Part of the Routledge Companions Series, the Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities shares ways to argue about mediation through new media. Containing fifty+ chapters, it highlights how media studies and digital humanities happen beyond text: about, with, and through new media such as audio, film, television, videogames, databases, algorithms, and electronics. Anchored in arts and humanities perspectives, it also underscores the social, cultural, political, aesthetic, and embodied dimensions of new media production.
The Companion's intended audience includes advanced undergraduates as well as graduate students curious about conducting applied media studies, blending cultural criticism with computation, authoring multimodal scholarly communications, and enacting social justice work through new media. It assumes the intersections of media studies and digital humanities are usually opaque to most audiences, especially people who are new to either field. As such, the Companion's emphasis is communicating key and compelling methodologies to students in the arts and humanities.
The Companion does not assume the form of a textbook, encyclopedia, or keywords collection. As a guide, it instead gives its contributors opportunities to convey the relevance of their methodologies and media practices to an array of audiences. It also surveys important differences across the contributors' approaches, projects, settings, styles, and perspectives, without assuming a unified voice across the chapters. These chapters contain original material and are relatively brief (~5000 words each).
The Companion is currently under contract with Routledge. The contributors and editor expect publication in 2017.
The table of contents and chapter abstracts are available here.
Jentery Sayers is Assistant Professor of English; a Faculty Member of the Cultural, Social, and Political Thought Program; Director of the Maker Lab in the Humanities; and Director of the Digital Humanities Certificate at the University of Victoria.
I would like to thank Nadia Timperio for copy-editing this companion and compiling the glossaries with me. I would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Department of English at the University of Victoria for supporting the research and labor required for this project.