KCL • CCH • Minor programme • AV1000

AV1000
Fundamentals of the digital humanities
Digital Humanities Bibliography

  1. Research, writing and critical thinking
  2. Humanities computing
  3. Computer science, AI and the history & philosophy of computing
    1. Discussions
    2. Resources
  4. Reference works
  5. Specific technologies and methods
    1. Communications
      1. Backgrounds and contexts
      2. HTML and Web design
      3. Online resources
        1. Citation rules
        2. Discussion groups
        3. Electronic journals
        4. Resource guides
    2. Imaging, visualisation and new media
      1. Discussions
      2. Resources
    3. Text-analysis
      1. Discussions
      2. Resources
      3. Examples of research in the field
    4. Numerical analysis
      1. Discussions
      2. Resources
    5. Database management
      1. Bibliographical
      2. Relational
        1. Discussions
        2. Resources
    6. Professional societies and conferences
    7. Other online materials

The intention of this bibliography is to give initial pointers to further work in the digital humanities at the undergraduate level.

In the following [KCL] provides a link to the KCL online library catalogue and thus indicates that the item in question can be obtained from the College libraries. The designation [CCH Library] means that the item can be consulted in the departmental library. An excellent way of getting information about and acquiring current books is amazon.co.uk (for books published in this country) or amazon.com (for those published in N America). Searching a9.com will give you links for books in amazon.com as well. abebooks.co.uk is an excellent portal for buying used books.

I. Research, writing and critical thinking skills

  1. Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M Williams. 2003. The Craft of Research, second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [KCL] A highly respected book on the hows and whys of research both inside and outside the academy. Required readings from this book will be supplemented by lectures on the application of traditional research skills in the electronic environment. (For AV1000, be sure to get the second edition, dated 2003, with ISBN 0-226-06568-5 or 978-0-226-06568-7. The first edition is confusingly different.)
  2. Edwards, Paul N. (Michigan). "How to Read a Book". [X]. A brief essay on how to get the most out of informational readings in the least amount of time.
  3. Gelder, Tim van. Critical Thinking on the Web (Melbourne) [X]. Begin with the section “Definitions”, especially Peter Facione, “Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Counts”.
  4. Strunk, William, Jr. and Elizabeth White, The Elements of Style [X]. A book famous (and infamous) for its pithy do-s and don't-s; a useful, mostly safe place to begin working on your writing style.

II. Humanities computing

  1. Busa, Roberto. 1980. “The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus”, in Computers and the Humanities 14:83-90. [KCL] A seminal article by a leading scholar [X] on what is commonly regarded as the first humanities computing project, with reflections on the nature and purpose of the field.
  2. McCarty, Willard. 2005. Humanities Computing. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
  3. Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth, eds. 2004. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford: Blackwell. [KCL] See the full text online at the ADHO site [X].
  4. Unsworth, John. 2002. “What is Humanities Computing and What is Not?”, in Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie 4. [X].

III. Computer science, artificial intelligence and the history and philosophy of computing

A. Discussions

In addition to the following, see McCarty 2005 (above, II.2), Chapter 4, “Computer science”.

  1. Franchi, Stefano and Güven Güzeldere, eds. 1996. “Constructions of the Mind: Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities”. Stanford Humanities Review 4.2. [X]. A collection of essays especially about the philosophical aspects of artificial intelligence. Particularly in the items by Agre, Collins and Hoftstadter the limits of AI and the usefulness of the field thus delimited are explored.
  2. Mahoney, Michael S. “Articles on the history of computing” [X]. Work by the leading historian of the field; begin with “In Our Own Image: Creating the Computer”.
  3. Smith, Brian Cantwell. “Foundations of Computing” [X]. A draft essay in which Smith argues that from a philosophical perspective the important thing about computers is not that they are computational, rather that with them we build “intentional artifacts”.
  4. Winograd, Terry and Fernando Flores. 1986. Understanding Computers and Cognition. Boston MA: Addison-Wesley. A philosophically sophisticated account of how to think about computers, language and artificial intelligence.

B. Resources

  1. Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information [X]
  2. Lee, I.A.N. The History of Computing [X]. A collection of materials toward a history of computing.
  3. National Archive for the History of Computing, Manchester. [X].
  4. Virtual Museum of Computing. WWW Virtual Library. [X]. An eclectic collection of WWW resources on the history of computing.

