Edward Vanhoutte

Melissa Terras

Julianne Nyhan

Digital Humanities is becoming an increasingly popular focus of academic endeavour. There are now hundreds of Digital Humanities centres worldwide and the subject is taught at both postgraduate and undergraduate level. Yet the term ’Digital Humanities’ is much debated. This reader brings together, for the first time, in one core volume the essential readings that have emerged in Digital Humanities. We provide a historical overview of how the term ’Humanities Computing’ developed into the term ’Digital Humanities’, and highlight core readings which explore the meaning, scope, and implementation of the field. To contextualize and frame each included reading, the editors and authors provide a commentary on the original piece. There is also an annotated bibliography of other material not included in the text to provide an essential list of reading in the discipline. This text will be required reading for scholars and students who want to discover the history of Digital Humanities through its core writings, and for those who wish to understand the many possibilities that exist when trying to define Digital Humanities.

A Reader

Defining Digital Humanities

Hidden and Devalued Feminized Labour in the Digital Humanities examines the data-driven labour that underpinned the Index Thomisticus–a preeminent project of the incunabular digital humanities–and advanced the data-foundations of computing in the Humanities. Through oral history and archival research, Nyhan reveals a hidden history of the entanglements of gender in the intellectual and technical work of the early digital humanities. Setting feminized keypunching in its historical contexts–from the history of concordance making, to the feminization of the office and humanities computing–this book delivers new insight into the categories of work deemed meritorious of acknowledgement and attribution and, thus, how knowledge and expertise was defined in and by this field. Focalizing the overlooked yet significant data-driven labour of lesser-known individuals, this book challenges exclusionary readings of the history of computing in the Humanities. Contributing to ongoing conversations about the need for alternative genealogies of computing, this book is also relevant to current debates about diversity and representation in the Academy and the wider computing sector. Hidden and Devalued Feminized Labour in the Digital Humanities will be of interest to researchers and students studying digital humanities, library and information science, the history of computing, oral history, the history of the humanities, and the sociology of knowledge and science.

On the Index Thomisticus Project 1954-67

Hidden and Devalued Feminized Labour in the Digital Humanities

Claire Warwick

This cutting-edge and comprehensive introduction to digital humanities explains the scope of the discipline and state of the art and provides a wide-ranging insight into emerging topics and avenues of research. Each chapter interweaves the expert commentary of leading academics with analysis of current research and practice, exploring the possibilities and challenges that occur when culture and digital technologies intersect. International case studies of projects ranging from crowdsourced manuscript transcription to computational reconstruction of frescoes are included in each chapter, providing a wealth of information and inspiration. QR codes within each chapter link to a dedicated website where additional content, such as further case studies, is located. Key topics covered include: • studying users and readers • social media and crowdsourcing • digitization and digital resources • image processing in the digital humanities • 3D recording and museums • electronic text and text encoding • book history, texts and digital editing • open access and online teaching of digital humanities • institutional models for digital humanities. Readership: This is an essential practical guide for academics, researchers, librarians and professionals involved in the digital humanities. It will also be core reading for all humanities students and those taking courses in the digital humanities in particular.

Digital Humanities in Practice

Marco Passarotti

This book gathers, and makes available in English, with new introductions, previously out of print or otherwise difficult to access articles by Fr Roberto Busa S.J. (1913 - 2011). Also included is a comprehensive bibliography of Busa, an oral history interview with Busa's translator, and a substantial new chapter that evaluates Busa's contributions and intellectual legacies. The result is a groundbreaking book that is of interest to digital humanists and computational linguists as well as historians of science, technology and the humanities. As the application of computing to cultural heritage becomes ever more ubiquitous, new possibilities for transmitting, shaping, understanding, questioning and even imagining the human record are opening up. Busa is considered by many to be among the pioneers in this field, and his research on projects like the Index Thomisticus is one of the earliest known examples of a humanities project that incorporated automation; it continues to be widely cited and used today. Busa published more than 350 academic articles and shorter pieces in numerous languages, but despite the unquestionable importance of his early work for understanding the history and development of fields like humanities computing and computational linguistics, a large part of his canon and thinking remained inaccessible or difficult to access until this book.

Fr Roberto Busa in His Own Words

One Origin of Digital Humanities

Andrew Flinn

This book addresses the application of computing to cultural heritage and the discipline of Digital Humanities that formed around it. Digital Humanities research is transforming how the Human record can be transmitted, shaped, understood, questioned and imagined and it has been ongoing for more than 70 years. However, we have no comprehensive histories of its research trajectory or its disciplinary development. The authors make a first contribution towards remedying this by uncovering, documenting, and analysing a number of the social, intellectual and creative processes that helped to shape this research from the 1950s until the present day. By taking an oral history approach, this book explores questions like, among others, researchers’ earliest memories of encountering computers and the factors that subsequently prompted them to use the computer in Humanities research. Computation and the Humanities will be an essential read for cultural and computing historians, digital humanists and those interested in developments like the digitisation of cultural heritage and artefacts. This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license

Julianne Nyhan

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