text encoding

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 fully revised edition of a celebrated reference work, offering the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of research currently available in this rapidly evolving discipline 
• Includes new articles addressing topical and provocative issues and ideas such as retro computing, desktop fabrication, gender dynamics, and globalization 
• Brings together a global team of authors who are pioneers of innovative research in the digital humanities 
• Accessibly structured into five sections exploring infrastructures, creation, analysis, dissemination, and the future of digital humanities
• Surveys the past, present, and future of the field, offering essential research for anyone interested in better understanding the theory, methods, and application of the digital humanities(Source: Publisher's website) 

Computer source code is written in a par ticular language, which consists of syntax and semantics. A language’s level is defined fi by how closely tied it is to the computer’s architecture and operation. Some are compiled, others interpreted, and not all languages are lists of instructions or imperatives, for example, functional languages such as Scheme. The “lowest” level languages offer ff the least abstraction from the machine processes, which typically indicates fewer conceptual groupings of processes. In machine languages, for example, instructions go directly to the microprocessor. A highlevel language, such as Java, needs to be compiled, or translated into processor instructions. High-level languages are marked by greater levels of abstraction, and a subset, including BASIC, COBOL , and even SQL , aspire to greater legibility to human readers. Some of the high-level languages, such as Inform 7, which is used to write interactive fiction, a genre of interactive narrative, can accept statements that read like natural language, such as, “The huge green fierce snake is an animal in Mt King” (Crowther and Conley 2011) (see inter active narr ative).

The ontological status of code has been the subject of much debate, particularly whether code can be described in Austinian terms as a performative system, as language that makes things happen. For example, N. Katherine Hayles has argued that “code has become . . . as important as natural language because it causes things to happen, which requires that it be executed as command the machine can run” (2005, 49). However, Wendy Hui Kyon Chun (2008) has warned critics not to confuse source code with executed code and not to treat the code as if it is the hidden essence within the object. Meanwhile, Alexander Galloway stresses the importance of “protocols” over code, arguing that “code only ‘matters’ when it is understood as being the substance of a network” (2006, 57). Such a point complements Friedrich Kittler’s (1995) pronouncement that “there is no software,” but instead a set of electrical signals coursing through the hardware. In that sense, there is also no code. Nonetheless, though code may not be able to claim the concrete physical status of hardware, code studies has developed around the material trace, the par ticular instantiation of an algorithm that is code (see algorithm).

( Johns Hopkins University Press)

This paper discusses a semester-long classroom project in which senior seminar students were required to take Shakespeare’s Sonnet 14 and convert it into various media objects and texts. The assignments made use of Ian Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric” (“a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation”), assigning tasks based on the core concepts of “encoding” and “algorithm.” Some objects were electronic (music, twitter feeds) while the majority were physical objects, but they all made use of a procedural rhetoric sketched out by the original shape of the sonnet itself and the long tradition of scanning poems. In doing so, the objects produced force us to ask: where, exactly, do we “hold the light”? Is it e-lit if there’s no “e”?

(Source: Author's Abstract)

This Companion offers a thorough, concise overview of the emerging field of humanities computing. 

• Contains 37 original articles written by leaders in the field. 
• Addresses the central concerns shared by those interested in the subject. 
• Major sections focus on the experience of particular disciplines in applying computational methods to research problems; the basic principles of humanities computing; specific applications and methods; and production, dissemination and archiving. 
• Accompanied by a website featuring supplementary materials, standard readings in the field and essays to be included in future editions of the Companion.(Source: publisher's website)