Digital Humanities: Merging Technology with Cultural Studies

"By casting the collection explicitly as an outreach to the larger community of Americanists---not primarily those who self-identify as 'digital scholars'---Earhart and Jewell have made an important choice, and one that will likely make this a landmark publication." ---Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, which features a wide range of practitioner-scholars, is the first of its kind: a gathering of people who are expert in American literary studies and in digital technologies, scholars uniquely able to draw from experience with building digital resources and to provide theoretical commentary on how the transformation to new technologies alters the way we think about and articulate scholarship in American literature. The volume collects articles from those who are involved in tool development, usability testing, editing and textual scholarship, digital librarianship, and issues of race and ethnicity in digital humanities, while also situating digital humanities work within the larger literary discipline. In addition, the volume examines the traditional structures of the fields, including tenure and promotion criteria, modes of scholarly production, the skill sets required for scholarship, and the training of new scholars. The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age will attract practitioners of digital humanities in multiple fields, Americanists who utilize digital materials, and those who are intellectually curious about the new movement and materials. Amy E. Earhart is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Texas A&M University. Andrew Jewell is Associate Professor of Digital Projects, University Libraries, at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Cover art: Book background ©iStockphoto.com/natashika digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

Twitter Archives and the Challenges of "Big Social Data" for Media and Communication Research

This volume presents an exploration of Digital Humanities (DH), a field focused on the reciprocal transformation of digital technologies and humanities scholarship. Central to DH research is the practice of modelling, which involves translating intricate knowledge systems into computational models. This book addresses a fundamental query: How can an effective language be developed to conceptualize and guide modelling in DH? Modelling, with its historical roots, carries multifaceted meanings influenced by various disciplinary contexts. Modelling Between Digital and Humanities innovatively connects DH with the historical tradition of model-based thinking in the humanities, cultural studies, and the sciences. It endeavors to reshape interpretative frameworks by contextualizing DH's modelling practices within a broader conceptual landscape. Through an exploration of digital, visual and data models, the book asserts that DH holds the potential to be a cornerstone of a novel cultural literacy paradigm. By probing the interplay between technology and thought, the book ultimately positions DH as a catalyst for transformative cultural insights.

Aim: This research note narrates existing and continuing potential crossover between the digital humanities and writing studies. I identify synergies between the two fields’ methodologies and categorize current research in terms of four permutations, or “valences,” of the phrase “writing analytics.” These valences include analytics of writing , writing of analytics , writing as analytics , and analytics as writing . I bring recent work in the two fields together under these common labels, with the goal of building strategic alliances between them rather than to delimit or be comprehensive. I offer the valences as one heuristic for establishing connections and distinctions between two fields engaged in complementary work without firm or definitive discursive borders. Writing analytics might provide a disciplinary ground that incorporates and coheres work from these different domains. I further hope to locate the areas in which my current research in digital humanities, grounded in archival studies, might most shape writing analytics. Problem Formation: Digital humanities and writing studies are two fields in which scholars are performing massive data analysis research projects, including those in which data are writing or metadata that accompanies writing. There is an emerging environment in the Modern Language Association friendly to crossover between the humanities and writing studies, especially in work that involves digital methods and media. Writing analytics accordingly hopes to find common disciplinary ground with digital humanities, with the goal of benefitting from and contributing to conversations about the ethical application of digital methods to its research questions. Recent work to bridge digital humanities and writing studies more broadly has unfortunately focused more on territorial and usability concerns than on identifying resonances between the fields’ methodological and ethical commitments. Information Collection: I draw from a history of meta-academic literature in digital humanities and writing studies to review their shared methodological commitments, particularly in literature that recognizes and responds to pushback against the fields’ ostensible use of extra-disciplinary methods. I then turn to current research in both fields that uses and critiques computational techniques, which is most relevant to writing analytics’ articulated focus on massive data analysis. I provide a more detailed explanation, drawing from my categorization of this work, of the conversations in digital humanities surrounding the digital archives that enable data analysis. Conclusions: A review of past and current research in digital humanities and writing studies reveals shared attention to techniques for tokenizing texts at different scales for analysis, which is made possible by the curation of large corpora. Both fields are writing new genres to compose this analysis. In these genres, both fields emphasize process in their provisional work, which is sociocognitively repurposed in different rhetorical contexts. Finally, both fields recognize that the analytical methods they employ are themselves modes of composition and argumentation. An ethics of data transformation present in digital humanities, however, is largely absent from writing studies. This ethics comes to digital humanities from the influence of textual studies and archival studies. Further research in writing analytics might benefit from reframing writing corpora as archives—what Paul Fyfe (2017) calls a shift from “data mining” to “data archaeology”—in its analyses. This is especially true for analyses of text, which in particular foreground writing and analysis of writing as acts of transformation. Directions for Further Research: I recommend that future efforts to find crossover between digital humanities and writing studies do so by identifying their common values rather than trying to co-opt language and spaces or engaging in broad definitional work. I further provide a set of guiding principles that writing analytics might follow in order to pursue research that draws upon and contributes to both digital humanities and writing studies. These research projects might consider and account for the silences of writing corpora—unseen versions of documents, and documents’ elements not described in structured data—while attending to the silences that these efforts might in turn (re)produce.

