New Work in Digital Humanities New Books Network

In this debut conversation, we speak to Dr. Nina Beguš, a researcher at UC Berkeley and the founder of InterpretAI who holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Listen to learn about Nina’s path at the intersection of AI and the humanities, the challenges and rewards of working across disciplines, what questions to ask as an ethical researcher, and practical advice for how to succeed in a multifaceted, multidisciplinary career in today’s fast-changing digital landscape.
Beguš' first book, titled Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI, is currently under an advance contract with the University of Michigan Press.
Towards Knowledge is a Latent Knowledge podcast series where we interview industry and academic leaders about research in the real world — from career development to the most pressing philosophical questions in today’s changing research landscape.
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The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History (Cambridge UP, 2022) celebrates the bold new research now possible because of text mining: the art of counting words over time. However, this book also presents a warning: without help from the humanities, data science can distort the past and lead to perilous errors. The book opens with a rogue's gallery of errors, then tours the ground-breaking analyses that have resulted from collaborations between humanists and data scientists. 
Jo Guldi explores how text mining can give a glimpse of the changing history of the past - for example, how quickly Americans forgot the history of slavery. Textual data can even prove who was responsible in Congress for silencing environmentalism over recent decades. The book ends with an impassioned vision of what text mining in defence of democracy would look like, and why humanists need to be involved.
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What isn't counted doesn't count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. Against this failure, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press, 2024) brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work. 
Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D'Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account. This book is also a forceful intervention that challenges hegemonic data science by exploring the possibilities and limitations of counting and quantification and drawing lessons for a restorative and transformative data science.
This book is available open access here. 
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How are digital platforms transforming heritage? In Geopolitics of Digital Heritage (Cambridge UP, 2023), Dr Natalia Grincheva, Program Leader of the BA (Hons) Arts Management at the University of the Arts Singapore and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and Dr Elizabeth Stainforth, a lecturer in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds explore the global political context for digital heritage. Drawing on 4 detailed case studies- Singapore Memory Project, the National Library of Australia’s Trove, the EU’s Europeana, and Google Arts and Culture- the book shows the political ideas and imperatives underpinning the aggregation of heritage on digital platforms. Both an accessible introduction and a significant intervention to the field of heritage studies, the book will be essential reading across the arts, humanities and social sciences.
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Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital (Amsterdam UP, 2023) is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, and the National Fairground and Circus Archive in Sheffield, UK serve as exemplary sites of historical mediation between early and silent cinema and the digital age.
A range of elements, from preservation protocols to technologies of display and from museum architectures to curatorial discourses in blogs, catalogs, and interviews, shape what the author innovatively theorizes as the archive’s hermeneutic dispositif. Archival Film Curatorship offers film and preservation scholars a unique take on the shifting definitions, histories, and uses of the medium of film by those tasked with preserving and presenting it to new digital-age audiences.
Archival Film Curatorship is available as an open access e-book at this link.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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The first critical examination of death and remembrance in the digital age—and an invitation to imagine Black digital sovereignty in life and death.
In Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (U California Press, 2023), Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans—and the records that document them—from slavery through the social media age, Sutherland explores media evidence, digital acts of remembering, and the right and desire to be forgotten.
From the popular image of Gordon (also known as "Whipped Peter") to photographs of the lynching of Jesse Washington to the video of George Floyd's murder, from DNA to holograms to posthumous communication, this book traces the commodification of Black bodies and lives across time. Through the lens of (anti-)Blackness in the United States, Sutherland interrogates the intersections of life, death, personal data, and human autonomy in the era of Google, Twitter, and Facebook, and presents a critique of digital resurrection technologies. If the Black digital afterlife is rooted in bigotry and inspires new forms of racialized aggression, Resurrecting the Black Body asks what other visions of life and remembrance are possible, illuminating the unique ways that Black cultures have fought against erasure and oblivion.
Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.
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