As Steve Lohr has written in The New York Times about the MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson, “data measurement is the modern equivalent of the microscope.” Sean Gourley, cofounder of a company called Quid, calls this new kind of data analysis a “macroscope.”

Bolving is unique to Exmoor for what is known elsewhere as the belling or roaring of red deer stags at rutting time. Adrian Tierney-Jones described it in the Daily Telegraph in 2007 as “a mix of roaring lion, bellowing cow, chainsaw and someone severely constipated”.

He had read about an advertising technique called astroturfing in which one person can impersonate hundreds of social media accounts to make it look as if there were grassroots support for their cause.

The head of the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations agency in charge of marine regulations, warned in 2000 of the growing hazards of building larger ships and called for a comprehensive review of safety rules, known as Safety of Life at Sea, or Solas.

All of this has shaped the new work, which she calls a “choreoessay,” in the same way that “For Colored Girls” was a “choreopoem,” said Claude Sloan, a longtime friend and director who shares a brownstone with her in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.