Precarious Labor and the Digital Humanities Christina Boyles (bio), Anne Cong-Huyen (bio), Carrie Johnston (bio), Jim McGrath (bio), and Amanda Phillips (bio) We want to believe that we can be agile and innovative, like Silicon Valley says it is, by making DH run with short-term grants, app contests, and temporary labor. We want to have a sort of Uber-style sharing economy for DH-research. But this is not how one supports careful, enduring scholarship and teaching. —Miriam Posner, "Money and Time" Despite the money and prestige that seems to come with the label, digital humanities is a field that relies on grants and temporary positions to establish credibility on campuses. As a result, DH laborers are frequently precarious across institutions. They occupy a startling range of positions: administrators, adjuncts, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students, tenure-track and contingent faculty, librarians, archivists, programmers, IT and edtech specialists, consultants, museum curators, artists, authors, editors, and more. Members of the American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus, who work across other precarious fields like African American studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, feminist studies, and more, recognize the many ways in which the value of our labor has been challenged, taken for granted, dismissed outright, or explained away as at best a fad or at worst the manifestation of neoliberalism in its most craven form within the humanities.1 These experiences have motivated us to make forms of digital labor and the agents behind this labor more visible, to create standards of evaluation that help practitioners and nonpractitioners define and describe the value of digital scholarship, and to sustain generative relationships that address the ethical dimensions of collaborative labor on digital humanities initiatives. It is our hope that this conversation can contribute to building solidarity with other precarious workers across the academy. [End Page 693] The Precarity of DH in and beyond American Studies Within American studies, students and faculty members interested in digital scholarship encounter many situations where support for digital labor could be greatly improved. While there has been compelling digital scholarship in American studies that takes a traditional form, collaborative, public-facing, and iterative digital scholarship proves challenging in environments that privilege the monograph. Consider the tenure-track faculty member required to print hard copies of born-digital scholarship far afield from the monograph, whose portfolio may be read by a department and an administration with no clear guidelines for how to promote the employees they hired to "do" digital work. Consider the graduate student encouraged to situate herself within digital humanities by completing digital projects in addition to a dissertation, taking on part-time positions, or even paying for additional credentials. While several humanities departments and professional organizations have taken steps to develop guidelines for professional evaluation of digital labor, these recommendations may not serve the varied forms of academic labor beyond the tenure-track model. How do we help members of the community interested in more creative or multimodal endeavors or forms—films, exhibitions, games, documentaries, oral histories—demonstrate the institutional and professional value of their labor to audiences who do not find its importance self-evident? Scholars looking for collaborators or material resources on campus may find their work challenged by the conditions of labor created by understaffing, particularly if a single employee is expected to serve a wide range of campus needs. Digital scholarship in American studies often involves the labor of experts who institutionally reside elsewhere on campus. Many of these individuals work in libraries, where they may collaborate with American studies students and faculty members. Others may be former American studies students who earned library degrees or gained employment in traditional or "alt-ac" roles. While some of these employees work in supportive environments where their time and expertise is valued or where their contributions to digital scholarship are visible and documented, this is not always the case. For example, Leigh Bonds and Alex Gil note that many experts in digital scholarship "have been given the mandate to coordinate and support digital scholarship at our institutions without being part of a fully-staffed center or institute" and are expected to operate as "miracle workers" on campus, performing as scholars, tech support, administrators, project...

