On the Digital Humanities
Essays and Provocations
A spirited defense of the field of digital humanities, On the Digital Humanities collects and updates Stephen Ramsay’s most influential and notorious essays and speeches from the past fifteen years, considering DH from an array of practical and theoretical perspectives. These wide-ranging essays all center around one idea: that DH not forsake its connection to the humanities.
Stephen Ramsay has long held a reputation as the enfant terrible of digital humanities. This book confirms that notoriety, but not in the way one would expect: his startling and deeply erudite provocations, developed over these many essays, will sting some DH insiders while welcoming many newcomers to the field.
Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland
Since its inception, the digital humanities has been repeatedly attacked as a threat to the humanities: warnings from literary and cultural theorists of technology overtaking English departments and the mechanization of teaching have peppered popular media. Stephen Ramsay’s On the Digital Humanities, a collection of essays spanning the personal to the polemic, is a spirited defense of the field of digital humanities.
A founding figure in what was once known as “humanities computing,” Ramsay has a well-known and contentious relationship with what is now called the digital humanities (DH). Here Ramsay collects and updates his most influential and notorious essays and speeches from the past fifteen years, considering DH from an array of practical and theoretical perspectives. The essays pursue a broad variety of themes, including the nature of data and its place in more conventional notions of text and interpretation, the relationship between the constraints of computation and the more open-ended nature of the humanities, the positioning of practical skills and infrastructures in both research and pedagogical contexts, the status of DH as a program for political and social action, and personal reflections on the author’s journey into the field as both a theorist and a technologist.
These wide-ranging essays all center around one idea: that DH not forsake its connection to the humanities. While “digital humanities” may sound like an entirely new form of engagement with the artifacts of human culture, Ramsay argues that the field well reveals what is most essential to humanistic inquiry.
Cover image description: Title in red and black with lines of type crashing together overlays a textured paper background with some text showing at right.
Stephen Ramsay has long held a reputation as the enfant terrible of digital humanities. This book confirms that notoriety, but not in the way one would expect: his startling and deeply erudite provocations, developed over these many essays, will sting some DH insiders while welcoming many newcomers to the field.
Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland
Wide-ranging, synthetic, and thought-provoking, On the Digital Humanities both captures the energy and anxiety of the ‘DH moment’ and points the way toward the as-yet untapped potential of the relationship between the digital and the humanities. Together, these essays present a complex, highly readable rethinking of the ways digital humanists work, the passions that keep them engaged, and the relationships they build—and the fights they have—in the process.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities, Michigan State University
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Textual Behavior in the Human Male
Data and Interpretation
How to Do Things (to Texts) with Computers
The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around
Code, Games, Puppets, and Kleist
The Art of DH
Digital Humanities and Its Disconnects
As We May Not Thin
Learning to Code
Stanley and Me
Data Mining
Centers of Attention
Care of the Soul
Class Time
Who’s In and Who’s Out / On Building
The Hot Thing
Notes
Index
