Digital Humanities for Librarians

April 1, 2020

Wilson (English, Southern Methodist Univ.) has written the comprehensive textbook on digital humanities (DH) work in libraries that she never had as a student or beginning practitioner. She reviews the theoretical and historical underpinnings of DH, then delves into the practice of librarians and their many roles on DH projects. Additional chapters focus on major projects, such as the Text Encoding Initiative, which leverages markup language to describe and provide access to manuscript material, marginalia, and a variety of other corpora. The author also considers technology and provides sample markup language, platform, and vendor information. Each chapter contains exercises that would be useful in a classroom environment, as well as references to more detailed works for further consultation. The real strength is in the third section, which focuses on the "humans in digital humanities," particularly with respect to establishing an outreach program. VERDICT This work should be a core text for courses in MLIS programs and will be helpful for librarians beginning work in DH.--Evan M. Anderson, Kirkendall P.L., Ankeny, IA

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