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Digital_Humanities
A visionary report on the revitalization of the liberal arts tradition in the electronically inflected, design-driven, multimedia language of the twenty-first century. Digital_Humanities is a compact, game-changing report on the state of contemporary knowledge production. Answering the question “What is digital humanities?,” it provides an in-depth examination of an emerging field. This collaboratively authored and visually compelling volume explores methodologies and techniques unfamiliar to traditional modes of humanistic inquiry—including geospatial analysis, data mining, corpus linguistics, visualization, and simulation—to show their relevance for contemporary culture. Written by five leading practitioner-theorists whose varied backgrounds embody the intellectual and creative diversity of the field, Digital_Humanities is a vision statement for the future, an invitation to engage, and a critical tool for understanding the shape of new scholarship.
141 pages, Hardcover
First published October 5, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 10, 2016
This primer is a 4; its content is novel as well as its form. It tries to be what it argues for, and it contains much insight towards the future and “dots to connect”. Sometimes it gets a little wordier than need be; ironically the collective authorship is still a part of academia, and academics have been groomed to write for word count.
p.122 - 137 were utterly useless, but the rest of the primer was insightful. Particularly interesting case study on "curating" an Afghan refugee camp. My favorite notes, which I think sum up the burgeoning field:
"Imagine being on the streets of a South African township as it explodes in violence after the apartheid-era government switched the language of education from English to Afrikaans. This is the experience Hamilton College students have when they play the immersive game Soweto ’76, one that deepens empathy and enlivens class discussions of race, power, and education. At Dartmouth, students compete furiously against each other to tag the materials they find in online archives. When these students play Metadata Games, they are encountering an open-source project that uses the affordances of gaming to build more robust archival data systems. King’s College London students create avatars in Second Life and then reconstruct historical stages from the classical Roman Theater of Pompey to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. At Duke and other participating universities, students play “Virtual Peace,” a collaborative simulation game in which players analyze complex situations posed by international crises in order to learn how to make effec- tive decisions. Digital Humanities gaming has begun to successfully engage with historical simulation, virtuous cycles of competition, and the virtual construction of learning environments."
p. 78
"To fully understand the specificities of our current moment and the prospects for the future, we need remember the social life of information in the industrial era, when worth tended to be determined by scarcity."
Though there were notable exceptions to this model of scarcity—the establishment of public education from kindergarten through graduate schools, the great philanthropic initiatives, the building of public library systems—much of our legal and economic system is still predicated on scarcity and narrow definitions of ownership as a driving force.”
p. 49
"This is the future of knowledge, where culture and social and political practice will emphasize embeddings of the virtual within the real, where actual physical landscapes will be curated just as if they were an art gallery, and where we will be surrounded and enveloped by the collaborative and distributed building of annotations on, and overlays of, the physical world.This is a future that is already with us. The challenge for scholarship and institutions? To build platforms and collections out into these and other domains of intersection between the virtual and the physical in ways that reinforce not only access and outreach but also establish new models of imagination, quality, and rigor.”
For free here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/defaul...
p.122 - 137 were utterly useless, but the rest of the primer was insightful. Particularly interesting case study on "curating" an Afghan refugee camp. My favorite notes, which I think sum up the burgeoning field:
"Imagine being on the streets of a South African township as it explodes in violence after the apartheid-era government switched the language of education from English to Afrikaans. This is the experience Hamilton College students have when they play the immersive game Soweto ’76, one that deepens empathy and enlivens class discussions of race, power, and education. At Dartmouth, students compete furiously against each other to tag the materials they find in online archives. When these students play Metadata Games, they are encountering an open-source project that uses the affordances of gaming to build more robust archival data systems. King’s College London students create avatars in Second Life and then reconstruct historical stages from the classical Roman Theater of Pompey to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. At Duke and other participating universities, students play “Virtual Peace,” a collaborative simulation game in which players analyze complex situations posed by international crises in order to learn how to make effec- tive decisions. Digital Humanities gaming has begun to successfully engage with historical simulation, virtuous cycles of competition, and the virtual construction of learning environments."
p. 78
"To fully understand the specificities of our current moment and the prospects for the future, we need remember the social life of information in the industrial era, when worth tended to be determined by scarcity."
Though there were notable exceptions to this model of scarcity—the establishment of public education from kindergarten through graduate schools, the great philanthropic initiatives, the building of public library systems—much of our legal and economic system is still predicated on scarcity and narrow definitions of ownership as a driving force.”
p. 49
"This is the future of knowledge, where culture and social and political practice will emphasize embeddings of the virtual within the real, where actual physical landscapes will be curated just as if they were an art gallery, and where we will be surrounded and enveloped by the collaborative and distributed building of annotations on, and overlays of, the physical world.This is a future that is already with us. The challenge for scholarship and institutions? To build platforms and collections out into these and other domains of intersection between the virtual and the physical in ways that reinforce not only access and outreach but also establish new models of imagination, quality, and rigor.”
For free here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/defaul...
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November 18, 2024great intro, very helpful, not sure if i'm meant to be applying for this for my masters having read it because i am interested in a very specific subset of the things they have described, but i guess hence this is why it is a good intro in scoping the field out
November 29, 2014
This was the textbook for an Intro to DH course I helped out with this spring. Also we've been using it as a discussion starter for a weekly DH brown bag lunch. If you're not familiar with Digital Humanities, there are good short sections that act as a primer. However, the authors don't use real-world examples (to avoid creating a canon, fair enough) so sometimes the hypothetical projects are a little too hypothetical. They made a point to say, this is what DH is now, but maybe it won't be quite this way in the future.
November 5, 2018
This is a great short introduction to this fascinating and growing field. The best thing about it is its design: I read it in pdf, but even on the flat dull surface of my laptop screen it was a pleasure to look at. The design is an integral part of the book's argument. The interconnected ideas are linked by clever motifs in the design, and the book's manifesto-like character is accentuated by sans serif fonts, line-end hyphenation and the direct language throughout.
Digital_Humanities seems to be mainly aimed at those outside the field. Its advice to deans and funding bodies is on point. It encourages them not simply to embrace DH, but tries to inform them how to judge DH projects properly, to arrive at a fair assessment of their real value.
As a practising DHer, I found less in this book than I'd hoped. As a model of collaboration and book design, and as a strong but approachable defence of my field, I enjoyed it. If this collective ever produced another manifesto, though, I would hope for them to shake up the field of DH a little.
September 4, 2022
The content was useful but dear lord I don't think I have ever read something so boring or hard to get through. I'm glad I got the content I did from it but I hope I never have to read this again
March 12, 2013
Wonderful and concise. Also, I think, a great example of collaborative writing. I saw the voices of the numerous authors come through clearly but in a way that was completely integrated in the work as a whole.
December 12, 2014
The structure of this book is a little too confusing at points, but it's aim is to innovative and I found the collaborative authorship inspiring. (I read this in my favorite class this semester so that may be why I liked it.)
December 9, 2014
I was hoping to read the whole book, but I got frustrated and decided to read only the part assigned for class. It was just too dense for me. I have too many other things to read this month.
October 15, 2018
Terrificante.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews