Moretti takes full advantage of an extremely peculiar way of approaching the literature genre. He chooses to use a method of computer science to express the same topics expressed in an ordinary piece through the use of graphs and charts. As you may already be able to tell, there are numerous benefits, as well as drawbacks for this kind of approach.
The benefits of using this approach is that it can be a major time saver. If you are faced with a very dense novel, or you have a large load of books to digest, rather than take the time to analyze each novel closely to gather information, you could use a graph to take all of said information and summarize it in such a way that not only do you extract the same amount of information, but you also can see patterns and similarities much easier. Also, you may be able to find the exact information that you need through cross referencing multiple novels, forecast future events through the analysis of patterns in the graphs and please a wider audience by using a method familiar to both scientist an writers.
The drawbacks of using this system is that it is unfamiliar to the public and may not always deliver the same, in depth perspective that one may wish by glancing over key concepts. Also, this way is more unusual in that it relies upon graphs, rather than words, which are a key point in literature.
A really neat, yet futuristic way of incorporating an interdisciplinary way of combining literature and computer tools would be a program that reads/records the frequency of words within a novel and can produce possible themes, or one that can analyze the personas of the characters within a novel and generate random endings to a story, based upon valid calculations of the characters.
I think that we could approach SSTLS in other ways, such as through literary critics, peer analysis, the author's biography, other novels by the same author, the time period that it was written in and the fashion, or style, that it is written in.
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