I am very excited to announce that I have signed a contract with De Gruyter to publish my PhD thesis as a book. The book will appear in the upcoming series Digital History and Hermeneutics (edited by Andreas Fickers).
After the successful defence of my thesis, three additional reviewers provided feedback with the specific question of how it could be turned into a book. All agreed there was sufficient material to make for an interesting book and provided suggestions how it could be made more compelling and of interest to a wider audience. In the coming months, I will restructure and rewrite my thesis, look back at my notes, and update the literature.
The book will investigate how digital history is negotiated and performed in collaborations between historians and computational experts, focusing on digital history projects, labs and centres. I analyse these according to three dimensions: 1) how collaborators engage with one another, 2) who is in control, and 3) how historians eventually change in work practices. For the more elaborate abstract of my thesis see this earlier post. The book should be of interest to scholars interested in how digital history relates to historical scholarship as well as to digital humanities, by providing an empirical account of how boundaries of practice are negotiated. Furthermore, I intend to add a section (not present in the PhD thesis) with recommendations for scholars who wish to engage in future digital history collaborations.