The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, by Steven E. Jones — Summary

Synopsis

Jones argues that the concept of “cyberspace” — the network imagined as a separate, immaterial realm — has been superseded by what William Gibson called eversion: the network turning inside out and spilling into everyday material life. The digital humanities emerged at this precise cultural inflection point, not as tools applied from outside onto humanistic objects, but as a field that operates within a mixed-reality environment where digital systems are embedded in material culture, archives, objects, places, and scholarly practices.

The argument unfolds across seven thematic chapters — Eversion, Dimensions, People, Places, Things, Publications, Practices — each examining a domain where the cyberspace/reality dualism has collapsed. The method is broad-spectrum cultural analysis: Jones reads science fiction (Gibson, Stephenson, Lovecraft), indie and mainstream games (Fez, Portal, Braid, Skylanders), artworks (Agrippa, Between Page and Screen), and DH projects (Digital Harlem, Transcribe Bentham, Neatline) as equally valid evidence of the same transformation. The theoretical backbone is media materialism — the insistence that digital artifacts always have physical substrates, that digitization is never dematerialization, and that the social and the technical are inseparable. Kirschenbaum, McGann, Moretti, Fitzpatrick, Bogost, and Drucker are the central academic interlocutors.

The book matters for the vault in three directions. First, its critique of platform ideology — the way digital systems use “social” rhetoric to mask extraction — maps onto the vault’s analysis of Silicon Valley and its Brazilian equivalents. Second, the argument that the internet is not “somewhere else” but a material infrastructure embedded in places and bodies connects to the investigation of belonging and thymos: digital platforms produce recognition dynamics structurally comparable to the thymic circuits of churches, cooperatives, and political movements. Third, the discussion of crowdsourcing, human computation, and collective knowledge production is relevant to the vault’s meta-question about how knowledge about Brazil is produced, circulated, and made public.

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Introduction

Jones opens the Introduction with a scene that is meant to do more than provide atmosphere. He visits the Idea Shop at the Illinois Institute of Technology, a fabrication and rapid-prototyping lab filled with routers, CAD files, and 3D printers producing physical objects from digital instructions. The setting matters because it immediately dislodges any narrow assumption that the humanities belong only in libraries, archives, or seminar rooms. Jones wants the reader to see, from the first page, that the contemporary digital humanities are intellectually at home not only among books and manuscripts but also in spaces where digital designs are translated into material artifacts. That walk across campus, from the humanities department to the fabrication lab, becomes the Introduction’s governing image: it stands for a disciplinary crossing and for a new configuration of the relation between culture, technology, and knowledge.

From that opening anecdote, Jones states the book’s core claim. He argues that the newer forms of digital humanities have as much conceptual kinship with makers, designers, and builders as with traditional scholars of texts. The significance of 3D printing for him is not merely technical novelty. It symbolizes a two-way movement that defines the field: digital files becoming physical things, and physical artifacts becoming digital objects through scanning, encoding, and archival remediation. In that sense, the digital humanities are not simply about using computers to study literature or history; they are about inhabiting a world in which the digital and the material increasingly interpenetrate. The author treats this permeability as both a practical condition and a theoretical problem, and he makes clear that the book will return repeatedly to this mixed condition.

Jones then narrows his historical focus. He acknowledges the longer genealogy of “humanities computing,” extending back to the mid-twentieth century, and notes that he himself worked in that tradition in the 1990s. But he is not trying to write a total history of computational work in the humanities. His interest lies in the emergence of a more visible, newly influential formation that came to be called “digital humanities,” or DH, in the first decade of the twenty-first century. For him, this newer DH is continuous with humanities computing but not reducible to it. It inherits earlier practices such as digital editing, archiving, and textual analysis, yet it also expands into new terrains because the cultural environment of networked technology changed in fundamental ways.

A crucial turning point in that environment, Jones suggests, was the collapse of the dot-com bubble around 2000. He treats that collapse as a symbolic end to the old “cyberspace” era, the period when digital technology was often imagined as a separate realm or as an autonomous historical force moving toward some grand destiny. In the years that followed, especially between 2004 and 2008, a different sensibility took hold. Instead of futurist dreams of total virtuality or the Singularity, the cultural emphasis shifted toward the social, the local, the mobile, and the practical: Web services, check-ins, targeted apps, and pervasive everyday use. Jones insists that these changes were not trivial updates. Taken together, they produced a major alteration in how already-networked people imagined and experienced the digital world.

He is careful, however, not to universalize that experience too casually. Jones pauses to note that the “most people” who encounter the network in the way he describes are only certain populations: the already-networked, often relatively privileged, parts of the world. He does not deny the reality of unequal access, nor the environmental and labor costs embedded in digital infrastructures. At the same time, he resists simplistic versions of the “digital divide” that imagine a neat binary between connected and unconnected worlds. His actual claim is more limited and more precise: within the sectors of society where dense networked life had become normal, a decisive experiential shift occurred. The book is about that shift and about the humanities practices that emerged in relation to it.

