A number of the members of the DH community at Pitt have put together the following list of texts that do a good job of introducing the overall state of the Digital Humanities in North America at the current moment. It begins with a section called, "Articles and Shorter Pieces," which has been kept intentionally brief so as to give you a good taste of the field without being overwhelming. Should you end up with a desire to read more, the next section entitled, "Larger Works," should satisfy many a curiosity. Finally, this post ends with a "Projects" section which includes just a few projects, some created here, others elsewhere, that have captured the attention of this community.
Articles and Shorter Pieces
David M. Berry, “The Computational Turn: Thinking about the Digital Humanities,” Culture Machine 12, 1-22. https://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/49813/1/BERRY_2011-THE_COMPUTATIONAL_TURN_THINKING_ABOUT_THE_DIGITAL_HUMANITIES.pdf
- Berry is a theorist and a maker, but his texts often take the long view, which makes him an apt choice here.
Anne Burdick, et al, “A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities, 121-135. Entire book can be found here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/9780262018470_Open_Access_Edition.pdf
- Provocative and useful overview of DH from creation to assessment.
Matt Kirschenbaum, "What is Digital Humanities and What's it Doing in English Departments?" https://mkirschenbaum.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/kirschenbaum_ade150.pdf
- A history about the formation of DH as a "proper" field than it is about English, and it covers how DH became a thing of note at the MLA conference.
Tara McPherson, "Introduction: Media Studies and the Digital Humanities,” Cinema Journal 48, 119–23. JStor link: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20484452
- Another fine introduction from a slightly different point-of-view.
Christof Schöch, “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities,” Journal of Digital Humanities, http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-3/big-smart-clean-messy-data-in-the-humanities/
- Those wanting to know something about "data" in the humanities can start here. Others may have a more provocative approach, but this one is pretty even keel.
Larger Works
Anne Burdick, et al, Digital_Humanities, https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/9780262018470_Open_Access_Edition.pdf
Johanna Drucker, DH101, http://dh101.humanities.ucla.edu/
Matthew Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/
Projects
The Hermeneutics of Shipping Logs
http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/11/reading-digital-sources-case-study-in.html
http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2014/03/shipping-maps-and-how-states-see.html
Ben Schmidt, Northeastern University, NULab
Itinera
https://itinera.pitt.edu/
Alison Langmead and Drew Armstrong, University of Pittsburgh
Music21: A Toolkit for Computer-Aided Musicology
http://web.mit.edu/music21/
Mark Cuthbert, MIT
NYPL Building Inspector
http://buildinginspector.nypl.org/
NYPL Labs in collaboration with the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division at the NYPL
Quantifying Kissinger
http://blog.quantifyingkissinger.com
Micki Kaufman, CUNY Graduate Center