Recensione: Johanna Drucker. 2021. The Digital Humanities Coursebook. An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/13808
Questa recensione descrive la proposta di un libro di testo per l'umanistica digitale, frutto di circa due decadi di studi e di insegnamento, da parte di Jonanna Drucker, ricercatrice pionere e attivista nel campo.&nbsp;
text/html
2532-8816
13808
11
en
Brunella Longo
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Umanistica Digitale
Teaching
Book review: Johanna Drucker. 2021. The Digital Humanities Coursebook. An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge
Text.Serial.Journal
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/
Reviews and reports
2022-01-25
2021-11-06
2022-01-25
2022-01-25
231-234
Um. Dig.
Brunella Longo
2021
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/13808
231
Online Data Assessment (self employed consultant)
2532-8816
11
Teaching
en
234
Book review: Johanna Drucker. 2021. The Digital Humanities Coursebook. An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/13808/13811
    Umanistica Digitale – ISSN: 2532-8816 – n. 11, 2021
B. Longo – Review: Johanna Drucker. 2021. The Digital Humanities Coursebook
DOI: http://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/13562


 Review: Johanna Drucker. 2021. The Digital Humanities
Coursebook. An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research
and Scholarship. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge

                                         Brunella Longo

                         Online Data Assessment (self employed consultant)
                                   bl@brunellalongo.co.uk


An advocate for the engagement of humanities' scholars in the design of technical infrastructure
for the internet since the early 2000s, Drucker is one of the pioneering authors of the Digital
Humanities Manifesto 2.0, outcome of the Mellon Seminar at the UCLA in 2009, in which the
idea of a collaborative scholarship as the modus operandi at the core of the discipline was
conceived and defined for the first time.
Johanna Drucker's own specialisation is art and in particular visual design (although she is
Professor of Bibliography in Information Studies at UCLA). Therefore it does not surprise that
this book has a structure that is, in itself, delightfully creative and easy to follow, making it a
terrific example of structured writing. It is written in plain English, with a tendency to privilege
synthetic and systematic presentations over discursive and verbal explanations. About forty visual
examples and many interesting instructional exercises within each chapter help to memorise,
recall and experiment the concepts described. Short takeaways at the end of each chapter also
help to this extent.
The first two chapters set the scene. "The humanities face many urgent challenges", the author
warns, reminding the reader of the short but tormented story of the discipline: object of grants
in the early 2000s to support curriculum development, the humanities still must defend
themselves from attacks that come from both the outside and within the field. Digital humanities
are seen at odds with what Drucker calls "the entrepreneurial emphasis in the university" while
criticism from colleagues "point out its limited demographics in terms of participants and early
emphasis on first-world western cultural traditions".
Advocating the need for everybody to be digitally skilled, and conceding that other approaches
for teaching digital humanities may exist (for instance, critical media studies, data science,
computer science), Drucker is strongly convinced that "one role of humanistic scholarship is to keep
ambiguity, complexity, and the capacity for contradiction present in the face of techniques that
privilege efficiency and problem solving. Humanists do not approach their research as problems to be
solved, but as investigations of the cultural record". And again, "the digital humanities have the
potential to put instrumental technologies into dialogue with interpretative activities".
In an overview of the discipline, Drucker states that the field is defined through its outcome
because it is made of components (materials, born digital or made "computationally tractable")
                                             231
    Umanistica Digitale – ISSN: 2532-8816 – n. 11, 2021

