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Chapter 2 considers the extent digital humanities offer us one productive way to think about new ways of being theorists. It examines the “computational turn”, whereby techniques and methodologies drawn from computer science are being increasingly used to produce new ways of understanding texts in the humanities. Will the use of digital tools and data-led methods to help us analyze the networked nature of knowledge in post-industrial society produce a major change in theory and the humanities? Chapter 2 addresses this question by means of an analysis that moves from Jean-François Lyotard’s account of how science is augmenting the power of states and corporations, through the relation between the digital humanities and twentieth-century critical theory, to Lev Manovich and the Software Studies Initiative’s work on Cultural Analytics.The overarching question raised by this chapter is: Should we be looking to develop still newer forms of theory and the humanities in the twenty-first century, characterized by an ability to combine the methodological and the theoretical, the quantitative and the qualitative, digital and the traditional humanities? Or do we need “something else besides”: a theory that we might begin to think of as being not just post-digital but post-humanities too?

This introductory chapter provides a general context for this collection, starting with the anecdotal inception of the project. It provides a list of some of the important titles in the field of digital humanities that figure prominently as academic predecessors and ponders on the consequences and implications of the digital turn in the humanities for the study of Latinx and Latin American culture. In response to the cultural hegemony of Anglocentric circles in the digital humanities, it provides ample evidence of the development and existence of the field in Latin America. Finally, it provides a brief overview of the four sections into which the book is divided: digital nations, transnational networks, digital aesthetics and practices, and interviews with Latin American DH scholars.

Humanist is an online, international seminar on digital humanities that was set up in 1987 by Willard McCarty. Since its inception, it has taken the form of an electronic mailing list and, within the context of the history of computing in the humanities, can be viewed as a proto-social media platform. Newer and slicker social media and crowd-driven platforms may have come (and, in some cases, gone) but Humanist has endured. Indeed, it arguably remains digital humanities’ most vital locus of questioning, imagining and reflecting on and about itself and its many interdisciplinary intersections. In this paper, the author discusses conversations conducted via Humanist in its inaugural year in order to identify and analyze references to disciplinary identity. After focusing on the contradictions that emerge, she reflects on what they might reveal about longer-term dynamics of Digital Humanities’ disciplinary formation and emphasizes the value of Humanist archives in such research.

Dealing with early twentieth-century Black literature more broadly, Korey Garibaldi considers how racial segregation in twentieth-century American society and print culture has informed and undermined numerous achievements made possible by the digital turn in the humanities in “Desegregating the Digital Turn in American Literary History.” As just one valuable yet under-examined historical example, literary interracialism in the early twentieth century could offer digital humanities (DH) practitioners countless generative cases studies for considering when and where racial lines and related categories blur in the digitized past. Despite numerous problems and setbacks, there were countless experiments with literary pluralism in the forms of writing and working across racial divides in the first three decades of the twentieth century. By investigating the roots, dismantling, and re-emergence of segregation in literary culture—as well as shifts in how persons of Black African descent were racialized—Garibaldi offers a valuable case study for contextualizing the need for inclusive DH designs and professional collaborations.

This interview, held in the first half of 2018, focuses on the digital humanities in Brazil. It discusses various aspects of the subject. It signals an increasing interest in the digital humanities in Brazil, visible in several initiatives, and materialized in projects and works both theoretical and applied. The growing creation of laboratories, study centers, or research groups stimulates discussion and the strengthening of the general humanities. Lacking the support of specific public policies, the initiatives listed are the fruit of commitment by researchers, since branches of government have not yet identified an important research area for the development of new knowledge in the humanities. The interview lists names of important Brazilian activists from the area of digital humanities. It also points out the difficulties in the development of the digital humanities, such as the lack of knowledge of the area by researchers and the tendency to reduce the budgets of institutions and universities due to the current economic crisis. Publications, seminars, and other activities that enable the wide exchange of experiences developed at the national and international levels are considered fundamental in the strengthening of the field. Finally, it highlights the relevance of the promotion of events for dissemination in the area, like the 1st International Congress on Digital Humanities, which involved universities, research centers, and cultural institutions in its organization.

A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a community publication project sponsored by the University of Alberta under the direction of Geoffrey Rockwell. Each year, it brings together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, March 18. The goal of the project is to create a website that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, Just what do computing humanists really do? In advance of the Day of DH, participants are asked, How do you define humanities computing/digital humanities? This chapter presents a selection of definitions culled from 2011 answers to that question, which are posted publicly on the Day of DH website.

What can you actually do with text analysis? Chapter 4 is the first Interlude or example of text analysis in action with Voyant. This Interlude asks about computing in the humanities and shows how one can study the evolution of discourse about a discipline like the digital humanities though the Humanist discussion list that has been a central place for discussion and announcements since 1987. Studying 21 years of discourse shows how the emergence of the web as a platform for electronic resources was a turning point. Attention shifted from hardware and software to services and social media.

The chapter highlights some of the important questions raised by DH debates in work that problematizes the omission of critical race, gender, and class perspectives, with respect to the study of the digital, and builds on these perspectives to consider the ongoing dilemmas of the field in Cuba during a new era of transnational relations contributing to the further transformation of Cuban society. Across the Americas, new research is taking up questions that include an understanding of how digital social networks mediate Latinx immigrant sociality and activism, and how others articulate the problems of digital segregation.

In his introduction to a volume titled Companion to the Digital Humanities (2004), a pioneering figure in the field, Roberto Busa, looked at the challenges posed by globalization to digital humanities.¹ Busa was mainly referring to the narrow linguistic aspect of the problem when he sketched a vision for a virtual project he called ...

