In the book a team of researchers from the Centre for Digital Humanities at University College London (UCLDH) shares their experience in the domains relevant for humanities scholars and memory institutions. The topics cover digital humanities in the sense of applying information and communication technologies, computational methods in humanities research, and teaching and humanities approaches to the studies of digital objects and any digital phenomena. As clearly stated by the authors in the title and introduction they aim to provide an overview of digital humanities practices. The reader should not expect a theoretical discussion of digital humanities, but instead will find an overview of numerous practical topics and examples relevant for this domain. These are, for example, social media, digitization, image processing, 3D modelling, text encoding, online teaching materials, etc.
In each chapter of the book there is a brief presentation of the topic selected for discussion. The overview is usually complemented by the examples of relevant projects. The language is clear and simple. The authors often draw on their experience and lessons learned in various initiatives and provide general recommendations for dealing with some of emerging issues. These features are of use for students and practitioners of digital humanities. The authors also try to present issues from the perspective of humanities scholars. This approach may be beneficial for all organisations involved in digital humanities initiatives and among them for memory institutions.
The authors have chosen a case study approach to digital humanities and discussed the topics that emerged from their experiences at UCLDH and, in the author's opinion, are successfully dealt with in the centre. It is difficult to agree with the authors that they provide an overview of a “cutting-edge research”. Without any doubts, the topics of the book are important, but the overviews are in most cases very basic and provide a discussion of well-known issues. For instance, developments in social media and crowdsourcing in particular have been discussed in the literature on digital libraries for a long time, but the overview of social media implications for digital humanities in this book covers quite well-known practices presented elsewhere. Naturally, due to the approach of the book some advanced ideas, e.g. data mining and visualisation, gaming etc. are left out.
Features of this book make it useful for memory institutions and other digital humanities practitioners with a basic knowledge of the domain and also students. The reader should be aware that the book is based mainly on one institution's (UCLDH) experience.
