Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field by Julie Thompson Klein (review)

As one who works at the periphery of Digital Humanities, I was immediately attracted to Julie Thompson Klein’s timely book on the current status of Digital Humanities in the academy. Interdisciplining Digital Humanities presents in fewer than 200 pages a genealogy of the field as it simultaneously addresses the broad spectrum of disciplines and theoretical considerations that have grown into the still emerging field. After presenting its argument in clear thematic progression of its six chapters, the book concludes with a helpful section that includes online resources, networks of Digital Humanities practitioners, and professional organizations.

Klein’s central argument is that interdisciplinarity is key to understanding Digital Humanities because—by its very design—it is a set of interdisciplinary practices. Her book should be considered essential reading for all “scholars, teachers, and students of interdisciplinarity” (6) interested in the theoretical and practical origins of the field, for those in search of an in-depth understanding of how Digital Humanities is changing the landscape of research disciplines, and for those engaged in digital endeavors.

In the context of a brief review, the best approach to this book may a quick look at what each chapter has to offer each reader—depending on where that reader finds him/herself on the spectrum ranging from novice to expert in Digital Humanities. Chapter 1, “Interdisciplining,” and Chapter 2, “Defining,” are perhaps the most complex as they outline the theoretical underpinnings and historical development of Digital Humanities from their origins in computational linguistics and text analysis.

The discussion in Chapter 1 is not intended to provide the reader with the final definition of interdisciplinarity but rather to present the multiple layers of theoretical considerations that comprise our collective practices. Klein delineates fundamental distinctions, such as “multidisciplinary” (a composite of inputs from distinct fields) and “interdisciplinary” (which is integrative as it provides new perspectives and asks new question), “methodological” and “theoretical” interdisciplinarities, as well as “instrumental” and “critical” interdisciplinarities. She emphasizes that “Digital Humanities is widely viewed as methodological in nature” [17] and, ideally, as a type of critical interdisciplinarity that aims not only at challenging and transforming structures of knowledge but also at creating new structures. Ways to achieve such new structures include transdisciplinarity as evidenced in various projects, and Klein reminds us that the practice is not only an interdisciplinary but also an interprofessional endeavor.

Chapter 2 considers Susan Hockey’s periodization for the history of Digital Humanities—its “birth” is generally considered to be 1949—tracing the beginnings from early computational linguistics and humanities through four stages to the present era of Web 2.0 tools. Klein firmly grounds her detailed discussion in the reality of the profession. For example, she explores practical milestones that may seem mundane but are absolutely crucial for the foundation (and survival) of a field of study: “a defining literature, a dedicated journal, and funding support” (45). As in other chapters, Klein’s theorizing gains additional power because she offers detailed information from actual practices through contextualized examples of three individual Digital Humanities projects that focus on English, History, and Archaeology, respectively.

This is the chapter that stands out the most to me. On the one hand, it describes our historical moment as a society at large and concludes with a reminder of how growing computing power and ubiquitous access to technology have been part of a cultural shift from which three new trends have emerged—visualization, spatialization, and computational turn. On the other hand, it best describes my own space where I introduce practices of Digital Humanities into the foreign-language classroom at a regional state university before the next step of “institutionalizing.” For example, I participated in a campus wide pilot study on the use of tablets in the classroom. Also, the final project for another class was a “virtual museum” for which students collected material during a team-taught study-abroad trip. In the sense that these examples suggest widely varying teaching practices...