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