Our critical momentDIGITAL TECHNOLOGY HAS MADE THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY a critical moment of opportunity but also of responsibility for scholars of Caribbean literature. Digital archives and recent reprints have provided access to Caribbean literary texts dating back to the nineteenth century and, thus, have supported a paradigm-shifting expansion of the corpus of Caribbean literature commonly taught and studied. Further, historical newspapers, photographs, memoirs and postcards from the region are being digitised - many are available open-access to the public. These archival materials illuminate the significance this literature held in its original political, social and cultural contexts, and shed light as well on its aesthetics. Further, digital technology is providing new means of analysing literature (such as visualisation and data mining), of presenting literary scholarship (such as curated digital exhibits and websites), and of teaching (online and hybrid courses). Together, these have the promise of bridging institutional and geographic barriers, enabling us to teach and research this expanded body of Caribbean literature in a collaborative interdisciplinary and international digital space.Paradoxically, digital technology is also reproducing colonial hierarchy and marginalising Caribbean literature. Digitising archival materials has the potential both to reproduce and to redress gaps and biases of colonial archives. A similar paradox pertains to digital technology. US government and corporate entities dominate the administration of the internet and an Anglo-American 'technocultural bias' shapes its language, services, and instruments. Anglo-American scholars and institutions dominate digital humanities as well.1 US and British authors, particularly white ones, have a strong web presence and large-scale digital archives and scholarly editions dedicated to them. By contrast, Caribbean authors lack such digital humanities projects, and the resulting marginal position of Caribbean literature on the internet threatens its ability to endure.2 Alex Gil argues compellingly that if Caribbean literature is not made digitally accessible, and if few scholarly editions exist and little digital scholarship, Caribbean authors are at risk of disappearing in the digital age.3Thus, as it opens new horizons, the digital age places significant responsibility on scholars to redress the marginalisation of Caribbean literature and to ensure its future. This article describes how one group of scholars, librarians and students - in the United States and the Caribbean - collaboratively designed a course that began to address this challenge. It is also an invitation to join us in building on that project to create an open-access teaching and research commons to sustain Caribbean literature through and beyond the twenty-first century.Teaching with the archiveWhen a small group of scholars started to plan the course in 2012 we had more modest goals. I taught at the University of the Florida which served as the technological hub for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and since 2007 had helped to build its collection in Anglophone Caribbean literature. Established in 2004, dLOC (www.dloc.com) is an open-access, non-profit, international partnership of over forty libraries, archives, universities and NGOS in the Caribbean, US, and Europe that houses Caribbean library and archival materials with the goals of preservation and access - and the inclusion of Caribbean materials in school and university curricula. As a non-commercial and nonexclusive association, dLOC facilitates collaboration with multiple institutions and works to provide a socio-technical infrastructure for Caribbean studies.In 2012, dLOC had amassed a significant collection of early Anglophone Caribbean literature and cultural journals, including the early poetry of Claude McKay and Una Marson, nearly all of Herbert de Lisser's oeuvre, the Jamaica Journal, Kyk-Over-Al, and Tapia. …

