = I:278 Baring-Gould.

28 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:195 Baring-Gould. By the by, Scotland Yard’s men are called “the official

force”.
29 Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four = I.620. Notice the same expression in, for instance, The Hound of the Baskervilles =

II:29 Baring-Gould: “a most suggestive fact”.

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“I have been guilty of several monographs”, Holmes says with considerable charm in

The Sign of Four.30 The detective is variously credited by Conan Doyle with a “trifling

monograph” on 160 forms of encrypted writing,31 on 140 varieties of tobacco ash,32 on the art

of dating manuscripts,33 and so forth. He has “contributed to the literature” on tattooing,34 a

practice that fascinated the chief theorist of 19th-century “criminal anthropology”, Cesare

Lombroso. (Lombroso is struck by adjacent representations of the lowest passions and noblest

sentiments in convicts’ tattoos. “Strange contradictions of the human mind!”, he exclaims.)35

Moreover, Holmes is said to have authored studies on forensic methods of analyzing

footprints, and of determining a person’s occupation from the scrutiny of their hands.36

In Conan Doyle’s gruesome 1893 story, “The Cardboard Box”, Holmes cites his own

“short monographs” on the “anatomical peculiarities” of the human ear – which is to say, on

the ear as a marker of organismic or phenotypic identity.37 This occurs when the detective is

confronted with a set – not a pair – of severed ears in the eponymous cardboard box.38 After

inspecting these relics, Holmes notes that each person’s ear is “as a rule quite distinctive”. For

one “trained to observation and analysis”,39 the involutions of your ear – the proportions of

upper and lower lobes, the “convolution[s] of the inner cartilage”, and so on – will identify

you no less surely than, say, the timbre of your voice or the proportions of your face.40

The importance of Holmes’s monographs on the ear was first noticed by the great

exponent of micro-history, Carlo Ginzburg, in a 1978 article titled “Spie: radici di un paradigma

indiziario”. This is still a truly thrilling scholarly performance which appeared in English in

30 Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four = I:612 Baring-Gould.

31 Conan Doyle, “The Dancing Men” = II:540 Baring-Gould.
32 Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four = I:612 Baring-Gould.

33 Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles = II:8 Baring-Gould. Holmes is not only skilled at dating manuscripts,

but at inferring the age of a writer (or a copyist) on the basis of his or her hand. “The deduction (sic) of a man’s age
from his writing”, he informs us, “is one which has been brought to considerable accuracy by experts.” See Conan
Doyle, “The Reigate Squires” (a.k.a. “The Reigate Puzzle”) = I:342 Baring-Gould.
34 Conan Doyle, “The Red-Headed League” = I:420 Baring-Gould.

35 C. Lombroso, “Criminal Anthropology and Psychiatry”, The Monist (1890), 186–196, at 192–96.

36 Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four = I:612 Baring-Gould.

37 Conan Doyle, “The Cardboard Box” = II:202 Baring-Gould. (Cit. Ginzburg, “Clues”, 277.)

38 Conan Doyle, “The Cardboard Box” = II:197 Baring-Gould. Incidentally, David Lynch’s 1986 neo-noir film, Blue

Velvet, begins with the discovery of a severed ear by the protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont, who becomes a sort of
antitype to Conan Doyle’s cool-headed, unscathed detective.
39 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:159 Baring-Gould.

40 Conan Doyle, “The Cardboard Box” = II:202 Baring-Gould. (Cit. Ginzburg, “Clues”, 277.)

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1979 under the title “Clues”.41 Holmes’s fictional (or meta-fictional) study of ears becomes,42 in

Ginzburg’s hands, emblematic of a highly consequential mode of analysis which coalesces in

the last quarter of the 19th century. Ginzburg calls this mode of analysis ‘indiciary’ (indiziario)

or ‘semiotic’. In “Clues”, he traces the material (historical), formal (morphological), and

conjectural (hypothetical) lines of influence and forms of resemblance which connect an

elusive art historian, Giovanni Morelli (a.k.a. Ivan Lermolieff, Johannes Schwarze); the Ur-

father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud; and the detective novelist – and latterly, spiritualist

– Arthur Conan Doyle. Ginzburg calls this “the Morelli–Freud–Conan Doyle triad”.43

