“Writing the History of the Humanities”: Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023

Choice Outstanding Academic Title is described as follows by the American Library Association: “This prestigious list, released today, reflects the best scholarly titles reviewed by Choice during the previous calendar year, as chosen by the editors. This year’s list features 499 books from 109 publishers.” More details about the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles (OAT) list can be found on the official website.

Julianne Nyhan and Andrew Flinn are delighted to have contributed a chapter to the book entitled: “Oral History and the (Digital) Humanities,” (pp. 153-172). Their chapter explores the potential gains and difficulties of using oral history to study the history of digital humanities, itself part of the wider history of the humanities. Building on a case study of Wilhelm Ott’s “paper search engine” (explored in an earlier oral history interview) as well as Sinclair and Rockwell’s research on forgotten text analysis techniques of Robert Jay Glickman and John Smith, the chapter argues that “attention to forgotten technologies … can alert us not only to the technology itself, but to the ways text itself has been conceptualised and studied across longer trajectories with a multiplicity of tools in the humanities and digital humanities. Accordingly, oral history has the potential not only to inform histories of digital humanities but to grant insight into the shape that the Humanities has taken, over the longue durée” (p.166)