Book Reviews: The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities

The sixteen essays assembled by Landow and Delany in this volume cover a broad array of topics connected by a concern with "text-based computing" that have applications to the "humanities." The unifying theme in the collection is, to a certain extent, an attempt to assess the impact that the rapid proliferation of networked text corpora and digital communications is having (or might have) in text-oriented disciplines. The editors suggest that networked computing facilitates analysis of very large corpora, or a docuverse (p. 23), which they contend is a vital component of research in the humanities. This does not mean that researchers can simply scale up their methods to meet the demands and possibilities of new technical capabilities. Rather, they suggest that humanists must