Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research

How does technology impact research practices in the humanities? How does digitisation shape scholarly identity? How do we negotiate trust in the digital realm? What is scholarship, what forms can it take, and how does it acquire authority?

This diverse set of essays demonstrate the importance of asking such questions, bringing together established and emerging scholars from a variety of disciplines, at a time when data is increasingly being incorporated as an input and output in humanities sources and publications. Major themes addressed include the changing nature of scholarly publishing in a digital age, the different kinds of ‘gate-keepers’ for scholarship, and the difficulties of effectively assessing the impact of digital resources. The essays bring theoretical and practical perspectives into conversation, offering readers not only comprehensive examinations of past and present discourse on digital scholarship, but tightly-focused case studies.

This timely volume illuminates the different forces underlying the shifting practices in humanities research today, with especial focus on how humanists take ownership of, and are empowered by, technology in unexpected ways. Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research is essential reading for scholars, students, and general readers interested in the changing culture of research practices in the humanities, and in the future of the digital humanities on the whole.

Jennifer Edmond is an associate professor of Trinity College Dublin and a co-director of the Trinity Centre for Digital Humanities. She holds a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Yale University, and applies her training as a scholar of language, narrative, and culture to the study and promotion of advanced methods in, and infrastructures for, the arts and humanities. In this vein, Edmond serves as president of the board of directors of the pan-European research infrastructure for the arts and humanities DARIAH-EU. Additionally, she represents this body on the Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP), which supports the European Commission in developing and promoting Open Science policies. She has also developed a significant individual profile within European research and research policy circles in the past five years, having been named one of Ireland's five 'Champions of EU Research' in 2012. She coordinated the €6.5m CENDARI FP7 (2012-16) project and is a partner in the related infrastructure cluster PARTHENOS. Edmond was also coordinator of the 2017-18 ICT programme-funded project KPLEX, which investigated bias in big data research from a humanities perspective, and she is currently a partner in the CHIST-ERA project PROVIDE-DH, which is investigating progressive visualisation as support for managing uncertainty in humanities research.