This essay provides an overview of the theory, methodology, and technical innovation driving the creation of Distant Reading Early Modernity (DREaM), a digital humanities platform that makes a massive corpus of early modern texts amenable for use with macro-scale analytical tools. Key focus areas include (i) introduction to DREaM and the Early Modern Conversions project, (ii) the argument for our approach to the early modern archive, (iii) overview of the digital tools available through DREaM-Voyant, (iv) the making of DREaM, and solutions to technical problems deriving from non-standardized spelling.