The Cambridge Introduction to Digital Humanities

How are the humanities transformed in the digital era? This book describes the transformation of the humanities by the largest shifts in the production of knowledge since the printing press. It addresses a wide range of disciplines, providing a history of those shifts and how humanists have responded to them. It argues that we are all digital humanists now, since we are all addressed by an era of pervasive digital research, reading, teaching, and learning. This book provides a history of digital transformations in the humanities since the first computers, defines the digital humanities through specific communities, conversations, tactics, and intersections, and poses the key questions of the field. Rather than particular technologies or tools, this Introduction centers on the lasting intellectual objects, methods, and concerns of the humanities from the late medieval period to the explosive growth of generative AI.