Steven Ramsay. 'Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism'. Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press. 2011. ISBN 978-0-252-03641-5 (Cloth) 978-0-252-07820-0 (Paper).

The Digital Humanities have attracted much attention as of late, including an increased concentration of DH-specific panels at the MLA conference, a focus in the MLA’s publication "Profession" (2011b), and a series of blog posts by Stanley Fish (2012a, 2012b). While this coverage has done much to expose scholars to the variety of the work being done in the digital humanities, the general sense of the digital humanities is still that it has more in common with the social sciences and computer sciences than the humanities, a sense that is apparent in popular articles like Fish’s blog posts (2012a,2012b) and Kathryn Schulz’s New York Times article “What is Distant Reading” (2011), and can even be felt to some degree when Johanna Drucker separates the digital humanities from speculative computing (2009 4-5). Data mining, database construction, and the development of visualisation tools require deep technological engagement, and appear entirely alien when compared to standard humanistic methods of enquiry.