New Book: Digital Scholarship

book

A interesting new book on Digital Scholarship was released in December called ‘Digital Scholarship’; edited by Marta Mestrovic Deyrup. I haven’t ordered, read, and reviewed  this book as yet (it doesn’t come cheap at 57 pounds).

What I see as one of the grand challenges of digital resources and scholarship is developing an explicit understanding of how they are actually incorporated into humanities research practices (and please, not through counting things!).  This requires an empathy towards humanities researchers so as to understand how they establish meaning from these resources.   Also, the concept of interdisciplinarity really needs to be interrogated socially and politically in the digital scholarship field, as at times, it is applied as a utopian buzz word lacking context and thus meaning and reeks of new-right anti-intellectualism. Here is a blurb from the dust-cover.

Collecting important original essays by librarians and archivists – all of whom are actively engaged in building digital collections – Digital Scholarship details both challenges and proven solutions in establishing, maintaining, and servicing digital scholarship in the humanities. This volume further explores the ways in which the humanities have benefited from the ability to digitize text and page images of historic documents, mine large corpuses of texts and other forms of records, and assemble widely dispersed cultural objects into common repositories for comparison and analysis–making new research questions and methods possible for the first time.

The ten notable scholars included in Digital Scholarship offer a balanced view of the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to digitization, reporting both progress and problems, examining new business models, new forms of partnerships, and the new technologies and resources that make many more library and archival services available. Librarians and library staff everywhere will find Digital Scholarship an essential text for the modern library and an illuminating resource for anyone looking to understand the changing face of research in the electronic age.

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