Interested in learning more about theories and practices of digital scholarship, and wondering where to go next? We offer here some initial suggestions, including the major journals in the field and some articles and books we’ve found useful. We will be expanding this list over time. Please let us know if you’d like to suggest additions.
Journals
LLC: the official print journal of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). LLC publishes on a range of digital humanities topics.
Digital Humanities Quarterly: the official online, open-access journal of ADHO. DHQ publishes on a range of digital humanities topics.
Vectors: an innovative online journal focusing on the interconnection between technology and socio-cultural relations.
Digital Studies/Le champ numérique: a bilingual journal of digital humanities published by the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI).
Electronic Book Review: a critical review that is also an experiment in public peer reviewing and digital publishing.
Journal of Library Metadata: research, innovations, news and expert views about metadata applications and the role of metadata in information retrieval.
Introductory collections and useful starting points
A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth. Blackwell, 2004. Available online. This collection includes useful introductory articles on a variety of topics, including text encoding, databases, information modeling, digital editions, text analysis, classification, and the use of digital methods in a variety of specific disciplines.
A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman. Blackwell: 2008. Available online. This volume, a successor to the Companion to Digital Humanities, offers a specific focus on the use of digital methods in literary studies.
Electronic Textual Editing, edited by Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth. MLA, 2006. Available online.
The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. MIT Press, 2003. Related materials available online.
Digital History: A guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the web. Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Available online.
The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities maintains a useful library of essays based on their research.
Blogs and Experiments
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum writes a thoughtful blog on digital humanities, with connections as well to fields like game studies and electronic literature.
Lisa Spiro’s blog, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, explores issues like collaborative authorship and definitions of digital scholarship.
Geoffrey Rockwell’s blog, Theoreti.ca, casts a wide and varied net with a special focus on humanities data visualization, text analysis, digital arts and culture, and the emerging shape of digital scholarship.
Grand Text Auto is a collaboratively authored blog focusing on computer narrative, game studies and interactive fiction.
Dan Cohen’s blog features podcasts on the impact of technology on teaching, learning and scholarship, as well as influential postings on a variety of topics in digital scholarship.
Digital Humanities Now is an experimental site that aggregates twitter feeds and other references from a large set of scholars and practitioners in the domain of digital scholarship, to provide a distilled view of what’s notable in the current landscape.
Recent and notable books
Drucker, Johanna. SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing. University of Chicago, 2009.
Hayles, Katherine. Writing Machines. MIT Press, 2002.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. MIT Press, 2008.
Landow, George. Hypertext 3.0. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Liu, Alan. Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. University of Chicago, 2005.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2002. Draft version available online.
McCarty, Willard. Humanities Computing. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. MIT Press, 2009.
Foulonneau, Muriel and Jenn Riley. Metadata for Digital Resources: Implementation, Systems Design, and Interoperability. Chandos, 2008.
Influential and provocative articles
Derose, Steven J., David Durand, Elli Mylonas, and Allen H. Renear. “What is Text, Really?” Journal of Computing in Higher Education 1.2 (Winter 1990), 3-26. Available online (licensed content).
Folsom, Ed. “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives.” PMLA 122.5 (October 2007), 1571-1579. Also see the responses by Jonathan Freedman, Katherine Hayles, Jerome McGann, Meredith McGill, and Peter Stallybrass in the same issue.
Liu, Alan. “Transcendental Data: Toward A Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 31:1 (2004): 49-84. Available online (Univ. of Chicago Press Journals).
Piez, Wendell. “Beyond the ‘Descriptive vs. Procedural’ Distinction”, Markup Languages: Theory and Practice 3.2 (Spring 2001). Available online.
Useful reference and technical introductions
The Text Encoding Initiative. Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. TEI Consortium, 2007. Available online.