and activities (such as processing data and presenting results by means of using specific file
formats, web platforms or digital repositories).
"Datafication" as a practice depends upon modeling, warns Drucker, and the assumptions and
biases built in each model are strongly reflected in the choices we made when we create the
apparatus that we will use for further processing and data diffusion. The baseline concepts the
author insists on are index terms and metadata, data cleaning and consistency, descriptions and
links. She also very convincingly explains the fundamental distinctions existing in data and
information management: those between structured and unstructured data, between the new
and the existing corpora of data, between data and "capta" (these are data automatically
summarised or extracted by scripts and not by humans), between parameterisation (what can be
measured) and tokenisation (what can be algorithmically included or excluded for the purposes
of creating bibliographies and citations, search engines results, visualisation of connections and
so on and so forth).
Chapter 3 deals with file formats and Web protocols and it is perhaps the weakest of the entire
book, as it limits the presentation to the sole domain of formatting languages (HTML)
excluding, for instance, audiovisual formats as well as PDFs that occupy such a huge part of
digital content productions. The following Chapter 4 about metadata, classification and markup
languages includes a brief presentation of Dublin Core and the DDC and useful exercises that
will help recognise the differences in syntax and representational affordances between TEI, JSON
and XML.
The same, very practical and instructional approach is adopted in Chapter 5 where the book
explains design and construction of relational databases, focussing on the difference between the
flat structure of spreadsheets and the content and data models and query languages of databases.
Without entering the complex argumentative arena of cultural and media studies about the
socio-technical context in which databases are created, this chapter warns the student that "in
spite of all of this formal structure, however, a database should be understood as an act of
interpretation that makes a rhetorical argument". Conceptual and design issues of legacy data,
ethics, metric standards and re-use are also addressed.
The basics of visualisation are presented in Chapter 6, almost a tutorial in statistics, with practical
guidelines for thinking about how to choose the right type of chart or diagram. Provocative and
instructive exercises challenge the student to try some reverse engineering of a visualisation, to
analyse the connections between data and infographics and to reflect on cases of misleading
charts. In this chapter there is also a convincingly essential explanation of the very fashionable
concept of network graphs (the data structures of networks that have become ubiquitous and
used to describe all sorts of social contexts in which analysis of connections is relevant from
advertising on social media to cyber forensics).
Data mining, text analysis and also more complex analytics techniques and case studies are
introduced in Chapter 7, where the author's tension is towards pointing out that "every medium
poses its own set of challenges for extracting information in a meaningful way".
Chapter 8 (Mapping and GIS) aims at exposing the student to the risks of assumptions encoded
in maps of all kinds. Very interestingly, Drucker convinces us that there is a raison d'être for
spatial humanities, defined as a "discipline concerned with inhabitation and experience and not
                                               232
              B. Longo – Review: Johanna Drucker. 2021. The Digital Humanities Coursebook

simply with location" a conceptualisation that could be perhaps useful also retrospectively in the
years to come when more and more maps of all historical periods will be available to scholars.
Chapter 9 focuses on the application of 3D and photogrammetry to historical and cultural sites
- a fascinating overview of what ICT can bring into museums and exhibitions, allowing the
construction of "virtual models of vanished environments" as well lost monuments, buildings,
works of art.
An overview of a wide range of topics covering design and production of websites, from linked
open data to intellectual property issues, is offered in the last three chapters that in spite of an
undoubtedly thorough background research could leave some readers disappointed because it
does not include the latest technologies or debates.
An appendix briefly outlines topics of current policy debates that occupy great space for
allocation of resources within University departments all over the world and are reflected in ideas
for curriculum development and special initiatives, like legacy data collections, projects and
systems and coding skills.
The analytic index can be very useful to students and teachers. The full-text of the book is
available online via Taylor & Francis eBooks Complete.
In conclusion, this is a book that achieves its objective in an extraordinarily skilled way and
nonetheless may still result unconvincing about the need for the digital humanist to distance him
or herself from the traditional humanist. In any case, students and scholars of any generation
could find it very useful to verify what they really know and what information and
communication technologies they are able to decode, interpret and apply on a daily basis, or
how they should be approaching their traditional objects of research with or without digital tools
and digital environments in the modern world.
Drucker's Coursebook may appear controversial or unconvincing because the field of digital
methods and tools for the humanities (as well as for philosophy or any other discipline with a
strong core of theoretical, abstract and verbal contents) is far from settled: conversely, it
continuously blurs, mangles and redefines its boundaries under economic and policy demands,
it tends to forget languages, platforms, tools very rapidly - making practical skills quickly
obsolete.
If the author and the publisher planned a new edition or even translations in other languages,
they could perhaps consider to review it and offer it as a Digital Scholar Primer, targeting not
only scholars and students of digital humanities but teachers of many disciplines, particularly in
secondary education, who need to level up their skills with common digital foundations whatever
their main subject may be. In fact, it is true that digital technologies and tools have now become
pervasively used for education, information and knowledge management ignoring the entire
matter of digital literacy skills or relegating it to a wide and confusing range of short courses or
accessorial activities extra-curriculum.
In this respect, Drucker's choice of technologies (which she tends to call “methods”) appears very
appropriate. Although she refers to them always with the purpose of facilitating the study of
artefacts and their digital representations according to principles and scenarios for the digital
humanities, the processes and tools discussed are here to stay for long in an interdisciplinary
                                               233
   Umanistica Digitale – ISSN: 2532-8816 – n. 11, 2021

space that not only allows but often demands several theoretical approaches to unravel around
the same devices and across different sectors.




                                            234
