Has anybody written a history of the digital humanities? « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

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Has anybody written a history of the digital humanities?

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Asked 5 years ago by Eric Johnson
Latest answer from aearhart

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Eric Johnson
Member
I've often found myself wondering if anybody has written a book-length narrative history telling the story of humanities computing/digital humanities from the early days of humanities computing until now (or some approximation thereof), addressing major milestone DH projects, related efforts, and some of the big themes of the field as they've evolved--or haven't--over time?

I suspect that some histories may have been done that address particular disciplines (e.g. digital history), but have they been tied together and examined as a whole? I see that the question has been addressed in conference presentations, such as those by Joe Raben or Stéfan Sinclair, and appears in Chapter 1 of Schreibman et al.'s "A Companion to Digital Humanities," but I wondered if anything longer has been published. I may well have just sailed right past it. Seems like it would make a great oral history project, too.
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Posted 5 years ago Permalink
unsworth
Member

Replying to @Eric Johnson's post:

Some oral history work was done a few years back at Kings College, London, but I don't know where or if it was published. Harold Short, Willard McCarty, or Sheila Anderson might know. If you're looking at the Blackwell's Companion to DH, don't overlook Father Busa's foreword, which has some great historical information....

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Stéfan Sinclair
Admin

Eric, I certainly share your interest in historical perspectives on humanities computing. Beyond fairly discipline-specific retrospectives oriented toward published research (the 1991 anniversary addition of CHUM contains several of these), I don't know of much along the lines of what you describe. I sometimes daydream of doing some video interviews with some of the pioneers still with us (Raben, Burrows, Hockey, etc.), but then the realities of my current commitments rudely shake me awake :). Still, I think this is fairly urgent, and it may not even be that time consuming to at least do the interviews, even if the synthetic work is delayed until later. But it's probably best for a historian or ethnographer to lead the work, rather than someone like me with a literary background :).

Another person to talk to about this is Edward Vanhoutte who has compiled a lot of materials on humanities computing. I know Willard McCarty has also digitized a ton of early stuff, and Geoffrey Rockwell has considered more closely some of the early Canadian work.

I certainly hope that someone takes this up as a project!

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Bethany Nowviskie
Admin

Amy Earhart (@amyeetx) is working on something like this right now. Tentative title: Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of the Digital Humanities. She may be taking a literary/archival angle, though. At least, those are the kinds of projects and groups she's connected with me about.

She's a DHanswers user! I'll draw her attention to this thread.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
aearhart
Member

Bethany is correct. I'm working on a book length project on digital literary studies. It started out as a broader DH book, but that seemed far too general. I'm tracing the development through forms--edition, archive--and approaches--content selection and fragmented data analysis like visualization, data mining, mapping, etc.

I do think it is important that we, as a field, begin to collect and analyze our early history. I've had great conversations with pioneers of the field and still have a number of folks on the list to contact (unsworth!). I'm hoping that this project will be complete within the next two years.

Glad to hear that folks are interested in the questions that the project poses. You never know....

Posted 5 years ago Permalink

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