New Dialogues in Spanish and Portuguese Studies:Pedagogical and Theoretical Perspectives from the Digital Humanities Susanna Allés-Torrent, Megan Jeanette Myers, and Élika Ortega The Digital Humanities (DH) has been for many years, even decades, in constant development and self-definition and has been able to gather a diverse and international community that goes beyond the traditional framework of academia. Different initiatives underscored the need to advocate for linguistic and cultural diversity and adopted inclusivity as one of its core values (Galina Russell 2014; Gil and Ortega 2016; Mahony 2018; Spence 2014).1 In this process of self-(re)presentation, one of the most particular lines of debate has probably been the relationship of DH with other disciplines. Consequently, practices, theories, and fields of studies come together to seek to redefine themselves in light of digital methods of critical analysis reshaping their academic practices and scopes, creating what Ortega (2019) has termed a "Digital Humanities ecology of knowledges." Critical Digital Humanities advocates for the need of stronger theoretical frames and deeper engagement with cultural criticism (Fiormonte 2016; Liu 2012). Black Digital Humanities explores the relationship between DH and Africana, African American, and Black Studies, and how technology can bring forward an understudied field by exposing "humanity as a racialized social construction" and by reconsidering the canon (Earhart 2012; Gallon 2016). Postcolonial Digital Humanities brings to light how legacies of colonialism of knowledge production still pervade the digital cultural record (Risam 2018). Data Feminism exposes how data science can be informed by the ideas of feminisms and justice (Klein 2020). Digital Black Atlantic investigates the ways in which digital tools can better be interconnected with African diaspora studies (Risam and Baker Josephs 2021), and so forth. In this sense, Modern Languages (ML) also finds itself in the process of establishing the terms in which it intersects with the Digital Humanities. This intersection of DH and ML does not consist of the adoption of a digital literacy as a mere instrument, but as an indispensable critical and culturally sensitive component for understanding digital culture and digital methods. We should emphasize, furthermore, that this crossroads of disciplines goes in both directions, meaning that the DH can provide ML with new digital approaches to study and analyze language, literature, and culture. And simultaneously, ML can enrich the linguistic and cultural meaning of DH. A decade ago Kirschenbaum (2010), in a key article for the field, analyzed the role of English departments and the reasons for being at the vanguard of DH: the centrality of texts, which are the most suitable data to process; the long tradition of composition unavoidably [End Page 535] associated with computers; the boom of theories around digital archives and editions since the 1980s, and practices of electronic literature; the openness of English departments to cultural studies, including digital material culture; and the interest for the digitization of books and reading supports (6). Obviously, the analysis was made from the US-perspective, but it paved the way to better contextualize the then burgeoning DH field within that precise setting. In the case of ML departments, no self-assessment has yet been done. We can find "histories" of digital methods in certain countries (e.g., Spain, in Toscano et al. 2020), geolinguistic communities (Ortega and Gutiérrez 2014), or disciplines (e.g., Medieval Studies), but not in a ML context. It seems therefore that the relationship with DH is still undefined, and this is especially true from a pedagogical perspective (Taylor and Thornton 2017). Modern language departments have traditionally focused on fostering the study of language and culture. So, as ML shares some of the developments highlighted by Kirschenbaum, units devoted to ML are institutionally kept busy with communicating and teaching the foreign component with digital tools. The urgency and popularity of language teaching has, in many cases, rendered an "instrumental" use of such tools (e.g., case of language courses), rather than fostering the critical and reflective integration of DH approaches.2 It is within this context where the challenge remains of determining how the digital is adopted and taught. Scholars are already examining the multiple ways to adopt and implement methods, skills, tools, and projects both in their teaching...