Jones proceeds to name the cluster of technologies and platforms that formed the new context. Social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter transformed online interaction. Google Books made large-scale digitization visible in a way humanists could not ignore. GPS on mobile devices, the Google Maps API, smartphones such as the iPhone, Android, and the broader ecology of location-aware computing changed how data attached itself to everyday movement through physical space. Even DIY 3D printing, associated later with MakerBot, became part of this same moment. None of these developments alone created a historical break. But their rapid convergence did. Together they made the network feel less like a remote virtual elsewhere and more like an environment embedded in ordinary life, bodies, objects, and places.

Against that background, Jones dates the emergence of the new-model digital humanities. The term “digital humanities” was consolidated in the mid-2000s, especially with the Companion to Digital Humanities. The National Endowment for the Humanities began formal initiatives in the area and eventually created the Office of Digital Humanities. By 2009, the MLA convention and coverage in major publications had brought DH into public visibility as a newly fundable, newly fashionable academic formation. Jones does not treat these milestones as proof that DH was invented overnight. Rather, they show that something previously more diffuse had suddenly become legible to institutions, administrators, journalists, and scholars as a named field.

He argues, though, that this was not a Kuhnian paradigm shift. DH did not replace one settled academic worldview with another. Instead, Jones describes it more as a “fork” or “branch” growing out of humanities computing, borrowing the language of software development to emphasize continuity as well as divergence. Elsewhere he says DH emerged “into the spotlight,” not “out of the primordial soup.” That formulation matters because it lets him avoid two errors at once: the fantasy that DH was wholly unprecedented, and the opposite claim that nothing important changed except branding. For Jones, a real shift did occur, but it took the form of a new concentration of attention, new institutional energy, and a new fit between humanities work and a transformed networked culture.

The term “digital humanities” itself remains unstable, and Jones does not pretend otherwise. He acknowledges that people disagree on whether DH is a discipline, a field, a temporary umbrella, or simply the name for what humanists increasingly do. His own preference is to think of it as a broad “energy field” spread across disciplines inside and outside the academy. From that perspective, DH is less a tightly bounded method than a zone of overlapping practices. That is why he rejects narrow definitions that would confine DH to the digitization and analysis of pre-digital artifacts while excluding the study of contemporary computational media. In his view, those exclusions miss where some of the most fertile work is happening.

This is why Jones explicitly places parts of media studies, media archaeology, and game studies within DH’s orbit, while still respecting their autonomy. He uses the image of a flower-shaped Venn diagram: not a total merger of fields, but a set of complicated overlaps where the borders themselves become intellectually productive. Video games, in particular, will matter throughout the book because they illuminate how digital systems are lived, imagined, and spatialized. Jones is not trying to annex all media studies into DH. He is arguing instead that the borderlands between fields are where important questions arise, especially when scholars examine born-digital objects, software platforms, interfaces, and the cultural forms generated by networked life.

From there he broadens the conceptual definition of DH. The relation between “digital” and “humanities,” he insists, works in both directions. Computing is not only an instrument for studying culture; it is also itself a cultural object that can be interpreted historically, formally, and politically. Traditional humanities scholarship used print both as medium and as object of analysis; digital humanities do the same with computing and digital media. That means DH includes the encoding, preservation, and analysis of older materials, but it can also include the study of video games, electronic literature, databases, software platforms, and other born-digital artifacts. Jones refuses to rule out those domains in advance because, historically and institutionally, they have already shaped the field.

At this point he turns to the charge that DH is merely hype. The field’s rapid ascent, media attention, and administrative enthusiasm had led some observers to talk about a “DH bubble.” Jones does not deny the existence of hype, but he thinks dismissing DH on that basis is lazy. The field is socially constructed, as every field is, yet that does not make it unreal. What gives DH lasting substance is its connection to a much older tradition of humanities computing and to enduring scholarly needs: building digital editions, curating archives, designing tools, applying quantitative methods to large corpora, and intervening critically in the mass digitization of cultural heritage. In his account, the visible boom of DH rests on real practices that preceded it and will outlast the moment’s excitement.

He singles out Google Books as an especially important disruptive catalyst, echoing Bethany Nowviskie’s point about “digitization-at-scale.” But Jones refuses to isolate Google Books from the larger ecology of change. The mass scanning of books mattered because it arrived together with mobile computing, geolocation, social platforms, augmented reality, and new forms of digital making. These developments reshaped not just infrastructure but everyday perception. For Jones, the key issue is not technological determinism. He is not saying gadgets mechanically caused a new academic field. He is saying that changes in infrastructure, culture, commerce, and imagination were intertwined, and that DH emerged within this broader rearrangement. The academic field and the altered experience of the network formed part of the same historical moment.

