2010 4.1

The digital humanities is increasingly becoming a buzzword, and there is more and more talk about a broadly conceived, inclusive digital humanities. The field is expanding and at the same time being negotiated, and this article explores the idea of a broadly conceived landscape of digital humanities in some depth. It is argued that awareness across this landscape is important to the future of the field. The study starts out from typologies of digital humanities, a flythrough of the landscape, and a discussion of what being a digital humanist entails. The second part is an exploration of four concrete encounters: ACTLab at University of Texas at Austin, the Humanities Arts Science Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), the Humanities Computing Program at the University of Alberta, and Internet Studies. In the third part of the article, it is suggested that a model based on paradigmatic modes of engagement between the humanities and information technology can help chart and understand the digital humanities. The modes of engagement analyzed are technology as a tool, study object, expressive medium, exploratory laboratory and activist venue.

This article traces the development of two important hypertext systems in the history of computing, and the new paradigms they created: the Hypertext Editing System (HES) and the File Retrieval and Editing System (FRESS). HES was the world's first word processor to run on commercial equipment. It was also the first hypertext system that beginners could use, and pioneered many modern hypertext concepts for personal use. Although the idea of hypertext predates HES and FRESS, this article argues that these two systems were successful because they demonstrated hypertext to a sceptical public; they were both working prototypes.

In this article we propose different methods of encoding, according to the TEI Guidelines, three different cases of genetic or compositional textual variants found in the autographs of the Italian contemporary poet Valerio Magrelli. These encoding experiments reflect the diverse nature of the artifacts and represent a critical assessment of the effectiveness of present encoding practices for the multidimensional and pragmatic aspects of authorial drafts. Thus far, it seems that the TEI has yet to offer a convincing theoretical model and adequate practical solutions for representing the complex temporal structures normally present in manuscripts, and in fluid textual traditions in general. Our conclusion is that there is a potential conflict between the linear and hierchical nature of current formal language systems such as XML, and the intrinsic dynamic nature of the writing process. In such cases we may have to rethink present models of document modeling, and to develop, within an adequate epistemological framework, a new theory of digital text.

Within the field of archival science, recent attention has been paid to identifying scholastic practices that will ensure the development of innovative research as well as the preparedness of future archival educators. Information science, long the academic frame of archival programs in the U.S. and elsewhere, currently allows for considerable co-expansion with digital humanities innovations when we consider the possibility of digital libraries, digital archives, and web-based collections integrating a humanist approach to display and users' interactivity with cultural objects. This paper reviews a workshop dedicated to charting the relationship between digital humanities and archival scholarship, as well as the opportunities to refine curricular and theoretical development in these two disciplines. The concepts expressed here would facilitate the efforts of practitioners to critically examine issues of pedagogy, practical training, and disciplinary alignment under a goal of sustaining the extraordinary expansion of applied humanist theory exemplified in research ventures we have seen thus far.

"The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine" is a review essay on Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008), by N. Katherine Hayles, and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Both works make remarkable contributions for the emerging field of digital literary studies and for the theory of digital media. While Hayles analyses the interaction between humans and computing machines as embodied in electronic works, Kirschenbaum conceptualizes digitality at the level of inscription and establishes a social text rationale for electronic objects.