Review by Choice Review
Where do the digital humanities fit within academia? How should the digital humanist's computational toolbox be positioned in relation to traditional scholarly approaches? These momentous questions reflect the ongoing, often haphazard, marriage of technology and the humanities. In Critical Digital Humanities, Dobson (English and creative writing, Dartmouth) offers his take on these questions, approaching them from the viewpoint of computational text analysis. He argues that computational methods are situated within historical and cultural contexts and that computational results, such as topic models and digital clusters of texts, are subjectively constituted through a series of human choices. Dobson's perspective is strongly theoretical and methodological; he provides ample references and leaves bountiful room for deeper discussion. That said, the book should be read in conjunction with works that counterbalance its literary-scholar point of view. Rife with scholarly language, computing terminology, and Python code, the book assumes familiarity with the subject matter; it is not appropriate for those new to digital humanities. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Charlie Harper, Case Western Reserve University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
