A splendid, sensitively written, solidly researched and thoroughly enjoyable reference work on the defining technologies of our day. A reference work that you want to read from cover to cover is an extraordinarily rare thing, The authors and editors of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media have achieved a work worthy of that attention and have done with world of digital scholarship a substantial favor in the process. A quick glance at an entry on a subject you know well should be enough to convince you both of the merits of the entry and the substantial thought that went into selecting and situating the entries in such a readable and logical way... In a field where change comes so quickly and memories are fleeting, even for those who have grown up in and studied the computing revolution, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media fills a void in scholarship and provides the needed authority to mark and gauge digital media's lineage and impacts. It is just what our culture needed.
Sean S. Costigan Publishing Research Quarterly In encyclopedic format, this guide introduces nearly every digital format and genre conceived thus far. For collection managers concerned with documenting the digital, or getting a jump start on pondering the mind-boggling future problems of content access and curation, this volume will serve as a fantastic one-stop, all-inclusive introduction.
Darby Orcutt Collection Management The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media represents a valuable and lasting contribution to the field of media studies by revealing current attitudes toward media as digital and material, preserved in bits while moving through multiple communities of practice, and key in unraveling the multiple entwinements between culture and technology. Comprehensive and accessible, there are an impressive 154 entries in the Guide that in combination offer a glimpse of the current state of scholarly work in digital media that is both detailed and broad... It will serve as a key resource to which future students and scholars alike can turn for its representation of the current state of digital media studies.
Alex Christie Journal of Digital Humanities An impressive undertaking and it will be well received by both newcomers to the field and more seasoned scholars. Like any good encyclopedia, it offers the reader an opportunity to get lost among its riches. Given that is a book and not a website or ebook, the text is also a unique and certain pleasure: take the book off the shelf, feel its weight in your hands, and then begin flipping through the pages to randomly encounter a new topic.
Karen Gregory Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy