Understanding Digital Humanities
Title
Understanding Digital Humanities
Subject
Digital Humanities
Description
In his introduction to Understanding Digital Humanities, David Berry traces the history of digital humanities—an evolving method and theory of interpreting the effects of digitization and computation on society and culture, while simultaneously adopting and inventing computational processes for guiding its nascent discipline. Notable scholars and pathfinders in the field were selected to write the essays featured in this book, which illuminate fundamental and often controversial issues of the digital humanities,. These issues include the relationship between computation and literacy, aesthetics, gender studies, and the invention and application of data mining tools for interpreting vast quantities of cultural data.
Of particular interest to the digital archivist is the Jussi Parikka’s essay, “Archives in Media Theory: Material Media Archaeology and Digital Humanities.” Parikka believes the archive offers a basis for theory and theoretical backing for digital humanities work, especially studies that focus on calculating effects and representing patterns. The non-narrative, non-discursive, and database logic of the archive presents a digital space, a metaphor, and a method for ingesting and interpreting the vast amount of information transmitted daily through digital media. By breaking down the study of digital media and culture into a study of the digital object’s materiality, its purposes, its historical and cultural context, and its representation and preservation, the archive as method becomes apparent—an apt metaphor Berry uses to describe the Internet’s resources, the “new infinite archive.”
Digital archivists will also find the final chapter, “Transdisciplinarity and Digital Humanities: Lessons Learned from Developing Text-Mining Tools for Textual Analysis” by Yu-Wei Lin, useful for promoting collaborative efforts between software engineers and humanists, and for extending the reach of archives into scholarly research and knowledge creation.
Of particular interest to the digital archivist is the Jussi Parikka’s essay, “Archives in Media Theory: Material Media Archaeology and Digital Humanities.” Parikka believes the archive offers a basis for theory and theoretical backing for digital humanities work, especially studies that focus on calculating effects and representing patterns. The non-narrative, non-discursive, and database logic of the archive presents a digital space, a metaphor, and a method for ingesting and interpreting the vast amount of information transmitted daily through digital media. By breaking down the study of digital media and culture into a study of the digital object’s materiality, its purposes, its historical and cultural context, and its representation and preservation, the archive as method becomes apparent—an apt metaphor Berry uses to describe the Internet’s resources, the “new infinite archive.”
Digital archivists will also find the final chapter, “Transdisciplinarity and Digital Humanities: Lessons Learned from Developing Text-Mining Tools for Textual Analysis” by Yu-Wei Lin, useful for promoting collaborative efforts between software engineers and humanists, and for extending the reach of archives into scholarly research and knowledge creation.
Abstract
Creator
Berry, David M.
Publisher
Palgrave MacMillan
Date
2012
Contributor
Polk, Victoria
Is Format Of
Print version: Understanding Digital Humanities.
Type
Book
Identifier
Print ISBN: 9780230292642
ISBN-10: 0230292658
Bibliographic Citation
Barry, David M. Understanding Digital Humanities. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Files
Collection
Citation
Berry, David M., “Understanding Digital Humanities,” Digital Archiving Resources, accessed April 20, 2024, https://dar.cah.ucf.edu/items/show/74.