This chapter focuses on Digital Humanities Now, a new web publication resulting from the author’s attempt to combine the activities of several hundred digital humanities scholars with TwitterTim.es (a service that creates a real-time publication consisting of articles highlighted by people you follow on Twitter). DHN aggregates thousands of tweets and the hundreds of articles and projects those tweets point to and boils them down to the most-discussed items, with commentary from Twitter. Based on the early returns, the algorithms have done fairly well, putting on the front page articles on grading in a digital age and bringing high-speed networking to liberal arts colleges, Google’s law archive search, and a talk on how to deal with streams of content given limited attention.

The introduction to the book discusses the place of method in the humanities and in particular thinking through computer-assisted methods. Descartes’ meditative method is contrasted to the method followed in this book of Agile Hermeneutics where the authors collaborate in developing tools for text analysis and using them to understand particular texts. The book is part of a larger hybrid work that includes Voyant Tools. Voyant Tools, the text analysis suite of tools that is the companion to the book, allows interpreters to embed interpretative tools, or hermeneutica, into their texts. Ways of working with the book and tools are described along with disclaimers about what this book is not.

Chapter 5 explores some of the possibilities for new ways of being as theorists and philosophers by asking: What would it mean for us to adopt the persona of the pirate who, traditionally, has often operated in a manner that is neither simply legal nor illegal? What’s interesting about certain phenomenon associated with networked digital culture such as Napster, the Pirate Bay, and Aaaaarg, is that we cannot tell at the time of their emergence whether they are legitimate or not. This is because the new conditions created by networked digital culture at times require the creation of equally new intellectual property laws and copyright policies. It follows we can never be sure whether these so-called pirates, in the attempts they are making to contend with the new conditions and possibilities created by networked digital culture, are not involved in the creation of the very new laws, policies, clauses, settlements, licensing agreements and acts of Congress and Parliament by which they could be judged. Might acting something like pirate philosophers lead to new forms of producing, publishing and circulating academic knowledge and research that act more in terms of the change in political mood post-2008?

The chapter provides a state-of-the field picture in 2012 – a moment where industry discourse was rife with representations and images of the impacts of digital technologies upon film production. The chapter outlines the approach of the book – the undertaking of a ‘Digital Film Production Study’ – a theoretical and conceptual framework synthesizing Production Studies, Film Studies and Digital Humanities, in order to be able to grapple with this complex industry at a critical moment of transition. The chapter outlines the methodology of the book - an examination of the people and processes involved in the entire lifecycle of one film – released under the title of Ginger & Rosa (Directed by Sally Potter) in October 2012. The chapter explains how it is emblematic of the transitional film-to-data period. The chapter also provides an overview of Sally Potter’s work and her own interest in how digital innovations in filmmaking a definition of digital film. It includes a review of production studies literature and an overview of the fields methods as well as outlines of the content and arguments of the books following six chapters.

A South African by birth, white, of German ancestry, fluent in Afrikaans, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick spent six months in her native country in 1993 and a full year in 1994 studying the Soweto uprising. During that time, she assiduously examined the relevant archives but was unable to find any of the posters she knew the marching students carried: … From the transcripts and correspondence of the Cillié Commission I knew that the Commission had received, from the police, many posters and banners that had been confiscated during various student marches in 1976. None of them would have fit into a traditional archive document box and, though mentioned on the list of evidence associated with the Cillié Commission, they were initially not to be found. I continued to request that archivists search the repositories—without success. Until, one day, perhaps exasperated by my persistence or wanting to finally prove to me that there was nothing to be found in the space associated with K345, the archival designator of my Soweto materials, one of the archivists relented and asked me to accompany her into the vaults in order to help her search for these artifacts of the uprising! To be sure, there were no posters to be found in the shelf space that housed the roughly nine hundred boxes of evidence associated with the Cillié Commission. But then, as my disappointed eyes swept the simultaneously ominous and tantalizing interior of the vault, I saw a piece of board protruding over the topmost edge of the shelf. There, almost 9 feet into the air, in the shadowy space on top of the document shelves, lay a pile of posters and banners… . We can understand Pohlandt-McCormick’s mounting sense of excitement. It is not just the discovery itself; it is the sense of being in touch with the past—literally in touch. It is the knowledge that no photograph can do justice to any 3D object, whether it is a collection of posters, a cache of cold fusion memorabilia, or Enrico Fermi’s Nobel medal.

In this chapter, I use the data of the Iran Book House to analyse the productionof books within Iran after the 1979 revolution and its ties to politics. This is an example of how the methods of digital humanities and book history can be used to help us to understand a literature that has not often been its object of study. The study juxtaposes this data to the discourse of literary practitioners I have been exposed to when doing fieldwork in the literary field in Iran between 2006 and 2017. As such, it confirms some ideas, for example the ebb and flow of publications according to politics, and contradicts others, such as that governmental publishers publish higher quantities of texts than independent ones. The chapter analyses data on the link between books’ production and who is in government; the decline of the number of copies published over the years since 1979; the decreasing amount of translations versus original texts; the increased centralisation of book production in Tehran; and the relative minority of governmental publishers compared to independent publishers.

This chapter concludes by raising the issue of the Sappho Syndrome, whereby whole works disappear and only are known through fragments and references to them. In doing so, the chapter provides a call to action for Digital Humanities to take on the task of preserving the cultural heritage reflected in born-digital media through a multi-faceted approach involving not just emulation and migration of media but also collection and documentation.