In a series of brilliant and convincing moves, Ginzburg shows that the so-called

“Morellian method” of identifying forged (or misattributed) paintings,44 a method which

consists in giving the utmost attention to seeming trifles – “the lobes of the ears, the

fingernails”, and so on45 – is bound by subtle links to Freud’s method of ‘reading’ his

analysands. “Psychoanalysis”, writes Freud in 1914, “is accustomed to divine secrets and

concealed things from unconsidered or unnoticed details, from the rubbish-heap, as it were,

of our observations”.46 As Ginzburg documents, Freud himself states that Morelli’s method is

“closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis”,47 and one of Morelli’s books (purchased

in Milan in 1898) is found among the holdings of Freud’s London library.48

Moreover, Ginzburg connects Morelli’s method to Conan Doyle’s style of constructing

and dissolving his mysteries. As Ginzburg reports in a footnote, one of Conan Doyle’s uncles

– Henry Doyle – in fact met Morelli in Dublin in 1887. This is the year in which, as we have

seen, Conan Doyle published A Study in Scarlet – and it is several years after Morelli’s writings

appeared in English.49 However, Ginzburg decides not to invest in the “unnecessary”

conjecture that Morelli’s methods directly influenced Conan Doyle – whether by way of Henry

41 C. Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm”, Theory and Society 7, no. 3 (1979), 273–88.
42 ‘Meta-fictional’ because it is possible that Conan Doyle published a pseudonymous column on ears in The Strand
Magazine in 1893 (Ginzburg, “Clues”, 285 note 18).
43 C. Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method”, History Workshop 9 (1980), 5–

36, at 24.
44 Ginzburg, “Clues”, 273.

45 Ginzburg, “Clues”, 274.

46 Cit. Ginzburg, “Clues”, 278.

47 Cit. Ginzburg, “Clues”, 278.

48 Ginzburg, “Clues”, 279–80.

49 Ginzburg, “Clues”, 286 note 19.

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Doyle or Morelli’s English texts.50 He is nevertheless led by Morelli’s tabulation of types of ears

in the paintings of the Italian masters,51 to reconsider the prominence that Conan Doyle gives

to the human ear in “The Cardboard Box”.

What this fixation on ears suggests to Ginzburg is that the basic concern of the

‘indiciary’ (indiziario) method is with “the elusive uniqueness of individuals”.52 For Morelli,

this is the uniqueness of a painter (or an imitator); for Freud, of a patient; and for Conan Doyle,

of a culprit (or a pair of victims, in “The Cardboard Box”). This method recognizes, and even

valorizes, Ginzburg writes, “an inevitable margin of hazardousness, of conjecture”.53 And this

method relies – not entirely unlike phrenology, which boomed in the 19th century54 – on

precise measurement to identify a threshold beyond which lies “the inevitable presence of

qualitative and individual elements”.55

Ginzburg traces the indiciary method back to more archaic methods of differentiation

and identification, such as the forms of sighting and tracking which are indispensable to

venation (hunting), divination (augury), and inculpation (forensics). The appearance in

Ginzburg’s account of these archaic methods of semiotic reasoning evokes a terrain which is

still haunted, at least, by three archaic figures – namely, the beast (venation), the god

(divination), and the juridical-metaphysical person (inculpation). At the same time, however,

he links the rise of the indiciary method to the criminology and penology of “developed

bureaucracies” in Europe in the second half of the 19th century.56 Specifically, Ginzburg notes

the relevance of anthropometric systems devised and implemented in this period by Alphonse

Bertillon, Francis Galton, and others.57 The origins in the 19th century of a vast anthropometric

archive is observed in his reading of the Holmes canon.

Ginzburg’s reading of Conan Doyle is at root humanistic, however – rather than

mechanistic – for the precise reason that it is semiotic. (This is not a criticism of Ginzburg, or of

50 Ginzburg, “Clues”, 286 note 19.

51 Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes”, 9.
52 Ginzburg, “Clues”, 283.

53 Ginzburg, “Clues”, 281.

54 Thus, one of Holmes’s clients asks him, “Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your

parietal fissure?” See Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles = II:7 Baring-Gould.
55 Ginzburg, “Clues”, 282.

56 Ginzburg, “Clues”, 283–84.

57 Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes”, 23–29.