IV. Reference works

  1. British Computer Society. BCS Glossary of ICT and Computing Terms. 11th edn. See [X]. [KCL] A standard reference work for computing terminology.
  2. Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine (London). [X].
  3. Raymond, Eric S., comp. The New Hacker's Dictionary. 3rd edn. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999. A lexicon of the terminology peculiar to the hacker subculture, especially of the U.S., showing remarkable imagination, linguistic inventiveness and a fine sense of humour. The author maintains an online resource corresponding to the Dictionary; see “The Jargon File” [X].
  4. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia [X]
  5. Zalta, Edward N. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [X]

V. Specific technologies and methods

A. Communications [IV.A,E,I]

1. Backgrounds and contexts

  1. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2001. On the Internet. London: Routledge. A philosophical discussion of the promises and dangers of the Internet.
  2. Graham, Gordon. 1999. The Internet: a philosophical inquiry. London: Routledge. [KCL] Supplies a robust means of thinking both about what the Internet is and about what it may become.

2. The Internet, HTML and Web design

Some of these references (and many HTML references available elsewhere on the web) are oriented towards HTML 4.0 rather than the XHTML 1.0 used in the course. They're still useful, but keep in mind that some details of syntax may be different; in XHTML the tag names always need to be in lower case, for example.

  1. Flanders, Vincent. Web Pages That Suck.com. Very funny, crude but effective; certainly not a place from which to learn good design directly.
  2. Graham, Ian S. 2001. The XHTML 1.0 Language and Design Sourcebook. John Wiley & Sons. See the supporting Web site. Among the best of the how-to books on HTML, with a very useful online reference site.
  3. Lynch, Patrick J. and Sarah Horton. 2002. Web Style Guide. 2nd edn. New Haven: Yale University Press. One of the best known and respected attempts to define good practice in the construction of Web pages.
  4. W3 Schools XHTML Reference.
  5. W3C Markup Validation Service. The validator for XHTML documents recommended for this course.
  6. XHTML standard from the World Wide Web Consortium: not the easiest reference on XHTML to use, but it's the one that defines XHTML and is the ultimate arbiter if you see conflicting claims about what's allowed.

3. Online resources

a. Citation rules

  1. “Citation Styles, Style Guides, and Avoiding Plagiarism”, University of California at Berkeley Library, circa 2004.

b. Discussion groups

Since the demise of The Directory of Scholarly and Professional E-Conferences, ed. Diane Kovacs et al., no central resource specializing in discussion groups throughout the humanities has replaced it. See under Resource Guides, below.

  1. Humanist. 1984--. Ed. Willard McCarty. [X]. An electronic seminar concerned with all aspects of humanities computing.

c. Electronic journals

  1. Ejournal SiteGuide: a Metasource. Ed. Joseph Jones. [X]. A selected and annotated set of links to sites for ejournals, which in turn provide links to individual titles and/or to other collections of links.
  2. NewJour: Electronic Journals and Newsletters. Ed. Ann Shumelda Okerson and James J. O'Donnell. [X]. The archival site for the electronic discussion group NewJour, on which new electronic journals and newsletters are announced.

d. Resource guides

  1. Bailey, Charles. Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography [X]. A well-maintained, very thorough listing of resources for scholarly e-publishing.
  2. Fraser, Michael, et al., eds. Humbul Humanities Hub, Research and Discovery Network (U.K.) [X]. A comprehensive guide to online resources in the various disciplines of the humanities.
  3. Liu, Alan, ed. Voice of the Shuttle. 1994--. [X]. Provides “a structured and briefly annotated guide to online resources that at once respects the established humanities disciplines in their professional organization and points toward the transformation of those disciplines as they interact with the sciences and social sciences and with new digital media.”

B. Imaging, visualisation and new media [IV.E]

1. Discussions

  1. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1969. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  2. Besser, Howard and Jennifer Trant. 1995. Introduction to Imaging. Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Art History Information Program. [X]. [CCH Library] A well-illustrated introductory discussion of imaging and image-manipulation techniques and their application.
  3. Kirschenbaum, Matthew, ed. 2002. Image-based Humanities Computing. A special issue of Computers and the Humanities 36.1, including an extensive bibliography [KCL].
  4. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. [KCL]. Perhaps the best current book in “new media studies”.
  5. Rockwell, Geoffrey and Andrew Mactavish, “Multimedia”, in Schreibman, Siemens and Unsworth 2004 (II.3, above).
  6. Tufte, Edward. 2001. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 2nd edn. Cheshire CT: Graphics Press. [KCL]. The first of three well respected books that focuses on the interpretative aspects of visualisation. An introductory, quite inexpensive and highly recommended booklet by the same author and Press is Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions, 1997 (ISBN 0961392134).

2. Resources

  1. Irfanview, a freeware image viewer and processor [X].
  2. Photoshop, a commercial product; undoubtedly the best of its kind. A considerable amount of imaging information is available from related Web-sites.

