Humanities Computing

Humanities Computing, now in paperback for the first time and including a new preface updating the original text, is widely regarded as a foundational text and one of the definitive commentaries on humanities computing and digital humanities scholarship.

It provides a rationale for a computing practice that is of and for as well as in the humanities. It engages philosophical, historical, ethnographic and critical perspectives to show how computing helps us fulfil the basic mandate of the humane sciences to ask ever better questions. It explores the challenges of imagining and constructing new scholarly resources. It strengthens current practice by stimulating debate on the role of the computer across all disciplines, examining and developing the key notions of collaboration and interdisciplinarity. It gives practitioners a way of conceptualising their practice as an ongoing anthropological encounter, and it gives those with whom they interact a new way of understanding the interdisciplinary language of method. It sketches the complex amalgam of computer science and suggests the basis for a productive relationship, as well as outlining an agenda for the field to which individual scholars can contribute.

In paperback, the volume serves as an invaluable resource for scholars and students worldwide who are interested in this thriving, vibrant area of study.

Willard McCarty is Professor of Humanities Computing at King's College London, UK, and fractional Professor in the Digital Humanities Research Group at University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is editor of the journal, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (2008-) and founding Editor of the online seminar Humanist (1987-). He was the recipient of the Roberto Busa Prize 2013 from the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, in recognition of outstanding lifetime achievements in the application of information and communications technologies to humanistic research. Willard has also received the Canadian Award for Outstanding Achievement, Computing in the Arts and Humanities (2005) and the Richard W. Lyman Award, Rockefeller Foundation (2006). He is editor of Text and Genre in Reconstruction (2010) and author of numerous articles and book chapters in the field.