Hi Rebecca,
"Image based humanities computing" can be broken into a few very different areas.
Firstly, there is the basics of how to create digital images of cultural and heritage artefacts via digitisation, which overlaps with a lot of work digital libraries are doing: see
Lee, S. (2001). “Digital Imaging, a practical handbook”. Library Association Publishing
Kenney, A. and Reiger, O. (2000) "Moving Theory Into Practice, Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives". RLG.
for the mechanics and the management of digitisation (these texts also point to good practice and recent projects). For something that explains some more advanced techniques to get the best images possible, try
Macdonald, L.W. (2006). “Digital Heritage: applying digital imaging to cultural heritage”. Elsevier
Secondly, there is the stuff about architecture - how to display images once you have them, and allow the sharing and manipulation of image based material. Again, the lit on this is mostly from the digital library point of things (there is a lot of work on, say, the use of tagging, and integrating users own notes into a networked resource). There's very little that I know of on the actual usability of these image systems for the Digital Humanities - an area ripe for study - and you should look at various ways of delivery such as CBIR as well. Without tooting my own trumpet, I would have a flick through "Terras, M. (2008). “Digital Images for the Information Professional”. Ashgate." which gives an overview of how images have and are being used in the cultural and heritage sector, and points to a lot of projects that you can look at for best practice. There are loads of cool things happening - not least with crowdsourcing at the moment (which my book doesnt cover). Today Simon Tanner told everyone about the dead sea scrolls and google archive http://www.thejc.com/news/israel-news/39956/dead-sea-scrolls-go-google-archive, we've been working on transcribe bentham http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/td/Transcribe_Bentham and there's lot of stuff with manuscript material happening, too. http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/2010/03/crowdsourcing-manuscript-material.html. There's not much written about this from a usability point of view for DH though - people are very much in the construction stages of these image based systems, or using them in institutional contexts.
It is worth looking at image management systems for libraries and archives as well, as they tend to deal with the areas you describe. See Perian Sully's "Collection Management Systems" http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a917623888
or something like http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/eklund/eklund.html from museums and the web. Not entirely "Digital Humanities" - but a lot of this stuff is going to cross over with digitisation done in cultural and heritage organisations. There is a lot parked up there on google scholar about this - have a grub around searching for "image management systems heritage" but keep the date to within the last few years.
Finally - we get into the realms of computer science and engineering, and we can talk about image processing - using computational methods to try and analyse images further, to get more information out of them than the human eye can see. There are various cool projects on this: the archimedes palimpsest http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/imaging_initialtrials1.html is the biggy, the dead sea scrolls is another. We are currently working on "e-science and ancient documents" http://esad.classics.ox.ac.uk/ between oxford and ucl, looking at how advanced image processing tools can be used to help read ancient documents. There are various reports on the website and also (sorry for pushing myself again) an overview of the early stages of the project in Terras, M. (2006)."Image to Interpretation: Intelligent Systems to Aid Historians in the Reading of the Vindolanda Texts". Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents. Oxford University Press. It has to be said that this cross over between EngSci and DigHum isnt entirely mainstream - but its a lot of fun, and there is a lot of potential for Digital Humanities in working with compsci and engsci in this way.
Hope this helps,
Melissa
