The Digital Humanities and the Digital Modern

Description

This book provides new critical and methodological approaches to digital humanities, intended to guide technical development as well as critical analysis. Informed by the history of technology and culture and new perspectives on modernity, Smithies grounds his claims in the engineered nature of computing devices and their complex entanglement with our communities, our scholarly traditions, and our sense of self. The distorting mentalité of the digital modern informs our attitudes to computers and computationally intensive research, leading scholars to reject articulations of meaning that admit the interdependence of humans and the complex socio-technological systems we are embedded in. By framing digital humanities with the digital modern, researchers can rebuild our relationship to technical development, and seek perspectives that unite practical and critical activity. This requires close attention to the cyber-infrastructures that inform our research, the software-intensive methods that are producing new knowledge, and the ethical issues implicit in the production of digital humanities tools and methods. The book will be of interest to anyone interested in the intersection of technology with humanities research, and the future of digital humanities. Front Matter ....Pages i-ix The Challenge of the Digital Humanities (James Smithies)....Pages 1-15 The Digital Modern (James Smithies)....Pages 17-45 Computation and the Discourse of Crisis (James Smithies)....Pages 47-77 Artificial Intelligence, Digital Humanities, and the Automation of Labour (James Smithies)....Pages 79-111 Towards a Systems Analysis of the Humanities (James Smithies)....Pages 113-151 Software Intensive Humanities (James Smithies)....Pages 153-202 The Ethics of Production (James Smithies)....Pages 203-235 The Culture of the (Digital) Humanities (James Smithies)....Pages 237-247 Back Matter ....Pages 249-268