Berry 2012

Berry, David, ed. Understanding Digital Humanities. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Introduction: Understanding Digital Humanities, by David Berry (1-20)

"a computer requires that everything is transformed from the continuous flow of everyday life into a grid of numbers that can be stored as a representation which can then be manipulated using algorithms. These subtractive methods of understanding culture (episteme) produce new knowledges and methods for the control of memory and archives (techne). They do so through a digital mediation, which the digital humanities are starting to take seriously as their problematic." (2)

using Presner, notion of 1st wave (quantitative, focused on text editing and analysis) and 2nd wave (qualitative, interpretive, experimental) -- also in DH Manifesto 2.0

"I propose to look at the digital component of the digital humanities in the light of its medium specificity, as a way of thinking about how medial changes produce epistemic changes." (4)

"I argue that to understand the contemporary born-digital culture and the everyday practices that populate it -- the focus of a digital humanities second wave -- we need an additional third-wave focus on the computer code that is entangled with all aspects of culture and memory, including reflexivity about how much code is infiltrating the academy itself." (5)

"Understanding digital humanities is in some sense then understanding code, and this can be a resourceful way of understanding cultural production more generally: for example, just as digital typesetting transformed the print newspaper industry, eBook and eInk technologies are likely to do so again." (6)

"We thus need to take computation as the key issue that is underlying these changes across media, industries and economies. That is not to say that humanities scholars, digital or otherwise, must be able to code or 'build', rather, that understanding the digital is in some sense also connected to understanding of code through study of the medial changes that it affords, that is, a hermeneutics of code or critical approaches to software." (6)

"less understood is the way in which the digital archives being created are deeply computational in structure and content, because the computational logic is entangled with the digital representations of physical objects, texts and 'born digital' artefacts. Computational techniques are not merely an instrument wielded by traditional methods; rather they have profound effects on all aspects of the disciplines." (13)