On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations

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A witty and incisive exploration of the philosophical conundrums that animate the digital humanities

Since its inception, the digital humanities has been repeatedly attacked as a threat to the humanities: warnings from literary and cultural theorists of technology overtaking English departments and the mechanization of teaching have peppered popular media. Stephen Ramsays On the Digital Humanities, a collection of essays spanning the personal to the polemic, is a spirited defense of the field of digital humanities.

A founding figure in what was once known as humanities computing, Ramsay has a well-known and contentious relationship with what is now called the digital humanities (DH). Here Ramsay collects and updates his most influential and notorious essays and speeches from the past fifteen years, considering DH from an array of practical and theoretical perspectives. The essays pursue a broad variety of themes, including the nature of data and its place in more conventional notions of text and interpretation, the relationship between the constraints of computation and the more open-ended nature of the humanities, the positioning of practical skills and infrastructures in both research and pedagogical contexts, the status of DH as a program for political and social action, and personal reflections on the authors journey into the field as both a theorist and a technologist.

These wide-ranging essays all center around one idea: that DH not forsake its connection to the humanities. While digital humanities may sound like an entirely new form of engagement with the artifacts of human culture, Ramsay argues that the field well reveals what is most essential to humanistic inquiry.

Reviews

"Stephen Ramsay has long held a reputation as the enfant terrible of digital humanities. This book confirms that notoriety, but not in the way one would expect: his startling and deeply erudite provocations, developed over these many essays, will sting some DH insiders while welcoming many newcomers to the field."Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland

"Wide-ranging, synthetic, and thought-provoking, On the Digital Humanities both captures the energy and anxiety of the DH moment and points the way toward the as-yet untapped potential of the relationship between the digital and the humanities. Together, these essays present a complex, highly readable rethinking of the ways digital humanists work, the passions that keep them engaged, and the relationships they buildand the fights they havein the process."Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities, Michigan State University

Author Bio

Stephen Ramsay is associate professor of English and a fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of NebraskaLincoln. He is author of Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism and has contributions in two volumes of Minnesotas Debates in the Digital Humanities series.