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semiotics. On the contrary, my objection is that Conan Doyle is himself, in certain moods, anti-

humanistic.) To sharpen the contrast between humanistic and mechanistic – terms which

could seem to be outlived and void of content – one could glance at a contrast which is made

between ‘sign’ and ‘signal’ in the first pages of Umberto Eco’s 1976 treatise, A Theory of

Semiotics. “A human being”, Eco stipulates, is invariably “the starting point of a signification

process”.58 Crucially, this is true of signals “that do not have a human emitter”, but that do

have “a human receiver”.59 In such cases signification begins, not with the emission of a signal

(by a machine), but with the reception of that signal as a sign (by a human). Eco holds that

signals, unlike signs, can subsist in a total absence of human apprehension; they can be

“computed quantitatively irrespective of their possible meaning”.60 Machines transmit signals,

but humans deal in signs. “In a machine-to-machine process,” Eco says, “the signal has no

power to signify”.61

Semiotics is therefore a theory which is “concerned with everything that can be taken

as a sign”.62 A sign is then idiosyncratically defined as being “everything which can be used

in order to lie”.63 Why this prominence of the ‘lie’? “The possibility of lying is the proprium of

semiosis”, for Eco, “just as (for the Schoolmen) the possibility of laughing was the proprium of

Man as animal rationale.”64 It is only human persons (or, Eco adds drily, “any other intelligent

biological or mechanical apparatus”) that can transmute a signal into a sign,65 and draw

information into the sphere of signification (and deception). In this precise yet capacious sense,

it seems to me that semiotics is an emphatically humanistic theory.

Therefore, without criticizing Ginzburg’s exemplary methods or findings, I propose

that much of the late 19th-century indiciary or semiotic material which he collects and analyses

in “Clues” – and specifically, the Holmes canon – could be reinterpreted in light of the

mechanistic iterations of the same method which follow in the 20th century, and are set to make

incredible strides in the 21st century. It is perhaps time to revisit Holmes in light of a

58 U. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 33 (my stress).
59 Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 16.
60 Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 20.

61 Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 8 (my stress).

62 Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 7 (Eco’s stress).

63 Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 7 (my stress).

64 Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 59.

65 Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 9.

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posthumanist vein in Conan Doyle. And it not hard to see Holmes as a fictional prototype of

21st-century observant machines – for Conan Doyle anticipates this reading.

In The Sign of Four, Watson accosts Holmes, saying: “You really are an automaton – a

calculating machine … There is something positively inhuman in you at times”. Holmes smiles

at this, so Watson recalls, and says: “A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem. The

emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning”.66 Similarly, in “A Scandal in

Bohemia”, Watson confides that “all emotions … were abhorrent to [Holmes’s] cold, precise,

but admirably balanced mind”.67 In the same passage, the memoirist sees in the detective

nothing but a machine-like sensor – “a sensitive instrument”. And he finally calls Holmes, in

a rare flight of rhetoric, “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine the world has seen”.68

As of this writing, the world has arguably seen more perfect reasoning and observing machines

– one of which IBM has dubbed Watson.

Ginzburg’s notice is drawn – and thanks to him, ours is drawn – to Holmes’s texts on

the structural expressiveness of the human ear. A number of Holmes’s other fictional texts

have been cited in this essay. But there is reason to glance at the first text by Holmes which is

cited in the canon; it bears an apocalyptic title, The Book of Life.69 In what sense is this title

‘apocalyptic’? One of the angels who speaks to the prophet John on the Isle of Patmos refers,

in Revelation 17, to “the Book of Life” – the liber vitae – which has been inscribed with human

names “from the foundation of the world”.70 This Book of Life is related, however darkly, to a

divine judgement of humankind on the Last Day (or, as Immanuel Kant approvingly calls it,

“the Youngest Day”).71 It is doubtful that Conan Doyle would not have thought of Revelation’s

Book when ascribing a text by the same name to his hyper-rationalist character in the first

pages of the first Holmes novel. Nor is the theme of judgement extraneous to Holmes’s Book of

Life, which consists of infinitesimal observations and intimate revelations. This is a book in

66 Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four = I:619 Baring-Gould.

67
Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” = I:346 Baring-Gould.
68 Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” = I:346 Baring-Gould.

69 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:159–160 Baring-Gould. “Its somewhat ambitious title”, as Watson drily writes,

“was The Book of Life”.

70 Revelation 17:8 = New Revised Standard Version, The Book of Common Prayer … According to the Use of The Episcopal

Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. R. Weber, rev. R.
Gryson (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007).
71 The German idiom is Jüngster Tag, for which, see I. Kant, “The End of All Things”, Religion within the Boundaries

of Mere Reason, and Other Writings (2nd edition), ed. A. Wood and G. di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2018), 234.