The affordances of the digital age have precipitated a crisis of authority. Whom do we trust? How do we prove ourselves trustworthy? The heuristics of authority, in particular at the information filtering and presentation layers, can be co-opted by actors able to manipulate them, and us. At the same time, social tolerance for uncertainty and complexity is low, to the extent that removing them has become a key success metric within both backend systems and user interface design. This rapid shifting of knowledge technologies, in particular as regards the manner in which sources convey their authority in the transition from their affordances as analogue to digital media (where unfiltered source availability is high and the visual languages of authority, from web design to ‘deep fakes,’ are easily appropriated), is an incomplete process that has muddied our ability to judge he signals of trustworthiness and credibility. These are problems democratic societies are struggling with on a fundamental level. Unfortunately, however, too often the solutions being proposed emerge from the same culture of software development that created the problems in the first place: as Pasquale describes it, ‘...authority is increasingly expressed algorithmically ... Silicon Valley and Wall Street tend to treat recommendations as purely technical problems. The values and prerogatives that the encoded rules enact are hidden within black boxes’ (Pasquale, 2015). Hiding the ‘encoded rules’ informing knowledge creation within ‘black boxes’ is precisely the kind of process the work of scholarly editors, in particular digital scholarly editors, has evolved over decades to avoid. Instead, this is an expertise that documents the complexities resulting from the work of filtering accounts, establishing authority, managing uncertainty, and documenting provenance. The clear link between the problems of information overload and technological overreach and the affordances of digital scholarly editorial expertise to “situate knowledges” (Haraway, 1988) is yet to be systematically explored, however. This chapter proposes a framework for negotiating trust and authority that exploits the affordances of digital scholarly editing by privileging the iterative rather than the definitive (McGann, 1996; Schreibman, 2013; Sahle, 2016; Broyles, 2020), the process rather than the product (Siemens et al., 2012; Pierazzo, 2014; Sahle, 2016; Doran, 2021), and the active, even radical role, of the editor, transparently acting as an active collaborator in the sensemaking process, rather than an ‘invisible hand’ (Siemens et al., 2012). It will draw together the long tradition of digital scholarly editing with the emerging subfield of critical digital humanities (see Hall, 2011; Liu, 2012; Berry, 2019) and address in particular the two key points of a) how we can explore and expand the current norms within analogue, digital and indeed hybrid scholarly editing processes toward a model that emphasises the constructed and consensual nature of knowledge, embraces the uncertainty, complexity and contextual dependency of cultural materials and makes knowledge claims and decision-making processes transparent; and b) how this model can be documented and expanded to become applicable in other kinds of human, machine and hybrid knowledge-making processes, in particular systems wielding algorithmic authority. References Berry, D. (2019) “Critical Digital Humanities.” Conditio Humana - Technology, Ai and Ethics (blog), January 29, 2019.Broyles, P.A. (2020) “Digital Editions and Version Numbering.” DHQ 14, no. 2, 2020. Doran, M. (2021) “Reflections on Digital Editions: From Humanities Computing to Digital Humanities, the Influence of Web 2.0 and the Impact of the Editorial Process.” Variants., 2021. Haraway, D. (1988) “Situated Knowledges, The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, vol 14.3, pp. 589-599. Hall, G. (2011) “The Digital Humanities Beyond Computing: A Postscript.” Culture Machine, 2011, 11. Liu, A. (2012) “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” in Debates in the Digital Humanities. McGann, J. (1996) “Radiant Textuality.” Victorian Studies 39, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 379-390. Pasquale, F. (2015) The Black Box Society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.Pierazzo, E. (2014) “Digital Documentary Editions and the Others.” Scholarly Editing 35 Sahle, P. (2016) “What is a Scholarly Digital Edition?” Digital Scholarly Editing Theories and Practices, ed. M. J. Driscoll and E. Pierazzo. Open Book Publishers, 19-39. Schreibman, S. (2013) “Digital Scholarly Editing.” Literary Studies in the Digital Age MLA. Siemens, R. et al. (2012) “Towards Modeling the Social Edition.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 27, no. 4,445-461.