Because he is a literary scholar, Jones approaches these changes through metaphor as much as through institutional history. He takes seriously the way societies imagine technologies and the figurative language through which they render them intelligible. Cyberspace, in William Gibson’s famous phrase, had once been a “consensual hallucination.” Now Gibson’s later idea of the “eversion of cyberspace” gives Jones the master metaphor he needs. The point is not that literature predicts technology in any simple sense. Rather, fiction helps crystallize collective perceptions. The shift from cyberspace as a separate virtual realm to an everted network embedded in daily reality names a real cultural transformation. Likewise, the shift from “humanities computing” to “digital humanities” is not just semantics; it reorganizes expectations, institutions, and the range of imaginable work.

Jones does not romanticize this transformation. He repeatedly stresses that enthusiasm for digital culture can slide into boosterism, and that new technologies are entangled with labor exploitation, environmental damage, and corporate power. He is also alert to the way university administrators may embrace DH as a convenient modernization strategy for embattled humanities departments, especially when the language of innovation promises funding and practical utility. This institutional opportunism, he warns, has implications for academic labor and for the managerial reframing of the humanities. His discussion of MOOCs makes the point concrete. Digital humanities should not be conflated with top-down online courseware or with the fantasy that platform delivery systems automatically renew education.

Instead, Jones presents DH as aligned with another educational ethos: collaborative, experimental, and hands-on. He associates it with labs, workshops, project-based learning, and the making of things—digital exhibits, textual platforms, scanned images, hybrid physical-digital objects, even prototypes involving sensors and microcontrollers. Crucially, he insists that this emphasis on making is not a retreat from theory. On the contrary, building can itself be theoretical when it probes the material conditions of media, reveals the assumptions embedded in platforms, or resists the ideology that the digital is somehow immaterial. The “hacker” disposition he attributes to some DH work is therefore not mere optimism. It is a pragmatic, interventionist stance that treats systems as contingent, modifiable, and interpretable rather than as magical black boxes.

His defense of that stance leads into a personal account of his own intellectual trajectory. Jones describes his earlier work on the Romantic Circles project and other digital textual environments, showing that he came to DH through textual scholarship, archives, and digital publication rather than through a cult of novelty. He also recounts the founding of Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities with George Thiruvathukal. That institutional story matters because it embodies his larger claim: the center deliberately joined textual studies with emerging computational practice, combining programming, HCI, markup, new media, book history, archives, and project-based collaboration. In other words, the field as he knows it is neither pure computing nor conventional literary study, but an organized encounter between them.

This leads Jones to one of the Introduction’s most important theoretical propositions: DH is fundamentally a mixed-reality arena. Its roots in textual and archival work mean that it has always dealt with physical artifacts on the one hand and digital representations or models on the other. For the DH scholar, research objects are never just things and never just data; they are things plus data, material artifacts saturated by metadata, framing, interpretation, and technical mediation. A manuscript, a printed book, or an ancient object becomes a research object through that hybridization. Digital humanities, then, is the place where such hybrid objects are not only studied but also made, modeled, and theorized. The field’s distinctiveness lies in taking that hybridity as both method and subject.

At the conceptual center of all this stands Gibson’s metaphor of eversion. Jones explains that when he encountered the idea in Spook Country, it gave him a way to recognize a pattern across otherwise disparate developments: social networks, smartphones, satellites, data maps, e-books, fabrication, and new academic practices. He is careful not to present this as paranoia or as a claim that everything is secretly connected. Rather, “eversion” functions as a powerful interpretive device that both reveals and organizes meaningful conjunctions. It names the process by which the digital network ceases to appear as a separate “space” and instead seems to unfold into the world of objects, places, and bodies. That, for Jones, is the condition from which the contemporary digital humanities emerged.

He closes by clarifying what the book is and what it is not. It is not a handbook, a neutral survey, or a final definition of DH. It is an extended argument about how new humanities questions and practices arise from the interweaving of digital and physical dimensions of experience. The chapters that follow are arranged accordingly: first the metaphors of eversion and dimensions, then the social, spatial, and object-centered aspects of the networked world, and finally DH’s experiments in publication and practice. The Introduction therefore does two jobs at once. It situates digital humanities historically within the transformations of the 2000s, and it frames the field conceptually as the humanities reoriented by a world in which the network has turned inside out. In Jones’s compact formulation, digital humanities becomes “the humanities everted.”

Chapter 1: “Eversion”

Jones opens the chapter by arguing that the old idea of cyberspace no longer explains how digital technology is experienced. In the 1980s and 1990s, cyberspace was imagined as an elsewhere: a distinct realm people entered from the ordinary physical world. By the early twenty-first century, however, that metaphor had become inadequate, because networked computation was no longer somewhere apart. It had moved into the grain of daily life.

His replacement term is eversion, borrowed from William Gibson. The word names a historical reversal: what once seemed inside the screen has turned outward into streets, bodies, devices, infrastructures, and habits. The network has not disappeared; it has become ambient. The decisive change is not that people stopped using digital systems, but that they stopped feeling they were entering a separate digital world when they used them.