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which the totality of “inner consciousness”, in Holmes’s phrase,72 is revealed by the body. In

his Book of Life Holmes writes of how, “by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a

glance of an eye”, it becomes possible “to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts”.73

This is a fine articulation, it seems to me, of the indiciary method that crystallizes – as

Ginzburg proves – in the last decades of the 19th century. But it is perhaps a still more acute

articulation of the ‘indiciary’ record that is being kept by the newest wave of machine

technology. The method of reasoning that Holmes sketches here moves from measurable,

visible effects (“a glance of an eye”) to immeasurable, invisible – and thus, conjectural – causes

(“a man’s inmost thoughts”).74 It is certainly reasonable to ask: How could this type of indiciary

reasoning possibly be executed by machines, and articulated in signals (not signs)? And how

could Conan Doyle seriously describe his detective as a “reasoning and observing machine”?75

The answer lies outside of Holmes’s Book of Life. We glimpse it in Holmes’s comments

on a piece of Victorian posthumanist literature, Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man

(1872).76 Holmes calls The Martyrdom of Man, in one place, “one of the most remarkable [books]

ever penned”.77 It is rather a cheap and brutal dream of the “pure and radiant beings who shall

succeed us on the earth”.78 Reade is conscious of the fact that entire races “may possibly

become exterminated” in the ascent to this ‘radiant’ future. “We must learn to look on this

result with composure”, he counsels, for it is a “beneficent law of Nature, that the weak must

be devoured by the strong.”79 Racial cleansing is now, of course – like eugenics – outré in

progressive circles, but Victorian posthumanism is a precursor to 21st-century posthumanism.

(No one has argued this more forcefully than the late French theorist, Paul Virilio.)80 Reade is

72 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:231 Baring-Gould.

73 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:159 Baring-Gould.
74 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:159 Baring-Gould.

75 Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” = I:346 Baring-Gould.

76 W. Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (London: Trubner & Co., 1872).

77 Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four = I:619 Baring-Gould. A study of Reade’s influence on the Holmes canon is J. M. I.

Klaver, “Eliminare l’impossibile: Darwin, Winwood Reade e l’adagio di Sherlock Holmes”, Linguæ & – Rivista di
lingue e culture moderne 11 (2012), 15–22.
78 Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, 538.

79 From the concluding pages of Reade’s book, Savage Africa. Cit. G. Levin, “Victorian Kurtz”, Journal of Modern

Literature 7 (1979), 433–40, at 439.

80 For Virilio’s unflinching thought, which ties Victorian eugenics to Nazi medical crimes – and both of them to

postwar biotech – see P. Virilio and S. Lotringer, Crepuscular Dawn, trans. M. Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotexte,
2002). Virilio died on 10 September 2018 – in the last days of my work on this essay.

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a tech-utopian avant la lettre.81 He believes that humankind must be martyred, and it is this that

gives his book its “strange but true title”. He is convinced that “the soul must be sacrificed”,82

so that a disillusioned humankind can usher in sublime “transformations of human nature

which cannot possibly take place for ages yet to come”.83 This sacrifice is beginning to be made,

he suggests, in the “laboratories and star-towers and dissecting-rooms” of the Victorian era.84

This précis of Reade’s book helps to isolate a posthumanist strain in Conan Doyle’s

thought,85 but it clarifies nothing of the mechanistic realization I have claimed for Holmes’s

Book of Life. That clarification comes in a scene of The Sign of Four in which Holmes again

commends Reade. In this scene, he and Watson are moving through the city as “the last rays

of the sun” are “gilding the cross upon the summit of St. Paul’s”. In a thoughtful mood,

Holmes says: “A strange enigma is man!” And Watson replies: “Someone calls him a soul

concealed in an animal”. Holmes shoots back: “Winwood Reade is good upon the subject …

He remarks that while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a

mathematical certainty … Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant.”86 Conan Doyle’s

annotator, William Baring-Gould, prints a sentence by Reade in the margin of this scene: “Even

those actions which are entirely dependent on the caprices of the memory, or the impulse of

the passions, are shown by statistics to be, when taken in the gross, entirely independent of the

human will”.87

Between Conan Doyle and Reade, we glimpse a future – in nebulous terms, our present

– in which ‘reasoning and observing machines’ can capture our features and track our

movements and, therewith, can begin to predict our thoughts and intentions. Holmes’s habit

of “thought-reading” could be taken as a prototype of machine observation.88 (The ‘proto’ in

‘prototype’ is relative. Conan Doyle of course purloins his thought-reading scenes from Poe.)

