In a review that addresses (and exposes) the founding myth of the “digital humanities” (DH), formerly known as “humanities computing,” Roberto Simanowski and Luciana Gattass measure just how much the 99 articles collected by Mathew Gold and Lauren Klein have overturned “academic life as we know it.”
This highly-anticipated volume has been extensively revised to reflect changes in technology, digital humanities methods and practices, and institutional culture surrounding the valuation and publication of digital scholarship.
A timeline relating digital literature and computation divided into three main topics: technological context (brown), cultural context (blue) and digital literature [littérature numérique] (green).
Digital literature started at the same time as electronic computation. This timeline presents digital literature in context, showing its roots in terms of pioneering scientific issues and literary issues, from the poetic avant-garde of the 20th century to more traditional writing systems. Digital literature progressively transforms itself with technological updating.
La littérature numérique est apparue en même temps que l'informatique. Elle s'enracine dans des problématiques scientifiques pionnières et des questions littéraires issues des avant-gardes poétiques du 20e siècle ou des écritures plus traditionnelles. Elle se transforme au fur et à mesure des progrès technologiques.
(Source: http://balises.bpi.fr/culture-numerique/lhistoire-de-la-litterature-num…)
If there is such a thing as a new computer-assisted literary criticism, its expression lies in a model that is as broad-based as that presented in John Smith’s seminal article, “Computer Criticism,” and is as encompassing of the discipline of literary studies as it is tied to the evolving nature of the electronic literary text that lies at the heart of its intersection with computing. It is the desire to establish the parameters of such a model for the interaction between literary studies and humanities computing – for a model of the new computer-assisted literary criticism – that gave rise to the papers in this collection and to the several conference panel-presentations and discussions that, in their print form, these papers represent.
Source: Author's Abstract
Work in progress, presented at the History of Material Texts workshop at the University of Pennsylvania 23 February 2004 (references therefore are omitted).
Montfort investigates into human-computer interaction before the screen and questions "how early print-based interfaces inform our understanding of print and paper metaphors in current computer interfaces."
My own idea is that while the material experience of an interactive computer program is important, screen-essential approaches to new media tend to collapse important distinctions, and perhaps, by ignoring the print-based history of new media and the fact that computer interface was based on paper to begin with, even understate in some ways how the screen changed the experience of computing, while neglecting the formal and computational continuity that we've seen across computer interfaces.
This Companion offers a thorough, concise overview of the emerging field of humanities computing.