In this short presentation, I would like to demonstrate how a critical standpoint – or even an ambivalent or skeptical one – influenced the construction of a unique introductory course for computational text research, with an emphasis on literary texts. Thanks to a collaboration with the Open University of Israel (led by my colleague Prof. Ophir Münz-Manor), which undertook the publishing of the first introductory book in Hebrew (forthcoming December 2020), we had a rare opportunity to design a field of knowledge from its inception, in a particular cultural setting.