The disciplinary structure and dimensions of digital humanities is evolving for many years. Even though several journals focus solely on digital humanities, the interdisciplinary nature of digital humanities remains a fact. The current study is an endeavor to understand the linkage of the digital humanities with other disciplines in the universe of knowledge so that researchers from multiple subject backgrounds can carry out research on digital humanities in a more vivid manner. The present research will prove valuable for researchers, authors, and decision-makers of research and development organisations and other institutions to carry out collaborative research activities on individual and organisational levels. The research results and discussions of this research publication will enlighten the researchers from the digital humanities subject field to take a decision in a better way regarding the evolution and interdisciplinary research activities in digital humanities and the incorporation of methods and techniques from library and information science and computer science to expand the horizons of the subject field (digital humanities). The author conducted a bibliometric analysis focusing on the objectives to discover linkages and an interdisciplinary approach to digital humanities. The results infer that the highest number of authors active in research activities in the digital humanities belong to computer science followed by art and humanities and library and information science disciplines. The journals preferred for publication of research on digital humanities are also analysed, and it is found that the highest number of journals are from the literature discipline, followed by art & humanities, computer science, history, and library and information science. The publication productivity of journals is also studied, and it is found that “Digital Scholarship in the Humanities” is the most productive journal and that it belongs to the humanities discipline. In the list of the top ten most productive journals, five belong to the discipline of Library and information science. The study of citation and bibliographic coupling displays that the journals “Journal of Documentation” and “Digital Scholarship in the Humanities” are the most cited journals. During this research endeavor, emphasis is given to the subject affiliation of authors, journals and publications. It’s been found that digital humanities research is actively related to the disciplines of library and information science and computer science.

Have digital tools and methods accelerated the rate of scholarly production over the last 20 years? If so, has this acceleration been beneficial for scholarship? This article considers examples of accelerated historical scholarship as well as calls for a “slow history.” Through an analysis of the author's own experiences with the digital humanities, it examines the advantages and disadvantages of digital technologies in the field of history. It concludes that online resources and digital technologies have expanded the archive for the historian and created new ways to reach other specialists and the general public. Nevertheless, historical scholarship must still rely on carefully crafted, well-argued prose whose production cannot be accelerated by new digital technologies, although recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence may ultimately challenge this situation. In recent decades, the field (or, at times, discipline) of digital humanities (DH) has revolutionized the scholarly profession and beyond—and with good reason. Seen at times as a democratizing force, DH has led to the creation of an increasing number of open- access databases and scholarly publications, the launching of massive archival digitization initiatives, and the development of numerous digital tools that help streamline the work of the academic researcher, student, and educator. In many ways, then, its benefits are manifest. Yet, recent years have also begun to reveal numerous problems that could influence various aspects of our trade as well as what—and how—information will be available in the future. This article discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of DH and invites the reader to reflect on what we can do to help mitigate these problems. Exciting new modes of digital scholarship have emerged in recent years, providing us with expanded windows onto the past. This process has been accelerated by somewhat democratized ways of digitizing and analyzing source material. A main issue of contemporary knowledge production using digitized sources is how power can so easily be reinscribed into access to archives. The choice to digitize collections, even the existence of collections themselves, creates a great opportunity for research but also runs the risk of reinforcing the privilege and worldviews that have shaped and continue to shape the very processes of digitization and digitalization. Drawing on examples of Western and non-Western digital scholarship, this article argues that, although the digital facilitates greater public knowledge of collections, when it comes to decolonizing our research subjects, it also introduces significant layers of complexity. This article advances an analysis of the development and state of critical digital humanities. It posits two modalities for this approach to digital humanities (DH). The first is a modality of inward-looking, functional self-critique that comprises a rethinking of computational genesis stories, logics and methods, institutions and infrastructures, and digital capitalism, and the second is an outward-looking critique best understood as a form of situated sociopolitical engagement that embraces epistemic and social justice projects that are decolonial, anti-racist, inclusive, collaborative, and multilingual. Through these analyses, the article offers a vision of critical digital humanities in its mission to critique the ideologies, social inequities, and epistemological hierarchies that are built into technological products and computational logics and that are concomitantly fostered by knowledge- creation industries of universities, corporations, governments, and the GLAM[R] sector. In this way, the article shows how critical digital humanities helps us to envision the role that DH can play in processes of recovery, reparations, emancipation, and community-building. Drawing upon over 20 years as Editor-in-Chief of H-France, I argue that the scholarly profession, established in Cold War era, pre-digital institutions, has only begun to adapt to the transformations introduced by the global digital humanities. A generational shift is currently underway as younger scholars more natively adept with digital technologies use their skills and forms of new media to press for changes in hiring and tenure practices, to demand greater progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues, and to insist that the academy confront the collapse of academic positions in the humanities and provide training for and recognition of alternative career paths. I call upon professional organizations to undertake difficult conversations and take leadership in reshaping professional organizations for a post–Cold War, digital age, especially in terms of funding priorities. Scholarly organizations will best gain influence through collaboration.

