Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists

What is digital humanities (DH)? This question has been asked many times over, and definitions abound, but is it the question we should be asking? In order to understand DH, we have to experience it for ourselves. Editors Hartsell-Gundy (head, humanities section and librarian for literature and theater studies, Duke Univ.), Laura Braunstein (digital humanities and English librarian, Dartmouth Coll.) and Liorah Golomb (humanities librarian, Univ. of Oklahoma) give examples of DH work from academic institutions across the country. DH is different from humanities even aside from the "digital" part: it's crossdisciplinary and not solitary but based in communities of practice. Examples of DH work include text encoding, text mining, metadata creation, and preservation, to name but a few. This book focuses primarily on humanities subject librarians new to DH and how they came to understand this field of work, but DH isn't just for the humanities anymore. One chapter shows how sciences and social sciences librarians can use transferable skills to get involved in promoting and supporting DH. DH is a "disrupter" in academic libraries but also might be the institutions' savior.