Readings for a Field in Digital History

In an earlier post I put together a list of undergraduate courses that would provide useful background for a student interested in pursuing digital history. For graduate students, a more useful exercise is to compile a reading list of a hundred or so books for a general / comprehensive examination. Obviously, there are very few books that are specifically about digital history (never mind a canon) so any list has to cover the space where the field is emerging. It's tricky. Below is the list that I would give a student if one came to me tomorrow. I'd expect them to negotiate the list with me, tailoring it to their level of technical expertise, getting rid of a few things and adding a few. I haven't read some of the books, but I've read enough of them that I could easily finish the rest as we were working through the list. There are a few books that I'd love to assign, but they're long out of print (like Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines). I'd be very interested in hearing from students or professors who are currently doing a field like this or want to. Other suggestions are welcome, of course.

1. Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997.
2. Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet, new ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000.
3. Agre, Philip E. Computation and Human Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2005.
4. Baeza-Yates, Ricardo and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto. Modern Information Retrieval. Addison-Wesley, 1999.
5. Barabási, Albert László. Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means. Plume, 2003.
6. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, new ed. Chicago: Chicago, 2000.
7. Battelle, John. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. Portfolio, 2005.
8. Belew, Richard K. Finding Out About: A Cognitive Perspective on Search Engine Technology and the WWW. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2000.
9. Beniger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1989.
10. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale, 2006.
11. Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. Collins, 2000.
12. Bowker, Geoffrey C. Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006.
13. Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, new ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000.
14. Brown, John Seely and Paul Duguid. The Social Life of Information. Boston: Harvard Business School, 2002.
15. Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet, 2nd ed. Polity, 2005.
16. Burnard, Lou, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe and John Unsworth, eds. Electronic Textual Editing. MLA, 2006.
17. Campbell-Kelly, Martin. From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry, new ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004.
18. Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford, 2003.
19. Ceruzzi, Paul. A History of Modern Computing, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003.
20. Chakrabarti, Soumen. Mining the Web: Analysis of Hypertext and Semi Structured Data. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.
21. Clark, Andy. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998.
22. Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford, 2003.
23. Cohen, Dan and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania, 2005.
24. Dornfest, Rael, Paul Bausch and Tara Calishain. Google Hacks, 3rd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2006.
25. Dourish, Paul. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004.
26. Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997.
27. Erle, Schuyler, Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh. Mapping Hacks. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2005.
28. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995.
29. Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004.
30. Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minnesota, 2006.
31. Garfinkel, Simson. Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2001.
32. Garside, Roger, Geoffrey N. Leech and Tony McEnery, eds. Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora. Addison Wesley Longman, 1997.
33. Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford, 2000.
34. Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006.
35. Gitelman, Lisa and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. New Media, 1790-1915. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004.
36. Goldsmith, Jack and Tim Wu. Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World. Oxford: Oxford, 2006.
37. Grossman, David A. and Ophir Frieder. Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Heuristics, 2nd ed. Dordrecht: Springer, 2004.
38. Hafner, Katie and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon and Schuster, 1998.
39. Headrick, Daniel R. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850, new ed. Oxford: Oxford, 2002.
40. Hemenway, Kevin and Tara Calishain. Spidering Hacks. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2003.
41. Hockey, Susan. Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford, 2004.
42. Hughes, Thomas P. Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture. Chicago: Chicago, 2005.
43. Ingold, Tim. Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000.
44. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU, 2006.
45. Kaptelinin, Victor and Bonnie A. Nardi. Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006.
46. Kidder, Tracy. The Soul of a New Machine. Back Bay, 2000.
47. Knowles, Anne Kelly, ed. Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History. Redlands, CA: ESRI, 2002.
48. Langville, Amy N. and Carl D. Meyer. Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings. Princeton: Princeton, 2006.
49. Lanham, Richard A. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: Chicago, 2006.
50. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1988.
51. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford, 2005.
52. Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Addison-Wesley, 1993.
53. Lesk, Michael. Understanding Digital Libraries, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004.
54. Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Penguin, 2005.
55. Levy, David M. Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age. New York: Arcade, 2003.
56. Lévy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace. Perseus, 2000.
57. Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Penguin, 2001.
58. Livingstone, David N. Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: Chicago, 2003.
59. Lutz, Mark. Programming Python, 3rd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2006.
60. Lutz, Mark and David Ascher. Learning Python, 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2003.
61. Manning, Christopher D. and Hinrich Schütze. Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999.
62. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002.
63. Markoff, John. What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. New York: Penguin, 2005.
64. McCullough, Malcolm. Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004.
65. Mindell, David A. Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics, new ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2004.
66. Mitchell, Tom M. Machine Learning. McGraw-Hill, 1997.
67. Mitchell, William J. Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003.
68. Monmonier, Mark. Spying with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy. Chicago: Chicago, 2004.
69. Moody, Glyn. Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. Perseus, 2002.
70. Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2005.
71. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998.
72. Nardi, Bonnie A. and Vicki L. O'Day. Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000.
73. Nunberg, Geoffrey, ed. The Future of the Book. Berkeley: California, 1996.
74. O’Harrow, Robert. No Place to Hide. Free Press, 2006.
75. Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, rev. ed. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2001.
76. Rhodes, Neil and Jonathan Sawday, eds. The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print. London: Routledge, 2000.
77. Rosenfeld, Louis and Peter Morville. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2006.
78. Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth, eds. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Blackwell, 2004.
79. Schuurman, Nadine. GIS: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
80. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke, 2000.
81. Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: Chicago, 1998.
82. Singh, Simon. The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. New York: Anchor, 1999.
83. Staley, David J. Computers, Visualization and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past. M. E. Sharpe, 2002.
84. Sterling, Bruce. Shaping Things. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005.
85. Suchman, Lucy A. Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2006.
86. Tufte, Edward R. Envisioning Information. Graphics Press, 1990.
87. Tufte, Edward R. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Graphics Press, 1997.
88. Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: Chicago, 2006.
89. Weber, Steven. The Success of Open Source, new ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2005.
90. Weiss, Sholom, Nitin Indurkhya, Tong Zhang and Fred Damerau. Text Mining: Predictive Methods for Analyzing Unstructured Information. Springer, 2005.
91. Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Da Capo, 1988.
92. Willinsky, John. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005.
93. Winograd, Terry and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Addison-Wesley, 1987.
94. Witten, Ian H. and Eibe Frank. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2005.
95. Witten, Ian H., Alistair Moffat and Timothy C. Bell. Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1999.
96. Yates, JoAnne. Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993.
    

Tags: bibliography | digital history | history education | pedagogy