It’s Time to Historicize DH: A Review of Digital Humanities and the Cyberspace Decade, 1990-2001: A World Elsewhere

This review of Claire Warwick’s Digital Humanities and the Cyberspace Decade, 1990-2001: A World Elsewhere (2024) praises the monograph’s unique value to the digital humanities as a comprehensive reconstruction of 1990s attitudes and practices regarding cyberspace. Warwick’s justification for her hybrid methodology, which combines history, analysis, thick description, and autoethnography, is discussed, as well as its basic premise that the 1990s should be of interest to digital humanists and humanist academics more broadly. The review then summarizes the monograph’s narrative arc, which traces the ultimate failure of cyberspace’s promises to offer freedom and community in a space apart from the constraints of the everyday world, with special attention to the way that Warwick positions humanist academics and the publishing industry as significant parts of internet history. The review ends with a recommendation that other academics adopt Warwick’s hybrid methodology in the service of historicizing the digital humanities.