Digital Humanities: Week 1

The three introductions to Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012, 2016, 2019) each outline the evolution of DH and its emergence into the literary and academic fields of study. As a digital practice, DH seeks to digitise subjects such as literature, art, history and philosophy, both qualitatively and quantitatively, essentially bridging a gap between the world of the “online” and history. DH is an interdisciplinary, humanist study that flourishes in its ability to collect a large scale of data together regarding a variety of topics and discover something revolutionary about our human history. With its roots in academia and University funded research projects, DH has run into criticism about its exclusivity and its predominantly western focused efforts, however, as the field has developed, new studies around subjects of race and gender discrimination over human history have come fruition.

The Shakespeare and Company Project is built upon three sources from the Sylvia Beach Papers at Princeton University; lending library cards, address books and logbooks. The project has pieced together a large collection of artefacts that reveals the novels that the greatest readers of our time were reading during the prime years of their literary careers.  With records of individuals such as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, the project gives invaluable insight into the practices of borrowship that occurred in the 1920s-1940s. Whilst the project is self proclaimed to be incomplete due to a few gaps in its logbook entries, the logbooks still provide a great amount of information on the lending library and its evolution from 1919 to 1941. The project also takes care to highlight the gender of the borrowers of the books and amalgamated lists for the top 10 books borrowed by men and women, which provides insight into the gender boundaries of the period and how they fed into literary choice. Overall, the project is very interesting in its content and offers a history of a library functioning away from the institutionalised practices that dominate the literary sphere.