We told you last year about the hot, new field in humanities research, the Digital Humanities, or DH for short. Well, in the past 12 months, it hasn’t cooled off in the least! Sessions on DH at this year’s MLA Convention were packed, sometimes overflowing. And several new books 
have come out that provide rich overviews of the field, as well as more narrowly focused studies. Interestingly, it is darned difficult to pull up a complete list from our online catalog, since the Library of Congress hasn’t yet gotten its act together and assigned a sensible Subject Heading to DH. You have to use convoluted LCSH like:
- Humanities–Study and Teaching (Higher)–Data Processing
- Humanities–Research–Data Processing
- Information Storage and Retrieval Systems–Humanities
Jeesh!
Beyond just reading books (paradox that it is), what else can you do to keep up to date with DH, or even just get a basic foundation? This is a question my graduate students often ask me. Well, blogs are certainly one of the primary communications channels of the DH world. Here is a listing 20 of the best. Individual institutions also host DH blogs, like New York University, or MIT. I would add Digital Humanities Now and Stanford’s blog to your reading list too.
Many of these blogs are linked to Twitter feeds, another *extremely* important DH communication channel. Try following one of the biggest names in DH, @nowviskie. That’s Beth Nowviskie at UVA. Or #digitalhumanities. Wow. Hunting for good Twitter feeds on Google, I stumbled across this comprehensive list of resources. Such is the world of DH – endlessly rich and seemingly endless.
I’ll close (for now) on a new DH resource, and one that illustrates a main concern of the digital humanities – the future of publishing. The MLA just brought online an evolving anthology of essays – Literary Studies in the Digital Age. This is perhaps the shape of things to come in scholarly humanities publishing. It at least bears watching.