Book Histories in the Digital Age: Challenges, Promises, Achievements

This special issue of addresses the wide-ranging transformations digitization has created in the field of book history. Several decades after the birth of Digital Humanities, the contributors to this special issue take stock of the challenges, promises and achievements of digital editing and cataloguing of medieval manuscripts. In addition, the articles discuss and assess the potential of computational methods, of big data and algorithms, of text mining techniques, stylometrics, multi-dimensional scaling and clustering, together with navigational tools such as scatterplots and dendrograms. The objects of investigation are both medieval manuscripts and newly digitized of modern writers such as Samuel Beckett, intermedial formats such as Alan Moore’s graphic novels and the online publication of a short story by Kristen Roupenian.