The subject of digital scholarship is attracting a lot of attention from scholars, government and publishing houses worldwide. This report is therefore timely, providing one of the few published materials on the subject. The report addresses how new digital media and technologies are being applied to transform teaching and learning, especially in the humanities. The report is the outcome of a symposium held in September 2008 organised by the Council on Library & Information Resources (CLIR) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to explore research topics intersecting the humanities, social science and computer science. The contributors to the report are experts with industrial knowledge from such diverse fields as computational linguistics, cloud computing, human‐computer interaction, content management, digital technology, cyber‐infrastructure, e‐publishing, computer modelling, cross language information retrieval, and digital resources management.
The report contains eight thematic chapters: research agenda for digital scholarship, Cyber‐Infrastructure, American Studies in the Global Era, Automated Language Processing, Information Visualisation, New Media, Social Networks in the Age of the Web, And Digital Humanities Centres. The burden of deconstructing “digital scholarship” is left to the reader, as the report does not provide a definition or scope of the concept. The report lacks an overall conclusion that summarises key issues raised and discussed in each of the chapters. As well, none of the eight theme chapters in the report provides a summary or a conclusion. Furthermore, whereas some chapters provide extensive references for further reading, others do not have such references.
The content is presented in logically organised chapters. The report is fully illustrated using analogies from diverse disciplines (such as history, archaeology, geography, philosophy, religion, computer science and linguistics, though it would seem that the content is designed to appeal more to experts in the fields of humanities and social sciences. The digital scholarship paradigm being in a nascent stage of development on one hand and cross‐disciplinary and hemispheric in scope on the other, a generic approach to introducing it before zeroing in on disciplinary‐specific issues in the humanities would have been more sensible to the readers.
The report lacks a glossary and an index that would help readers in understanding novel terms in the digital scholarship paradigm. The figures provided in the report would have been more appealing if they were presented in colour, especially those on social networks. The chapters of the report are not numbered, making cross‐referencing of content rather difficult.
Despite the weaknesses noted above, the report in general presents very important ideas on digital scholarship with regard to its benefits, cyber infrastructure needs, levels of abstraction of research questions to facilitate large scale collaborative projects, sharing of research data and methodologies across disciplines, etc. Therefore, given the nascent stage of digital scholarship development, this report contains important knowledge that scholars, researchers and other stakeholders will find fascinating and informative to read.
