Between Humanities and the Digital

contested and exciting field, as well as of its future directions. The volume describes the breadth and depth of how the humanities engage with the digital and information technology, including discipline-specific studies and perspectives, research infrastructure, innovative tools, and creative expression. We are committed in and through the volume to articulate an expansive and large-scale vision of the field, of the humanities at large, and so also of their constitutive relations to each other. This vision is anchored in several traditions: those invested in the humanities and their constituent disciplines, in the digital, in the digital ’ s key contributions to the humanities, and in the humanistic considerations regarding the digital. Respect for these is vital to the book project as well as to a strong engagement with the future of the humanities. This volume aspires to be field-defining in an opening and open-ended sorts of ways, to be inspirational and bridge building through suggesting and manifesting a “ large ” and capacious sense of the digital, of the humanities, of their relation, and, in the final analysis, of what is marked by the name “ digital humanities. ” It is all this that we intend by the “ between ” in the title. The humanities have been undergoing profound changes regarding research and pedagogical practices, funding structures, the role of creative expression, infrastructural bases, reward systems, and interdisciplinary sentiment and structures. At the deepest level, these considerations have been bound up with the transforming and contested roles of the humanities within the changing structure of the university and the place and structure of higher education in contemporary political economy, and so also with a crisis in self-confidence. These shifts have been mediated at the same time by the emergence of a deeply networked humanities both in relation to the processes of knowledge production and its products. Humanities scholars, as scholars more generally, have turned increasingly to using and exploring information technology as both scholarly tool and cultural object in need of analysis. I N T R O D U C T I O N