Computation and the Humanities download highs

UCLDH Deputy Director Julianne Nyhan and Andrew Flinn’s open access book Computation and the Humanities: towards an oral history of Digital Humanities has been achieving high download rates.

As of November 2019, Computation and the Humanities has been downloaded some 116,205 times and counting! According to the most up-to-date information from the book’s publisher, Springer, the book was in the top 25% most downloaded of their texts of 2018. Also, its download rates were almost triple the discipline download average rates for 2018. It looks like the book is becoming a vital reference for scholars of cultural and computing history, digital humanities and cultural heritage alike. It also features in a number of university syllabi (Open Syllabus).

Computation and the Humanities: Towards an Oral History of Digital Humanities presents the first rigorous oral history account of the history and development of digital humanities. No longer a fledgling discipline, recently a marked interest in the historiography of digital humanities can be noticed. More nuanced understandings of the history of its intellectual agenda, influences, the development of its methods over the past 70 years and its place within the humanities more generally, are starting to emerge. Nyhan and Flinn’s book is an important contribution to this scholarship.

Computation and the Humanities features a series of fourteen oral history interviews that Nyhan conducted with sixteen well- and also lesser-know pioneers of the Digital Humanities. Those interviewed include Susan Hockey, John Burrows and Michael Sperberg-McQueen, whose memories are “essential to charting the often disputed and disputatious histories of the establishment of new disciplines” (Computation and the Humanities, 22). In the oral history interviews included in this book, and the four more analytical chapters that are also included in it, Nyhan and Flinn insightfully unpick the complex foundations, motivations and intellectual roots of Digital Humanities.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. Please grab yourself a copy of it if you have not done so already!

Do also note that the interviews included in Computation and the Humanities can be read alongside a further selection of open access oral history interviews that were published in Digital Humanities Quarterly in 2012