Digital Scholarship

Encompassing new technologies, research methods, and opportunities for collaborative scholarship and open-source peer review, as well as innovative ways of sharing knowledge and teaching, the digital humanities promises to transform the liberal arts--and perhaps the university itself. Indeed, at a time when many academic institutions are facing austerity budgets, digital humanities programs have been able to hire new faculty, establish new centers and initiatives, and attract multimillion-dollar grants. Clearly the digital humanities has reached a significant moment in its brief history. But what sort of moment is it? Debates in the Digital Humanities brings together leading figures in the field to explore its theories, methods, and practices and to clarify its multiple possibilities and tensions. From defining what a digital humanist is and determining whether the field has (or needs) theoretical grounding, to discussions of coding as scholarship and trends in data-driven research, this cutting-edge volume delineates the current state of the digital humanities and envisions potential futures and challenges. At the same time, several essays aim pointed critiques at the field for its lack of attention to race, gender, class, and sexuality; the inadequate level of diversity among its practitioners; its absence of political commitment; and its preference for research over teaching. Together, the essays in Debates in the Digital Humanities suggest that the digital humanities is uniquely positioned to contribute to the revival of the humanities and academic life.

Pairing full-length scholarly essays with shorter pieces drawn from scholarly blogs and conference presentations, as well as commissioned interviews and position statements, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 reveals a dynamic view of a field in negotiation with its identity, methods, and reach. Pieces in the book explore how DH can and must change in response to social justice movements and events like #Ferguson; how DH alters and is altered by community college classrooms; and how scholars applying DH approaches to feminist studies, queer studies, and black studies might reframe the commitments of DH analysts. Numerous contributors examine the movement of interdisciplinary DH work into areas such as history, art history, and archaeology, and a special forum on large-scale text mining brings together position statements on a fast-growing area of DH research. In the multivalent aspects of its arguments, progressing across a range of platforms and environments, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 offers a vision of DH as an expanded field--new possibilities, differently structured.

The latest installment of a digital humanities bellwether. Contending with recent developments like the shocking 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the radical transformation of the social web, and passionate debates about the future of data in higher education, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 brings together a broad array of important, thought-provoking perspectives on the field's many sides. With a wide range of subjects including gender-based assumptions made by algorithms, the place of the digital humanities within art history, data-based methods for exhuming forgotten histories, video games, three-dimensional printing, and decolonial work, this book assembles a who's who of the field in more than thirty impactful essays.

This reader brings together the essential readings that have emerged in Digital Humanities. It provides a historical overview of how the term 'Humanities Computing' developed into the term 'Digital Humanities', and highlights core readings which explore the meaning, scope, and implementation of the field.

In E-Crit, Marcel O'Gorman takes an ambitious and provocative look at how university scholarship, pedagogy, and curricula might be transformed to suit a digital culture. Arguing that universities were founded on the logic of print culture, O'Gorman sets out to reinvent the academic apparatus, constructing a hybrid methodology that draws on avant-garde art, deconstructive theory, cognitive science, and the work of painter and poet William Blake. O'Gorman explores the ways in which digital media might help to restore the critical, intellectual purpose of higher education, which has been repressed by the technocratic structures that dominate the modern university. He argues that the revolutionary, socio-critical impetus that spurred deconstructive theory and transformed the humanities was lost in the initial attempts to digitize the literary canon and demonstrate the convergence of critical theory and hypertext. Humanities disciplines, he argues, must reposition themselves through the invention of humanities-based interdisciplinary programs capable of adapting to the post-print vicissitudes of a digital culture. E-Crit is thus essential reading for anyone concerned with the practice - and future - of the humanities in higher education.