Abstract
The premise upon which digital humanities is based is that our everyday lives have been irreversibly changed by digital technologies and that this applies very much to the humanities and the ideas about culture intrinsic to them. Accordingly, the field seeks to develop a detailed understanding of computation in culture, but it is also concerned with the application of computation to humanities research and the kinds of question asked by such research. Statistical analysis and date visualization are just two examples of this; perhaps the most common example would be the digital search and retrieval of archives and collections. In this book, David Berry and Anders Fagerjord provide a guide to this emergent field and offer critical discussion of how it has developed and should develop in the future. They outline what computational thinking involves and how digital technologies have changed the construction and representation of knowledge. They discuss digital methods and tools, and digital scholarship and interface criticism. The book concludes with their thoughts on possible future directions for the digital humanities, focusing particularly on the development of a critical framework and a more contextualized approach. There remain doubts about the whole enterprise – whether it is opportunistic or timely, whether it seizes the moment or is woolly headed in its grasp of social and cultural change, among various other points of scepticism – but the book helps a great deal in setting out what has been achieved thus far and in having a strong sense of what should ensue hereafter. Students in particular will find the book a helpful and highly informed introduction to this new field sitting adjacent, as it does, to the long-established field of media and communication studies.