81 For the rise of “techno-religions” see the final chapters of Y. N. Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
(London: Harvill Secker, 2015).
82 Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, 543–44. A recent treatment of the problem of ‘soul’ in Conan Doyle’s thought and

life – and in the memoirs of his “rationalist materialist detective” – is M. Burrow, “Conan Doyle’s Gothic
Materialism”, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 35 (2013), 309–23.
83 Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, 540.

84 Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, 539.

85 A fascinating treatment is C. Ferguson, “Eugenics and the Afterlife: Lombroso, Doyle, and the Spiritualist

Purification of the Race”, Journal of Victorian Culture 12 (2007), 64–85.

86 Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four = I:665–66 Baring-Gould (my stresses).

87 Cit. The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Baring-Gould, I:666 note 148 (my stresses).

88 Conan Doyle, “The Cardboard Box” = II:195 Baring-Gould.

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D. L. Dusenbury, “Data and Detection”, forthcoming in Slow Reading and the Shock of Recognition, ed. Andrea A.
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It is by tracking Watson’s eye-movements, reading habits, and posture, for instance, that

Holmes can divine and break in upon his chronicler’s “most intimate thoughts”.89 But what,

in crude terms, is the state of the art with observant and predictive technology?

First, observant machines: The essayist Geoff Manaugh has surveyed the new-wave

technologies that place more and more 21st-century city-dwellers in a situation of “total

documentation”. The “ubiquitous installation of sensors”, he says, creates a hitherto

unimaginable state of “ubiquitous capture”. Manaugh continues: “City dwellers are

constantly generating data about themselves, down to the vibrations of their footsteps.”90 His

description of machine technologies which make it possible to capture and analyze the sub-

sensory traces of footfall in an urban setting is extraordinary. When Holmes sees a burglar’s

footprint in “The Resident Patient”, he says: “There can be no doubt as to his individuality”.91

What a clayey footprint was to Holmes, the vibrations of a human footstep are – in real time –

to the newest observant machines.

Second, reasoning machines: This is not the place to review the billowing literature on

machine ‘intelligence’, but a pair of Stanford University researchers claim that, from a cloud

of machine-observations, machine systems are beginning to “detect people’s intimate traits”.

What is more, they note that “governments and companies seem to be already deploying face-

based classifiers aimed at detecting intimate traits”.92 How is this type of ‘machine reasoning’

– from facial capture to inclinations and intentions – possible? Well, in the lines I have

extracted from The Sign of Four, Holmes names it with startling precision. The method for

correlating a person’s bodily and mental features with something approaching “a

mathematical certainty” is aggregation.93

“In the aggregate”, says Holmes, the inclinations and disinclinations of humans become

“a mathematical certainty”.94 ‘Data aggregation’ is a term of art in the 21st-century tech

89 Conan Doyle, “The Dancing Men” = II:527 Baring-Gould.

90 G. Manaugh, “The City That Remembers Everything: The Smart City is Moving Beyond Cameras and
Microphones to Stranger Surveillance Tools”, The Atlantic (23 February 2018). Archived online at
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/james-joyce-as-police-operation/553817/. Accessed on 23
February 2018.
91 Conan Doyle, “The Resident Patient” = I:275 Baring-Gould.

92 Y. Wang and M. Kosinski, “Deep Neural Networks Are More Accurate than Humans at Detecting Sexual

Orientation from Facial Images”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114 (2018), 246–57, at 246 and 255.
93 Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four = I:665–66 Baring-Gould.

94 Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four = I:665–66 Baring-Gould.

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industry, and it is one that Holmes – citing Reade – anticipates. Data aggregation is the route

from Holmes’s minute observations to his capacity for reading “a man’s inmost thoughts”.95

In this sense, aggregation is the secret of Holmes’s Book of Life. It is not by means of one person’s

“twitch of a muscle” or “glance of an eye” that it becomes possible to access that one person’s

“inmost thoughts”.96 On the contrary, it is by the aggregation of hundreds of millions of twitches

and glances that it becomes possible to read, in one person’s twitch or glance, their thoughts or

intentions. And though historians of computing have only recently begun to talk of “Victorian

data processing”,97 Reade’s comment on information which is “taken in the gross” and

columnized in “statistics” is glaringly contemporary.98 He is a late-Victorian proponent of big

data.

