Review: People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center, edited by Anne B. McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier

Roughly a decade ago, the academic world was abuzz with the revolutionary possibilities of applying digital and computational approaches to humanities topics. What has happened since then? A new essay collection edited by Anne B. McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier, part of the “Debates in the Digital Humanities” series published by the University of Minnesota Press, offers as good a place as any to take stock of the state of the field. That is, if we can even call digital humanities (DH) a field. The question of whether what we are investigating is a distinct discipline or if digital humanities as a practice remains interdisciplinary and interstitial continues to be unclear. After all, the humanities are already multifaceted. Adding “digital” makes things even more confusing. We cannot even decide on what verb form to use. Some write “digital humanities is a field”; others insist “digital humanities are a...