Digital Humanities and the Future of the Book

Having been a somewhat niche activity for decades, digital humanities (DH), formerly called humanities computing, leapt into prominence in 2009 when it was pronounced the ‘next big thing’ at the US Modern Languages Association conference. But what is ‘digital humanities’? In a world where there is surely no one in the humanities who doesn’t use digital tools and resources, is digital humanities something special? There are specialist journals, collections of essays, and monographs devoted to it. There are also departments and centres of digital humanities in many institutions, and job lines in English (and sometimes other disciplines) and digital humanities. The US National Endowment for the Humanities has an Office of Digital Humanities, the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council has a Digital Transformations theme, other funders eagerly accept proposals in the digital humanities. There seems to be a prevailing view that, as Parker points out to us, ‘project plus digital equals funding’ (Parker, 2012, p. 3). What’s going on? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.