C. Literary and linguistic text-analysis [IV.B]

1. Discussions

  1. Bradley, John. 2004. “Text Tools”, in Schreibman, Siemens and Unsworth 2004 (II.3, above).
  2. Burrows, John. 2004. “Textual Analysis”, in Schreibman, Siemens and Unsworth 2004 (II.3, above). Focuses on applications in literary studies.
  3. Craig, Hugh. 2004. “Stylistic Analysis and Authorship Studies”, in Schreibman, Siemens and Unsworth 2004 (II.3, above).
  4. McCarty, Willard. 1993. “Handmade, Computer-Assisted, and Electronic Concordances of Chaucer”. In Computer-Based Chaucer Studies, ed. Ian Lancashire. Vol 3 of CCH Working Papers. Toronto: Centre for Computing in the Humanities. 49-65. Provides a capsule history of concording prior to a detailed comparison of a handmade and a computer-generated concordance to Chaucer. [CCH Library]
  5. Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus Concordance Collocation. Describing English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [KCL] A short, elegant consideration of simple but powerful techniques for language study using very simple concordance tools.
  6. Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. 1991. “Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding with Examples from Medieval Texts”. Literary and Linguistic Computing 6.1: 32-46 [KCL]. A discussion of textual encoding as a means for scholarship.
  7. Stemler, Steve. 2001. “An overview of content analysis”. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation 7.17 [X].

2. Resources [III]

  1. Barlow, Michael. Corpus Linguistics [X]. A comprehensive listing of resources for linguistic text-analysis.
  2. University of Virginia Digital Collections. [X]. An online collection of XML texts and images.
  3. Oxford Text Archive. Oxford University. [X]. A collection of more than 2500 resources in over 25 languages; a member archive of the Arts and Humanities Data Service [X].
  4. TELRI Research Archive of Computational Tools and Resources (TRACTOR) [X]. A multilingual archive of electronic texts; a resource of the Trans-European Language Resources Infrastructure (Birmingham).
  5. Watt, R. J. C. Concordance, ver. 3.2. [X].

3. Examples of research in the field

  1. Baker, Paul, Tony McEnery, and Costas Gabrielatos. “Using collocation analysis to reveal the construction of minority groups: The case of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in the UK press”. Talk at the Corpus Linguistics 2007 conference; abstract and slides online.
  2. Hyland, Ken, and Polly Tse. 2004. “‘I would like to thank my supervisor’. Acknowledgements in graduate dissertations”. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 14:2: 259–275. Online at the Blackwell Synergy site; Athens password required. A study performed using Monoconc.
  3. Mautner, Gerlinde. 2007. “Mining large corpora for social information: The case of elderly”. Language in Society 36.1: 51–72. Full text available online. A good example of a corpus-based study of discourse.

D. Numerical analysis

1. Discussions

  1. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1961/1977. “The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science”, in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. 178-224. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [KCL]. The 1961 version is available online via JSTOR. An historical and philosophical study of the relationship between measurement and theory in science.
  2. Meninger, Karl. 1958/1969. Number Words and Number Symbols: A Cultural History of Numbers. Paul Broneer, transl. Boston MA: MIT Press. [KCL]. An intellectual history of numerical thinking and its devices.
  3. Poovey, Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [KCL]. A study of the epistemological conditions that made modern social and economic knowledge possible; covers inter alia the history of double-entry bookkeeping (precursor of the electronic spreadsheet) and the institutionalization of statistics.

2. Resources

  1. Software Made Simple: Microsoft Excel. A step-by-step technical guide. [X]

E. Database management [IV.D]

1. Bibliographical

  1. A guide from Dartmouth College (with good general advice, though some is specific to their campus) [X]

2. Relational

a. Discussions

  1. Date, C.J. Database: A Primer. Addison-Wesley, 1983. [KCL] A classic work on relational database management; quite technical.
  2. Greenstein, D.I. 1994. A Historian's Guide to Computing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [KCL] Although focussed specifically on historical studies, this book provides a very good introduction to the scholarly and intellectual applications of database technology.
  3. Townsend, Sean, Cressida Chappell and Oscar Struivjé. Digitising History: A Guide to Creating Digital Resources from Historical Documents. AHDS Guides to Good Practice. [X].

b. Resources

  1. Software Made Simple: Microsoft Access. [X]. A beginning-level online course.

F. Professional societies, conferences and journals

See The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations for a complete guide [X].

G. Other online materials

  1. Oxford English Dictionary.
  2. World Lecture Hall (U.S.) [X]. A collection of online course materials; see under Computer Science as well as Humanities.

revised November 2007