Jones stresses that this is first of all a shift in cultural perception. Gibson’s original “cyberspace” was always a metaphor, not a literal destination, and eversion is a new metaphor for a new condition. The network is now experienced less as a transcendent zone and more as an invisible but ordinary support structure for everyday life. The disappearance of the language of “cyber” from common speech is therefore not trivial; it signals that the older fantasy of separateness has begun to collapse.

He notes that the word “cyber” lingers most visibly in domains such as war, national security, and social panic, where institutions still speak as though the digital were a separate arena that could be attacked, defended, or quarantined. That lingering vocabulary matters because it reveals resistance to acknowledging how fully digital systems and physical life have fused. Government language still often treats cyberspace as a distinct theatre, even as public testimony increasingly admits that networked systems form the internal skeleton of modern existence.

For Jones, one of the sharpest ways to grasp the change is Gibson’s inversion of “here” and “there.” In the past, the network was “there,” a place reached by connection. Now constant connectivity is “here,” while disconnection is what feels remote, strange, and exceptional. When Wi-Fi fails or a phone loses signal, what one experiences is not a return to reality but a sudden fall out of the contemporary real.

The chapter lingers on the word eversion itself because its connotations matter. The term suggests turning an inside surface outward, as in medical or surgical usage, and it also carries rhetorical implications of reversal. Jones uses that thickness of meaning to emphasize that the contemporary network is neither simply virtual nor simply physical. It is a layered condition in which data and material life are folded into one another.

To show that Gibson was not alone, Jones brings in Marcos Novak, who had already used the idea of eversion in the late 1990s to describe the outward spill of virtuality into ordinary space. Novak saw that “immersion” was not enough as a concept, because it only described entry into virtual environments, not the opposite movement by which digital logic reconfigured the physical world. Jones treats Novak as an early theorist of the same transition, even before smartphones and ubiquitous wireless access made the phenomenon obvious to ordinary users.

Jones then gives the transition a rough historical rhythm. He suggests that the decisive perceptual break occurred between about 2004 and 2008, when the dream of immersive virtual worlds began to lose cultural centrality just as mobile, locative, and socially networked technologies were becoming routine. Platforms such as Second Life briefly seemed to embody the future, but their importance faded at exactly the moment that the network’s actual future was moving outward into phones, GPS, wireless access, casual gaming, and everyday data exchange.

This periodization lets Jones contrast older fantasies of total immersion with newer forms of mixed reality. Even World of Warcraft, for all its scale and fantasy, was socially and technologically closer to networked communication than to classical virtual-reality dreams. At the same time, devices like the Nintendo Wii and the rapid growth of mobile computing made the body, the room, and the street newly central to digital experience. The screen no longer absorbed the world; the world became an interface.

Gibson’s novel Spook Country becomes a crucial literary marker for Jones because it stages a world in which locative art, GPS, mobile devices, and pervasive connectivity make the network something encountered in place. What matters in this fiction is not escape into a separate matrix but the saturation of ordinary environments by invisible data. Jones reads the novel as one of the clearest imaginative statements of eversion: the realization that “the other side of the screen” is not elsewhere but here.

He then broadens the argument by placing Gibson alongside media theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles, Adam Greenfield, Beth Coleman, Clay Shirky, and Nathan Jurgenson. These writers, from different disciplines, converge on the same perception: digital media should no longer be understood through a strict division between online and offline. Hayles describes a new phase in which virtual information overlays physical objects and locations; Greenfield calls it “everyware”; Jurgenson attacks “digital dualism” and argues for augmented reality as the actual condition of social life.

Jones’s point is not that these thinkers all say exactly the same thing, but that together they register a broad cultural transformation. The old ideology of cyberspace treated information as disembodied and digital life as detached from matter. The newer situation makes embodiment, infrastructure, geography, objects, and interfaces impossible to ignore. Networked culture has become worldly, physical, and entangled with institutions, logistics, and everyday behavior.

This change in the larger culture, Jones argues, forms the background for the rise of the new digital humanities. The field did not emerge in a vacuum, nor can it be explained simply as a rebranding of older humanities computing. It gained public prominence at the very moment when culture itself was rethinking the relation between data and the world. That historical coincidence matters because it helps explain why digital humanities began moving beyond text processing toward archives, platforms, maps, interfaces, code, media objects, and material systems.

Jones is careful not to caricature earlier humanities computing. He cites Roberto Busa to show that the field’s founding ambitions were already broad, even if textual analysis remained central. So his argument is not that old humanities computing was narrow and the new digital humanities is enlightened. It is that changing technological conditions altered the field’s emphases, priorities, and self-understanding.

One of the most important consequences of eversion, in his account, is the practical turn often associated with the slogan “more hack, less yack.” Jones refuses the simplistic idea that this turn was anti-theoretical or merely instrumental. Instead, he suggests that building, making, designing, coding, and working with platforms were often ways of responding intellectually to a world in which digital systems had become infrastructural, embodied, and materially consequential. Practice was not theory’s absence; it was theory under new historical pressure.

