Readings
Humanities researchers have experimented with computing since the arrival of mainframe computers on university campuses in the 1950s and 1960s. In the early days before the rise of personal computers and the establishment of encoding standards, these efforts focused largely on quantitative approaches that made use of the machines’ raw processing power.
A comprehensive literature review allows emerging digital humanities specialists to situate their work in long disciplinary trajectories that stretch from decades before the term “digital humanities” gained currency to the more recent developments in specific subfields. While the identity of a subfield may shift over time, understanding its early foundations clarifies the ideas and assumptions that continue to shape it.
The divergent paths of different subfields are also worth close attention. Literary scholars, for instance, should know something about the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia rather than assuming that Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” marks the starting point of computational literary studies. Digital historians, meanwhile, would benefit from familiarity with the work of East Asia specialists like Edward Wagner, Robert Hartwell, Song June-ho, and Kim Hyeon, as well as the contributions of Roy Rosenzweig and Dan Cohen at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.
Consider also the case of “cultural analytics,” a term introduced by Lev Manovich to describe a unique approach at the intersection of social computing and the digital humanities. Although cultural analytics has since expanded beyond Manovich’s original focus on visual cultural data, the cross-disciplinary tendency to remain grounded in the humanities while engaging with other quantitative domains (e.g., data science and computational social sciences) continues to inform current research and the aims of the Journal of Cultural Analytics. Tracing these trajectories through a thoughtful literature review proves essential for digital humanities specialists and equips them to navigate and shape the evolving contours of the field.
The following reading list constitutes the core components of a digital humanities curriculum the BDSL team has contributed to the University of Hong Kong’s Bachelor of Arts in Humanities and Digital Technologies, which in turn was built on the highly experimental interdisciplinary seminars taught in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. BDSL team members and project leads under BDSL incubation are expected to demonstrate a solid command of the academic discourses shaping the digital humanities.
Please note that this list is intended to provide a starting point for newcomers to digital humanities, not to serve as an exhaustive bibliography. Many important studies are not included. The subject categories are intended as heuristics rather than fixed classifications, and should not be taken to narrowly define the scope of each researcher’s contributions.
Distant Reading and Computational Literary Studies
Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii1/articles/franco-moretti-conjectures-on-world-literature.pdf.
Underwood, Ted. “Distant Reading and Recent Intellectual History.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2016. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/3b96956c-aab2-4037-9894-dc4ff9aa1ec5.
Underwood, Ted. “A Genealogy of Distant Reading.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 2 (2017). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/2/000317/000317.html.
Buurma, Rachel Sagner, and Laura Heffernan. “Search and Replace: Josephine Miles and the Origins of Distant Reading.” Modernism/modernity 3, no. 1 (2018). https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/search-and-replace.
Wimmer, Mario. “Josephine Miles (1911–1985): Doing Digital Humanism with and without Machines.” History of Humanities 4, no. 2 (2019): 329–34. https://doi.org/10.1086/704850.
Da, Nan Z. “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies.” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 3 (2019): 601–639. https://doi.org/10.1086/702594.
Long, Hoyt. The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age. Columbia University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7312/long19350.
Digital History
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Historian and the Computer. In The Territory of the Historian, 3–6. University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Swierenga, Robert P. “Clio and Computers: A Survey of Computerized Research in History.” Computers and the Humanities 5, no. 1 (1970): 1–21.
Wagner, Edward W. “The Korean Chokpo as a Historical Source.” In Studies in Asian Genealogy, edited by Spencer J. Palmer, 141–52. Brigham Young University Press, 1969.
Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003): 735–762. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/108.3.735.
Putnam, Lara. “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast.” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 377–402. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.377.
Bol, Peter K. “Creating a GIS for the History of China.” In Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship, 28–59. ESRI Press, 2007.
Milligan, Ian. “Lost in the Infinite Archive: The Promise and Pitfalls of Web Archives.” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 10, no. 1 (2016): 78–94. https://doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2016.0161.
Milligan, Ian. The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age. Cambridge University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009026055.
Cultural Analytics Beyond Text
Manovich, Lev. “The Science of Culture? Social Computing, Digital Humanities and Cultural Analytics.” Journal of Cultural Analytics (2016). https://doi.org/10.22148/16.004.
Escobar Varela, Miguel. Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11667458.
Tilton, Lauren. Distant Viewing: Computational Exploration of Digital Images. MIT Press, 2023. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546133/distant-viewing/.
Digital Materiality
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. MIT Press, 2007. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262517409/mechanisms/.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., et al. Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections. Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2010. https://www.clir.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/pub149.pdf.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. https://www.pennpress.org/9780812224955/bitstreams/.
Hogan, Mél. “Water Woes & Data Flows: The Utah Data Center.” Big Data & Society 2, no. 2 (2015): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715592429.
Velkova, Julia. “Data That Warms: Waste Heat, Infrastructural Convergence, and the Computation Traffic Commodity.” Big Data & Society 3, no. 2 (2016): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716684144.
Big Data and the Humanities
Laney, Doug. “3D Data Management: Controlling Data Volume, Velocity, and Variety.” Technical report, META Group, February 2001. https://blogs.gartner.com/doug-laney/files/2012/01/ad949-3D-Data-Management-Controlling-Data-Volume-Velocity-and-Variety.pdf.
boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. “Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon.” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 662–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878.
Cha, Javier. “Big Data Studies: The Humanities in Uncharted Waters.” Korean Studies 47 (2023): 274–299. https://doi.org/10.1353/ks.2023.a908625.