Apologies for cross-posting

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Dear list members and friends,

We are happy to announce the publication of our new book "L'umanista
digitale" (*The Digital Humanist*), by Teresa Numerico, Domenico Fiormonte
and Francesca Tomasi (Il Mulino, Bologna, 2010):

http://www.mulino.it/edizioni/universita/scheda_volume.php?vista=indice_esteso&ISBNART=13425

This work follows the collective "Informatica per le discipline
umanistiche" (ed. by Teresa Numerico and Arturo Vespignani, 2004), a small
best-seller in our field, as it was widely used in many humanities
computing courses across Italy.

In the last six years so many things have changed, so we decided to write
a completely different book, and organized it around the idea of an
essential "digital trivium". Not just an introduction to DH, but a
critical reflection on current tools and practices.

Accordingly, the volume is divided in three main sections: "Writing &
producing content" (*Scrivere e produrre*, by D. Fiormonte);
"Representation and preservation" (*Rappresentare e conservare*, by F.
Tomasi); "Searching and organizing" (*Cercare e organizzare*, by T.
Numerico). The book was conceived from a genuinely interdisciplinary
perspective, as we all work in different fields: Teresa is a philosopher
of science and CS historian, Francesca is a computer scientist and digital
archivist, and Domenico is a linguist and new media student.
Perhaps the most challenging output of this collaboration is the first
chapter on the "humanistic roots" of computer science, written by T.
Numerico, but discussed among us at length. Teresa, who has been working
for years on this topic, describes an epistemological turn: from the
computer as "computing machine" to idea of "interface" and communicative
tool, explaining how this idea derived from people and scholars who had a
humanistic approach to knowledge.

Interesting to the textual scholars community would be also the Appendix: "The
international scenario of digital humanities", a concise summary of geo-
political trends, research scenarios and projects in our field. The
prospect provided here is deliberately international, but also attentive
to the specific cultural needs of each national DH community.

Finally, registered readers can access the publisher's online environment
AulaWeb (http://www.mulino.it/aulaweb/), where they can find more
material, i.e. unpublished chapters, tests, slides, and tutorials.

We would be very grateful you can help us to translate bit & pieces, summarise,
or abridge paragraphs and chapters, and post them in your blog and web
sites. We will be happy to send you the italian text and help you to translate anything
you're interested in. Especially the introduction "Storia dell'interazione
tra tecnologia e sapere umanistico" is something quite new in our DH field:
we don't remember many publications, except perhaps Willard McCarty's "Humanities
Computing", reflecting on how important has been our theoretical and
practical contribution to the birth of Informatics and Computer Science.

If you need more info, or want a review copy of the volume, please contact
the publisher at [log in to unmask], or feel free to write us:

Teresa Numerico ([log in to unmask])
Domenico Fiormonte ([log in to unmask])
Francesca Tomasi ([log in to unmask])

Thanks!