Review Defining Digital Humanities. A Reader.

In her plenary talk at the Interface 2011 conference, Melissa Terras said to her audience ‘What is Digital Humanities? (...) It’s not the place here to give a history of the definition of DH, but emergent scho-lars could do worse than make themselves familiar with a lot of the arguments’. That may have been the moment when the volume reviewed here was con-ceived. Many contributions to the debate about the nature of Digital Humanities are available online but scattered all over the web. Defining Digital Humanities. A Reader brings together a number of conference talks, essays, and blog posts that some-how address the issue of what Digital Humanities is, what digital humanists do, and what academic status their activities deserve. The book is meant to be used in teaching, where it will certainly prove useful, but without doubt it will also find its way to the bookshelves of many practitioners—in itself a highly significant way of referring to those who engage in Digital Humanities. For do we refer to, say, biologists as ‘practitioners of biology’? To speak of digital humanists as practitioners is to define Digital Humanities as a practice, as some-thing that one does. It is the approach taken i