He also argues that the new digital humanities pushed back against what he elsewhere describes as the ideology of disembodiment. Much work in digital forensics, code studies, platform studies, game studies, GIS, data visualization, and distant reading did not ignore materiality; it made materiality newly legible. These approaches insisted that digital objects have substrates, histories, interfaces, institutions, and political implications. They challenged the fantasy that the digital is weightless, placeless, and immaterial.

From that angle, digital humanities appears less as a settled discipline than as a transitional formation. It sits between inherited humanistic work on artifacts, archives, and interpretation, and a world in which those same objects are increasingly tagged, encoded, networked, sensed, and transformed into rich data objects. Jones therefore proposes that digital humanities should help interpret and shape the continuing eversion, because the humanities has always dealt with layered cultural objects and their meanings. In his strongest formulation, digital humanities is not just about the eversion; it is the humanities everted.

The chapter’s final major move is to explain why video games are such important examples for the whole book. Games matter historically because they have long been part of computing culture and of digital humanities work, from experimental scholarly environments to preservation projects. But they also matter conceptually because they model the relationship between algorithmic systems, represented worlds, interfaces, and embodied users better than almost any other form of new media.

Jones uses games to attack the immersive fallacy, the mistaken idea that digital media are fundamentally about disappearing into a separate virtual realm. Drawing on game theorists Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, he argues that gameplay usually occurs at the boundary between player and system, not in the abolition of that boundary. Controllers, displays, menus, peripherals, co-present players, and room-scale movement all remind us that games are normally mixed-reality experiences. Players inhabit what Salen and Zimmerman call a hybrid consciousness: they are in the game and in the room at once.

The rise of casual gaming strengthens this argument. The Wii, and later Kinect, did not abolish mediation; they redistributed it into the living room, the body, and the social scene around the console. These systems “evert” gamespace by spreading play across screens, sensors, gestures, furniture, and people. Far from being a late deviation from true immersion, this mixed condition reveals something basic about games from the beginning.

Jones closes by generalizing from games back to digital culture and to digital humanities. All meaningful computation depends on human actors engaging systems at points of contact between data and the material world. The network does not turn itself inside out on its own; people enact the eversion through use, design, interpretation, and labor. That is why video games become exemplary, and why digital humanities matters: both operate in the channels where data meets objects, bodies, places, and social life.

Chapter 2: “Dimensions”

Chapter 2 argues that the old habit of imagining the digital network and the physical world as two separate realms no longer works. Steven E. Jones starts from the observation that people still talk as if online and offline were distinct “dimensions,” but that this metaphor has become unstable because the network now appears everywhere inside ordinary life. What once felt like a distant domain has become ambient, embedded, and difficult to isolate. The chapter’s central claim is that we are living through the exposure of that false divide: the digital has not remained elsewhere, but has everted into the material world.

Jones is careful not to say that people literally believed in two universes. His point is subtler: the separation once felt convincing, and that feeling shaped language, imagination, and culture. Now that the network is woven into streets, shops, workplaces, airports, and homes, the older metaphor becomes newly visible as metaphor. We notice the “breach” precisely because the boundary has become porous. This gives contemporary life a strange, often uncanny quality, as if hidden layers of information were suddenly surfacing in spaces we once treated as purely physical.

To explain that sensation, Jones turns to James Bridle and to science-fiction language. Bridle’s idea that the network is like “another dimension” matters less as a literal proposition than as a description of perception: the network is a perspective on the same world, one that had long remained partly unseen. Jones links this to William Gibson’s idea of eversion and to Lovecraftian imagery of inaccessible worlds lying right beside us. The result is a theory of mixed reality in which the digital does not replace the physical, but protrudes through it in signs, interfaces, and encounters that feel like momentary openings in the fabric of everyday life.

The chapter’s first sustained example is the QR code, which Jones treats as the most mundane and revealing emblem of interdimensional experience. QR codes are technically simple: matrix patterns that allow a smartphone camera to translate a physical mark into data, usually a URL. But their importance is not only functional. They sit on storefronts, flyers, signs, cups, packaging, and business cards as public-facing symbols of linkage. Unlike older barcodes used mainly for internal logistics, QR codes are addressed to passersby. They visibly mark the world as something that can be scanned, decoded, and connected to the network.

Jones stresses that QR codes are often clumsy, redundant, or faintly absurd. Many merely save the user from typing an address, and some point back to trivial or circular destinations. That practical thinness is exactly what makes them interesting. They behave less like robust tools than like talismans of connectedness, signs that announce the presence of data whether or not the data are especially meaningful. Their semiotic force exceeds their utility. A QR code says, above all, that an object, place, or surface has been recruited into the informational order.

This is why Jones lingers on apparently frivolous cases such as QR-code tattoos. A tattooed code is almost designed to become obsolete, and that is part of its meaning. The body receives a permanent inscription of a fleeting technological present. What matters is not efficiency but the friction between the durable flesh and the short lifespan of a digital convention. In that sense the tattoo makes explicit a tension that haunts the whole chapter: contemporary culture wants to stabilize links to data even while the systems and standards that carry those links are constantly changing.