Editorial Commentary

Reviewed by: Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists ed. by Arianne Hartsell-Gundy et al. Harriett E. Green Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists, ed. Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Laura Braunstein, and Liorah Golomb. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), 2015. 291 pages. $68.00 (ISBN 978-0-8389-8767-4) From early on, academic libraries and library and information science programs have pioneered digital humanities (DH) projects and initiatives. These have included the Valley of the Shadow Project, a digital history project depicting the experiences of Confederate soldiers in the Civil War; the Text Creation Partnership, which produces digital editions of early print books; Documenting the American South, a collection of full-text digital sources on Southern history and culture; and the Walt Whitman Archive, which has writings and other materials about the American poet. Yet only in recent years has the role of librarians noticeably shifted from facilitating access to content to taking a more actively engaged role by collaborating with faculty and initiating DH projects. And this shift is necessary. As Tyler Walters and Katherine Skinner observe in New Roles for New Times: Digital Curation for Preservation (Chicago: ACRL, 2011, p. 72), “Libraries must also be concerned about losing ground within their campus environment by not meeting the digital needs of the scholarly community. If we do not seek to engage with the digital humanities, other entities will.” Featuring firsthand case studies of academic librarians engaging in DH research and teaching, Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists explores the strategies necessary for taking a more active role in DH projects. This volume is divided into four sections: “Reasons for Subject Specialists to Acquire DH Skills”; “Getting Involved in Digital Humanities”; “Collaboration, Spaces, and Instruction”; and “Projects in Focus: From Conception to Completion and Beyond.” Chapters in each section describe in detail diverse projects, collaborations, and initiatives undertaken by librarians over the past decade. Practical in perspective and scope, the book pays particular attention to teaching and learning, providing case studies of collaborations between librarians and faculty in small and large colleges and universities. Other chapters cover strategies for outreach and engagement with stakeholders, researchers, and organizations. Still others offer insightful “how-to” approaches for building infrastructure to support DH scholarship, including digital scholarship centers and learning spaces, and for outreach and sustainability of library-centered digital [End Page 207] projects. The most impactful contributions in Digital Humanities in the Library cast a critical eye on the theory and practice of digital humanities and the role of libraries therein. These include Caro Pinto’s chapter “Construction and Disruption: Building Communities of Practice, Queering Subject Liaisons,” in which Pinto exhorts librarians to “disrupt toward solidarity and innovate toward communities of practice in digital humanities.” Another stimulating chapter is Liorah Golomb’s account of her own text mining project, “Dipping a Toe into the DH Waters: A Librarian’s Experience,” which illustrates the ways in which some librarians are already digital scholars. (p. 49) Many of the lessons in Digital Humanities in the Library could also apply to digital scholarship in the social sciences and sciences. In addition to providing a good overview of current library activity in digital humanities, this volume will be beneficial to librarians looking to become involved in DH and unsure about where to begin. Addressing a wide range of institutions, skills, and projects, Digital Humanities in the Library will help librarians explore the dynamic world of the digital humanities. Harriett E. Green University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Green19@illinois.edu Copyright © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press

