Wilson (Univ. of Alabama libraries) offers an impressively practical guide to the complex, interdisciplinary world of the digital humanities. She explains the technical side of digital humanities, including details on the most relevant digital humanities tools--for example, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), digital mapping, and big data analysis--and their uses in digital exhibitions. She also provides a digestible explanation of metadata types and their uses. In the final section, Wilson offers a lens library professionals can use to clearly define their roles, specifically enumerating the responsibilities of various digital humanities positions in libraries and the tasks involved in digital humanities projects. Wilson closes each chapter with thorough notes and selected resources for additional reading, along with a handful of exercises centered on the chapter's topic. These exercises support the suitability of this text for a digital humanities graduate course. Wilson's obvious expertise in the field renders Digital Humanities for Librarians at once a valuable, suitably detailed guide for those already in the library and information science profession and a trustworthy textbook for those preparing to enter the field. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, and professionals.--CHOICE Wilson has written the comprehensive textbook on digital humanities (DH) work in libraries that she never had as a student or beginning practitioner. She reviews the theoretical and historical underpinnings of DH, then delves into the practice of librarians and their many roles on DH projects. Additional chapters focus on major projects, such as the Text Encoding Initiative, which leverages markup language to describe and provide access to manuscript material, marginalia, and a variety of other corpora. The author also considers technology and provides sample markup language, platform, and vendor information. Each chapter contains exercises that would be useful in a classroom environment, as well as references to more detailed works for further consultation. The real strength is in the third section, which focuses on the "humans in digital humanities," particularly with respect to establishing an outreach program. This work should be a core text for courses in MLIS programs and will be helpful for librarians beginning work in DH.--Library Journal Emma Annette Wilson has drawn on her experience as head of the Alabama Digital Humanities Center, University of Alabama Libraries, to provide a road map for librarians involved in digital services and other related job positions. Digital Humanities for Librarians is a welcome introduction to this growing, inter-disciplinary field. The author herself is now an Assistant Professor of English, Southern Methodist University, and the book has the distinction of being the first single-author textbook on the digital humanities for librarians, and is intended for use in the classroom. Digital Humanities for Librarians is a useful, well-conceived book, which should be of equal use to both the practitioner and the student.--Marta Mestrovic Deyrup, professor, Seton Hall University Libraries Emma Wilson's Digital Humanities for Librarians is a welcome addition to the reading lists of academic librarians, administrators, and faculty who are engaged in DH work or who are toying with the idea of getting started. Building upon her years of experience at the University of Alabama and the convener of several DH conferences, Wilson writes from experience as well as with authority and clarity in answering key questions about what DH is and how and why libraries are at the core of this work before diving into five approaches (focusing on metadata, exhibitions, text encoding, digital mapping, and computational analysis) and the corollary skills and framing required by all collaborators who strive to see every project through to a successful launch. In short, Wilson has created an essential field guide for starting, sustaining, and accelerating digital humanities projects and collaborative environments where the library and librarians are front and center.--Juilee Decker, Associate Professor, Museum Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology


Biografía del autor
Dr. Emma Annette Wilson holds a BA and M.Phil. in English from the University of Cambridge, a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature from the University of St. Andrews, and an MLIS from the University of Western Ontario. For the past 4 years she has worked in the University Libraries at the University of Alabama running the Alabama Digital Humanities Center (ADHC). In that time, as the leader of a 2-person team (herself and an IT Specialist), she has grown the ADHC from having 5 Digital Humanities projects to having over 140, and this volume is an opportunity to share that experience and successful approaches and strategies with an LIS and librarian readership. Dr. Wilson has initiated Digital Humanities collaborations for research and pedagogy in more than 20 different departments across the University of Alabama, ranging from partnerships in English, History, Art and Art History, and Modern Languages, to perhaps more unexpected areas such as Music, Diversity initiatives, and Clothing, Textile, and Interior Design. Furthermore, a number of these projects include significant inter-institutional collaborations with establishments including Somerville College, Oxford, and St. Louis Public Library, to name just a couple. As Digital Scholarship Librarian at the ADHC, Dr. Wilson established Digitorium, an annual Digital Humanities conference that saw its third iteration in Spring 2017. Since its inception in 2015, the conference has grown by over 60%, attracting more than 130 delegates from 3 different continents, 25 different institutions and 10 different subject areas in 2017 alone. Digitorium always includes plenary speaker sessions, and the combination of these with highly diverse panels of speakers from all over North America and Europe, all of whom Dr. Wilson corresponds with directly and regularly, means that she has built up an extensive network of librarians and scholars practicing in the field of Digital Humanities, a resource which she intends to draw upon in the making of this book. She has published articles and an edited collection in Renaissance literature, but germane to this project her recent work has involved presenting at the ALA and ACRL and publishing on the role of metadata in Digital Humanities alongside her colleague, Metadata Librarian Mary Alexander, as well as putting together an edited collection on Digital Humanities for teaching for Indiana University Press.