The same logic appears in Jones’s discussion of artistic and architectural uses of QR codes. He notes projects that make the code mutate like Conway’s Game of Life, or that tile buildings with scannable surfaces, or that imagine a retail environment where augmented-reality devices instantly bridge shelves and databases. Such examples matter because they dramatize translation. A QR code is not just a square image; it is a protocol for moving from one register to another, from physical surface to encoded data and back to visual display. It rehearses, in miniature, the larger process by which the network becomes palpable in the world.

Jones’s most telling interpretation is that QR codes are “visible glitches” of eversion. They are crude, exposed, sometimes awkward expressions of a deeper cultural desire to bind matter and information together. His example of a QR code on a contractor’s van, accompanied by a pictogram instructing viewers to scan it, leads him to compare the whole thing to a message aimed at unknown intelligences. The code becomes a tiny act of transmission into the ether, addressed to whoever can decode it. In this reading, the banality of QR codes is precisely what makes them philosophically useful: they reveal the anxiety and ambition involved in translating between the physical and the digital.

From QR codes Jones moves to the New Aesthetic, the cluster of artists and designers associated above all with James Bridle. Here the argument shifts from explicit gateways to subtler signs of digital irruption. The New Aesthetic notices pixelation, glitches, drones, machine-readable forms, CAPTCHA tests, retro game imagery, and other artifacts that make the world look as though it had acquired the texture of computation. Jones accepts Bruce Sterling’s criticism that the movement could become a loose heap of curiosities, but he insists that its deeper importance lies in its sensitivity to something genuinely emerging.

For Jones, the New Aesthetic is not just a style but a way of naming the moment when the “grain of the virtual” shows up in ordinary reality. Works like Kelly Goeller’s Pixel Pour, in which a street pipe seems to spill pixelated water onto a sidewalk, matter because they stage the digital as if it were leaking into the physical world. The illusion is made of ordinary materials, yet what it communicates is the feeling that digital forms have begun to extrude into shared space. These works are metaphors made visible. They do not prove that there was ever a separate cyberspace, but they capture the sensation of living where that old fantasy is being reworked into mixed reality.

Games, Jones argues, provide an even richer laboratory for this problem because games have always been explicit about constructing worlds. Video-game history can be described, in one simplified sense, as a movement through dimensions: from linear text adventures to 2D spaces, then to 3D environments and hybrid forms. Game designers therefore think about dimension not just as metaphor but as design constraint and possibility. When contemporary games foreground dimensional switching, they are not inventing the issue from nothing; they are making conscious a problem that has long structured digital media.

This is why Jones spends so much time on platformers and art games such as Braid, Fez, Portal, and the then-emerging Miegakure. In these works, dimensions are not background assumptions but playable mechanics. Portal turns folded space into the core logic of movement. Miegakure imagines what it would mean to navigate a fourth spatial dimension. Mainstream Nintendo titles such as Super Paper Mario and Super Mario Galaxy likewise play with shifts in viewpoint, gravity, and world-structure. Jones reads all of them as procedural thought experiments about what happens when one layer of reality becomes accessible from another.

His reading of Braid emphasizes time as the crucial extra dimension. At first the game looks like a refined variation on Mario-style platforming, but its rewind mechanic slowly acquires philosophical and narrative weight. The player’s ability to reverse time alters not only puzzle-solving but moral perspective. By the end, the game reveals that the apparent rescue plot has been misread, and that the player-character may be the threatening figure rather than the hero. Jones treats this as a powerful example of multidimensional meaning: the same sequence of actions becomes legible in radically different ways once temporal direction is reversed.

Fez, by contrast, centers on spatial perspective. Its world appears at first as a charming 2D platform environment, but the magic fez allows the player to rotate the world, exposing hidden passages, relationships, and structures. Jones reads this mechanic as a model of how contemporary culture is learning to perceive hidden dimensions of mediated reality. The game’s glitches, reboots, cubes, and fragmentary cosmology all suggest that the world is a computational construct that periodically reveals its own instability. Yet Jones never reduces Fez to allegory alone; he insists that its procedural form itself teaches the player to think through dimensionality by making perspective shifts actionable.

At this point the chapter broadens from games to literature and speculative fiction. Jones aligns these games with works such as Flatland, House of Leaves, Against the Day, 1Q84, and The City & The City, as well as with the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. The common thread is not simply fantasy or parallel worlds, but the paradox of overlapping realities occupying the same space. Lovecraft becomes especially important because his descriptions of weird geometry and hidden entities brushing against ordinary life offer Jones a ready-made vocabulary for the eversion of the network. What once seemed like gothic horror becomes, in his hands, a metaphor for augmented, layered, data-saturated environments.

That literary turn leads directly into Jones’s account of digital texts and digital humanities. He argues that games and DH are closer than the field sometimes admits, because both confront complex digital objects and ask how meaning emerges from layered systems. Digitization, in his view, should never be understood as mere transcription. To digitize a text seriously is to port it into a new mode of existence, one in which metadata, markup, interface, searchability, visualization, and database structures expose dimensions that were latent but less accessible in print. The digital humanities matters here not because it abolishes reading, but because it multiplies the angles from which texts can be read.

