It’s a question that draws heated answers. Digital humanities has been accused of fetishizing science, of acting as a Trojan horse for the corporate forces threatening the university, and worse. A recent broadside in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “The Digital-Humanities Bust” took a bludgeon to the field’s revolutionary rhetoric, with Mr. Moretti among those accused of issuing a stream of vague “promissory notes” for results that never arrive.

Mr. Moretti — who prefers to call the lab’s work “computational criticism” — tends to greet such challenges with a mixture of modesty and bravado.

“Our results are not as good as what I had hoped for 10 or 15 years ago,” he said in an interview earlier this month, during a brief trip to New York. “We have not yet created a revolution in knowledge. But how much of literary scholarship is even trying to do that?”

[Read about some of the Stanford Literary Lab’s findings.]

Mr. Moretti, who was born to teacher parents in a small town in northern Italy (his brother is the filmmaker Nanni Moretti), represents something of a paradox. He’s an intellectual trained in the grand European tradition who questions its most cherished methods. And he’s a professor who has achieved some measure of celebrity by promoting a ruthlessly impersonal idea of both scholarship and literary history itself.

Literary criticism typically tends to emphasize the singularity of exceptional works that have stood the test of time. But the canon, Mr. Moretti argues, is a distorted sample. Instead, he says, scholars need to consider the tens of thousands of books that have been forgotten, a task that computer algorithms and enormous digitized databases have now made possible.