Digital humanities : knowledge and critique in a digital age /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Berry, David M. (David Michael), author.
Imprint:Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2017.
Description:ix, 189 pages ; 24 cm
Language:English
Subject:Digital humanities.
Digital humanities.
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11039750
Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:Fagerjord, Anders, author.
ISBN:9780745697659
0745697658
9780745697666
0745697666
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:As the twenty-first century unfolds, computers continue to change the way we think about culture, society and what it is to be human: areas traditionally explored by the humanities. In a world of Big Data, Google Books, digital archives, real-time streaming systems and smart phones, our use of culture has been changing dramatically. The digital humanities give us powerful tools and methods for thinking about culture and history in the contemporary world, through the use of sophisticated computing techniques and methods. Berry and Fagerjord provide a comprehensive guide, exploring the history, intellectual work, key arguments and ideas of this emerging discipline. They also undertake a substantive critique, suggesting ways in which the humanities can be enriched through computing, but also how cultural critique can transform the digital humanities.
Other form:Online version: Digital humanities. Cambridge, England ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2017] 9780745697680
Review by Choice Review

With the goal of mapping both the shifting boundaries of a nascent discipline and emergent areas/issues within the field, Berry (Univ. of Sussex, UK; editor of Understanding Digital Humanities, CH, Sep'13, 51-0067) and Fagerjord (Univ. of Oslo, Norway) aspire to the impossible and primarily succeed by capturing the inflection point in the metamorphosis of digital humanities into critical digital humanities. This slender, massively sourced volume aptly surveys the contours, challenges, and possibilities in a set of confederated, interdisciplinary practices. The authors offer both descriptive and prescriptive formulations about what these practices are and can become, but always in the form of open invitations to assess, add, or revise. Roughly organized around what the authors call the "humanities stack," presented in a visual representation of increasing layers of abstraction in the field from encoding to critique, the book concludes with a call for further theorization and critical application/intervention. The volume's claims--positing a type of "computhesis" akin to Foucault's "mathesis" in the history of human knowledge--and implications affect everyone involved in humanities education and research. The authors' call to actively and critically shape collective access to and imbrication/interaction with computation and the digital deserves deliberate consideration. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --Andrew C Jenkins, College of Central Florida

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review