Jones relies heavily on Jerome McGann to make this point. McGann’s argument that literary works are multidimensional allows Jones to claim that scholarly digitization ought to reveal linguistic, graphical, documentary, rhetorical, semiotic, and social dimensions rather than flatten texts into mere lexical strings. He presents the role-playing project Ivanhoe as a striking example: instead of treating interpretation as a commentary external to the text, the project turns interpretation into collaborative play. Meaning emerges through moves, rewritings, visualizations, and tracked interventions. The result is a model of textual scholarship that is dynamic, performative, and explicitly shaped by interface.

The chapter then turns to the debate over quantitative methods in the humanities. Jones takes seriously Johanna Drucker’s warning that humanistic interpretation cannot be reduced to scientific visualization or positivist certainty. But he does not accept a simple opposition between numbers and interpretation. Through figures such as Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, and Ted Underwood, he argues for a feedback loop between macro and micro scales. Distant reading, topic modeling, graphs, and large corpora do not replace close reading; they reveal hidden patterns that call for new acts of interpretation. In this sense, quantitative work is another way of making textual dimensions visible.

Jones reinforces that claim with Steven Johnson’s idea of the “long zoom,” a cultural habit of moving across radically different scales. He finds that sensibility not only in Google Maps and film, but in games such as Spore, where gameplay repeatedly zooms outward from cell to creature to civilization to space, and in Minecraft, whose blocky, procedural world combines local making with vast generated space. Both games are important not only as representations of dimensional play but as platforms for user-generated content, data sharing, and procedural world-building. They demonstrate how digital systems make worlds by linking local acts to networked structures.

The chapter closes by defending metaphor itself. Jones agrees that “cyberspace” was never literally another world, but he refuses the easy conclusion that dimensional language was therefore meaningless. For him, such metaphors register real conceptual struggles, real ambivalences, and real shifts in perception. The problem is not that people were foolish to imagine another dimension; it is that they needed a language for the layered relation between data and matter before that relation had become fully visible. Even now, he suggests, we are still learning how to see what surrounds us.

That is why the final gesture of the chapter is toward the task of the new digital humanities. Its role is not merely technical, and not merely academic. It is to help build the perceptual and interpretive frameworks through which people can understand a world increasingly organized by hidden layers of code, metadata, interfaces, and networked connection. “Dimensions,” then, is not just a chapter about gadgets, games, or textual methods. It is a theory of cultural perception in the age of eversion: a claim that the humanities must learn to read the world as a layered, mixed, multidimensional environment whose structures are no longer elsewhere, but here.

Chapter 3: “People”

Chapter 3 argues that the decisive change in the networked world is not simply technical. It is conceptual and social. Steven E. Jones begins from the contrast between the old dream of cyberspace and the contemporary experience of the Internet. In the older imagination, especially the one crystallized by William Gibson, cyberspace appeared as a sublime, abstract, almost empty realm of data. In the newer reality, the network is crowded, shaped by constant human presence, and dependent on millions of ordinary acts of participation. For Jones, this shift matters because it helps define what the digital humanities actually are and what kind of world they belong to.

Jones opens with Gibson’s famous image of cyberspace as a vast field of abstract data, shared by billions but strangely devoid of actual social life. He emphasizes the oddness of that image in retrospect. Even though Gibson described a space accessed by many operators, the space itself felt impersonal, almost empty of human exchange. That emptiness became one of the central myths of the 1990s digital imagination. Cyberspace was pictured as an elsewhere, detached from bodies, places, and ordinary social relations.

Against that model, Jones insists that the Internet as most people now know it is fundamentally social. The rise of Web 2.0, social platforms, cloud services, and everyday online interaction pushed attention away from the fantasy of escape into a separate realm and toward the fact that the network is built from visible, continuous human involvement. He is careful not to romanticize this development. Sociality can be exploited, harvested, monetized, and trivialized. Still, the basic point stands: the network is not merely used by people; in a meaningful sense, it is made out of their presence, labor, and interactions.

To show how deep this dependence on human participation runs, Jones turns to CAPTCHAs. At first glance they seem like a small annoyance of online life, but he treats them as a revealing micro-example. A CAPTCHA is a reverse Turing test: instead of a human trying to determine whether a machine is intelligent, a machine asks a human to prove that they are not a bot. That ordinary action, repeated millions of times, becomes a vivid instance of how the digital system depends on human recognition, judgment, and perception.

His discussion becomes sharper with reCAPTCHA. Here, human effort is not merely a gatekeeping procedure; it is redirected into productive labor. The user who deciphers a distorted word is also helping correct OCR failures in digitized texts. In other words, the same act that permits entry into the network also improves the network’s textual archive. Jones treats this as a compact model of “human computation”: a system in which machine limits are supplemented by human intelligence. The promise of pure automation, he suggests, has been overstated. Behind supposedly autonomous digital systems, human labor remains indispensable.