Late last year, Yilun Wang and Michal Kosinski claimed that machine systems which

mimic and excel human observation techniques can realize the 19th-century phrenologists’

most feverish dreams.99 According to their report, it is already possible for ‘reasoning and

observing machines’ to predict the sexual orientation of humans, with unnerving accuracy, by

analyzing the dimensions of their faces. (Note that this study has not been replicated, and has

been challenged on methodological grounds.) “Our faces contain more information”, they

write, “than can be perceived or interpreted by the human brain”.100 This is not contentious.

What is unsettling is the idea that “deep neural networks” – nodes of a dead ‘intelligence’ –

can detect and interpret the data which is “displayed on human faces beyond what can be

perceived by humans”.101

It is in “The Cardboard Box” – which returns us to Ginzburg and the indiciary method

– that Holmes, having tracked and stated Watson’s “unspoken thoughts”, then says to him:

95 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:159 Baring-Gould.

96 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:159 Baring-Gould.
97 M. Campbell-Kelly, “Victorian Data Processing: Reflections of the First Payment Systems”, Communications of the

ACM 53, no. 10 (2010), 19–21.

98 Cit. The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Baring-Gould, I:666 note 148.

99 There is a guarded rehabilitation of physiognomy’s basic intuition in Wang and Kosinski, “Deep Neural

Networks Are More Accurate than Humans”, 246–47: “Physiognomy is now universally, and rightly, rejected as a
mix of superstition and racism disguised as science … Due to its legacy, studying or even discussing links between
facial features and character became taboo, leading to a widespread presumption that no such links exist. However,
there are many demonstrated mechanisms that imply the opposite ...”
100 Wang and Kosinski, “Deep Neural Networks Are More Accurate than Humans”, 254.

101 Wang and Kosinski, “Deep Neural Networks Are More Accurate than Humans”, 248 (my stress).

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“The features are given to man as the means by which he shall express his emotions”.102 The

question raised by new-wave technologies is this: What if deep neural networks are more

accurate than humans at observing human features and tracking human emotions? Compared

to the newest machine entities, Holmes’s powers of observation would be virtually nil. Where

machines can now glean a set of ultra-precise biometric signs (or in Eco’s terms, signals),

Holmes would register only a blur of impressions. In the most advanced 21st-century cities,

Holmes would be a spectator – and the ‘observant machines’ that he prefigures would track

him with mystifying ubiquity, and observe him with disconcerting intensity. It may not be a

coincidence that London – “the Metropolis”, in the Holmes canon103 – is today one of the

world’s most heavily machine-observed cities.104

Sherlock Holmes’s Book of Life is currently being written. We are all supplying it with

data. But it is not being written by humans who, in Holmes’s phrase, are “trained to

observation and analysis”.105 Nor, that we can tell, is it being written by angels and archangels.

The Book of Life dreamed up in the last years of the 19th century by Conan Doyle is being

written by sensors and processors and ‘cognitive’ machine entities. In its underlying code and

form, this Book of Life is inhuman. It is not a record of natural signs and intelligence, but of

machine-coded – and machine-encrypted – signals. Now is the time for us to ask what it means

that humankind’s Book of Life is increasingly being generated, and scanned, and edited by

machines.

102 Conan Doyle, “The Cardboard Box” = II:194 Baring-Gould. A nice study of the face in Darwinian theory, and its
influence on the development of “composite photography” and the use of “judicial photography” in the 19th
century is N. J. Wade, “Faces and Photography in 19th-Century Visual Science”, Perception 45, no. 9 (2016), 1008–
1035.
103 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:233 Baring-Gould.

104 Hard numbers are hard to come by, but the United Kingdom’s Surveillance Camera Commissioner voices his

concerns in a sobering report by M. Weaver, “UK Public Faces Mass Invasion of Privacy as Big Data and
Surveillance Merge”, The Guardian (14 March 2017). Archived online at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-
news/2017/mar/14/public-faces-mass-invasion-of-privacy-as-big-data-and-surveillance-merge. Accessed on 20
September 2018.
105 Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet = I:159 Baring-Gould.

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