While current students have opportunities for formal digital training, most digital humanists working today point to workshops as one of their primary means for training in the field. In part, this is a result of the paucity of digital humanities programs in the 1990s and 2000s, but it is also a result of how resources have been allocated and deployed by the various sites of digital humanities work: departments, libraries, digital scholarship centers, and digital humanities research centers. Digital humanities (DH) workshops provided a way for the discipline to anchor itself and welcome newcomers without formal curricula. This volume represents the expansive definition of digital humanities that we encounter in our research and teaching, that is, a constellation of practices that engage with and interrogate the role of computing in understanding, analyzing, and representing human experience. As such, it incorporates many terms that you may be familiar with: digital scholarship, digital heritage, digital practice, and digital research. We do not firmly demarcate the boundaries, for example, between digital humanities and digital scholarship in this volume as the methods, tools, and practices often overlap. Nor, for example, do we limit ourselves by excluding work taking place in digital heritage contexts. Whether termed digital humanities, digital scholarship, or digital heritage, workshops often deploy similar pedagogical and methodological approaches and outcomes. They appeal to the same audiences and thus overlap in their goals and strategies for audience and community. Thus, this volume represents the ecosystem that digital humanities workshops exist within. Sometimes they take place in digital humanities or digital scholarship centers; other times in libraries and museums; some are recurring, and others, ad hoc. The chapters in this volume are written to appeal to the same broad audiences as the workshops themselves: to students, teachers, administrators, novices, and experts alike.

In the last decade, the terms 'digital scholarship' and 'digital humanities' have become commonplace in academia, spurring the creation of fellowships, research centres, and scholarly journals. What, however, does this 'digital turn' mean for how you do scholarship as a medievalist? While many of us would never describe ourselves as 'DH people,' computer-based tools and resources are central to the work we do every day in offices, libraries, and classrooms. This volume highlights the exciting ways digital methods are expanding and re-defining how we understand, represent, and teach the Middle Ages, and provides a new model for how this work is catalogued and reused within the scholarly community. The work of its contributors offers valuable insights into how 'the digital' continues to shape the questions medievalists ask and the ways they answer them, but also into how those questions and answers can lead to new tools, approaches, and points of reference within the field of digital humanities itself.

Globally, English Language Teaching and Learning and the communication practices have been undergoing tremendous changes in the 21st-century of the Third Millennium. Digital Age has established itself with a rich source of information through different Applications of social media upto Chat GPT and other Artificial Intelligence tools in the recent times. It reduces strain in teaching and learning and gives emphasis to knowledge-based strategies. Radio, newspapers and television were the main sources of information before the arrival of the internet. Technology has revolutionized information access across all sectors, largely replacing humans in global learning, making it quick and cost-effective. The move from physical to mental labour has also become widespread, as the transformation of man from traditional practices to technological advancements. Today the success of English as a Global Language and the learning of it relies on surplus information and human resources, with data storage at its peak. Microphotography, microform, wireless networking,internet, information sharing, mobile phones, pocket laptops, and digital cameras evolved.Digital Humanities has opened avenues for intellectual activity using Digital Technology to give a new dimension to the various disciplines in Humanities. Digital resources in Humanities give a face-lift in teaching and learning. When there is no urban/rural divide among the teaching community across the globe, all the teachers of English are expected to have a better knowledge in the use of the latest tools to teach English as a language to any kind of learners effectively with the same humanistic approach practised in conventional teaching. Knowledge of Digital humanities is essential to improve the quality of teaching and learning.This paper aims at contextualising English as a global language by teaching its literature through Digital format by converting the print form of literature into eBooks, Digital Archives, Electronic Literature, and Language Games along with Digital Humanism,which is yet another face of Digital Humanities. According to Hannes Werthner, Co-founder, Digital Humanism Initiative, “Digital humanism is a broader approach to designing a digital future with respect to human needs.”