In recent years,linguistics has progressively developed data-driven linguistics on the basis of quantitative linguistics,aiming to discover patterns and extract regularities from large-scale linguistic data.Can literary studies,with its long tradition of close reading,also move toward a data-driven approach? It is precisely with this question that this article interviews Professor Liu Haitao,a leading scholar of data-driven linguistics in China.Liu argues that literary studies need not shy away from discussing “patterns” and “regularities”; on the contrary,data-driven literary research is already an emerging trend.In the digital age,the key for literary studies is not to replace close reading with distant reading,but to reorganize the relationship between the two based on specific research questions.Against the backdrop of rapid advances in large language models,the significance of data-driven literary studies extends beyond methodological renewal to prompting humanists to rethink the relationships among text,data,knowledge,intelligence,and subjectivity.Accordingly,literary studies are facing not merely a simple technological turn,but a holistic transformation spanning concepts,materials,and methodologies.