Browse all reviews
Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies: An Introduction / eds. Juliana Dresvina, Victoria Blud
Review Date: 26 March 2021
Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies breaks ground on very important, yet controversial, territory. As its title indicates, this volume primarily explores what we might call the principles of the mind or brain in European medieval society, in unique ways. The editorial introduction defines cognitive sciences as ‘an interdisciplinary field for the study and understanding of the mind’ (p.
AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines / eds. Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, Sarah Dillon
Review Date: 11 December 2020
‘Artificial intelligence (AI)’ is a loaded term, rife with connotative contradiction that inspires debate, disagreement, and disillusion.
The War of Words: The Language of British Elections, 1880-1914 / Luke Blaxill
Review Date: 04 December 2020
Luke Blaxill’s book deserves to be seminal. Its unassuming title conceals a bracing methodological challenge: an argument for the application of specific digital techniques to the study of electoral politics. It deploys ‘corpus linguistics’—the computerised compilation and interrogation of massive databases of millions of words—to intervene in a series of debates about the language of the platform in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
Computation and the Humanities: towards an Oral History of Digital Humanities / Andrew Flynn, Julianne Nyhan
Review Date: 01 February 2018
Over the past years, there has been a lot of debate around the nature of scholarship in the area of Humanities Computing or, more recently, Digital Humanities (DH); more specifically, there have been several attempts to define it and identify its disciplinary characteristics.
Legacies of British Slave-Ownership / eds. Nick Draper, Rachel Lang, Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington, Kristy Warren
Review Date: 14 September 2017
In 1833, after centuries of resistance and rebellion by enslaved people, decades of popularly-mobilized antislavery protests, and years of economic struggle on colonial plantations, England’s Parliament initiated the process of slave emancipation in the British Empire.
Venetian Digital Resource Review / Georg Christ
Review Date: 27 July 2017
CIVES and ESTIMO are two databases providing a wealth of important data for the social and economic history of Venice in the late Middle Ages. Both are directed by Reinhold C. Mueller, professor emeritus at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and edited and managed by Dr Alfredo Cosco.
Leisure, Travel and Mass Culture – The History of Tourism / ed. Adam Matthew Digital
Review Date: 01 June 2017
Leisure, Travel and Mass Culture – The History of Tourism is an online archive of tourism resources, curated by Adam Matthew Digital. The site is beautifully presented and easy to access for users. Like all good tourism attractions, it is welcoming to visitors, who will be curious to explore its enticing content.
Manuscripts Online: Written Culture 1000-1500 – DIGITAL RESOURCE / ed. Orietta Da Rold
Review Date: 12 January 2017
Manuscripts Online: Written Culture 1000–1500 is an online gateway to digitised primary sources on medieval written culture. The website collects existing resources behind an interface similar to that of a library catalogue.
Europeana Newspapers / ed. Clemens Neudecker
Review Date: 18 February 2016
It is generally assumed that the digital revolution will spell the end for print journalism. Newspaper sales are in terminal decline as an increasing number of readers turn to websites, smartphones, and social media for their news and entertainment. However, while the internet may eventually kill off modern-day newspapers, it has managed to breathe new life into their ancestors.
Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope / Ian Milligan, Scott Weingart, Shawn Graham
Review Date: 11 February 2016
For the past decade, digital history students have really only had one book upon which to draw to introduce them to the field: Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s 2005 Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.(1) The book continues to appear on nearly every ‘digital history’ syllabus in the English-speaking world.