This observation leads Jones to a broader historical correction. Even in the early days of the Internet, actual use was social. Bulletin board systems, MUDs, IRC, and Usenet all depended on interaction with other people, often at a thrilling distance. Yet the dominant concept of cyberspace downplayed that reality. The network was imagined as the territory of isolated hackers, abstract data structures, and disembodied intelligence. The real social life of the early Internet existed, but the ideology built around it obscured that fact.

The chapter’s central case study is Agrippa (1992), the multimedia artwork created by William Gibson, Dennis Ashbaugh, and Kevin Begos Jr. Jones chooses it because it sits at a hinge moment between the pre-Web network and the public Internet that would follow. Agrippa included a poem by Gibson embedded not as print but as a floppy disk inside an artist’s book. The poem was designed to encrypt itself as it was read, disappearing after a single viewing. At the time, this made the work seem like a perfect emblem of digital ephemerality and immateriality.

Jones reconstructs the original aura around Agrippa with care. The poem appeared to detach itself from the book, dissolve into electronic form, and then leak into the network like contraband information. The rumor that hackers had cracked strong encryption only reinforced the sense that the digital text had been liberated from its physical shell. Within the intellectual climate of the early 1990s, this looked like proof that digital culture was defined by disembodiment, fluidity, and escape from material limits.

The force of Jones’s argument comes from showing that this interpretation was wrong. Drawing on Matthew Kirschenbaum’s forensic work and on The Agrippa Files, he explains that the so-called hack was not a magical triumph of immaterial code over matter. It was a mundane, mixed-media operation. The public “Transmission” of the poem was projected in New York using improvised equipment; the scrolling text was secretly videotaped; later, the poem was manually transcribed from the tape into plain text and circulated online. What had been mythologized as a cybernetic liberation turned out to be a low-tech, social, and thoroughly material process.

For Jones, this changes the meaning of Agrippa entirely. The artwork is no longer best understood as a parable of digital disappearance. It becomes an example of layered materiality and distributed social action. The physical book, the floppy disk, the live performance, the camera recording, the hand transcription, the bulletin boards, the archives, and the later emulations all belong to the work. Its history reveals that digital objects never float free of substrates, procedures, institutions, and people. In that sense, Agrippa becomes a perfect demonstration of what the ideology of cyberspace had concealed.

Jones then extracts a larger lesson from the case. The network, he argues, is material, located, and social. It is material because it always depends on hardware, signals, storage media, and infrastructures. It is located because it links specific machines, archives, places, and embodied users rather than opening onto some placeless ether. And it is social because the network ultimately consists of relationships among people as much as among machines. These three claims give Jones a compact way of redefining digital culture after the age of cyberspace fantasy.

From there, he shifts to games. Kevin Begos had remarked that the real experimentation once expected from books now seemed to be happening in the world of games. Jones agrees, but with a twist: he argues that Agrippa was already game-adjacent from the beginning. Gibson’s own original idea of cyberspace had been shaped by arcade culture. More broadly, the media ecology around Agrippa—with its disk, packaging, constraints, and challenge structure—resembled the logic of games more than traditional literary publication.

He develops this point through interactive fiction and the culture of “feelies,” the physical objects packaged with games in the 1980s. Such materials were not decorative extras. They deepened immersion, supported world-building, and sometimes even functioned as copy protection. Seen from that angle, Agrippa resembles a high-art boxed game: a physical artifact that organizes access to digital content while making tangibility part of the experience. The supposedly immaterial digital object thus appears, once again, as inseparable from touchable things.

Jones extends the comparison to early hypertext and CD-ROM culture. Works published by Voyager and Eastgate in the late 1980s and early 1990s mixed text, image, sound, interface, and physical packaging in ways that critics often dismissed as turning literature into videogames. Jones’s response is blunt: in one sense, those critics were right. These works were exploring the gamelike affordances of textual media. They belonged to a transitional mixed-media moment in which books, disks, screens, software, and embodied interaction overlapped rather than remaining cleanly separate.

His example of Myst sharpens this claim. The game is obsessed with books, portals, and hybrid objects that combine codex imagery with digital transport. It stages, inside its own fiction, the awkward embedding of the digital inside the symbolic shell of the printed book. Jones treats Myst and Agrippa as sibling artifacts of the same historical moment. Both reveal a culture trying to figure out how physical and digital media could coexist, and both show that the “magic circle” of play is never sealed off from the social world around it.

The chapter then returns to digitization itself. Jones rejects the popular metaphor that digitization means dematerialization, as though books were vaporized into pure information and shipped off to the cloud. Digital humanities practitioners know better. In practice, digitization is recursive, layered, and full of back-and-forth exchanges between physical originals, scanners, OCR, databases, editors, readers, and interfaces. The digital copy does not abolish the material artifact; it generates new relations to it and often requires repeated returns to it.

This part of the chapter focuses on the crowd as a scholarly resource. Jones reviews the move from Project Gutenberg to Google Books and then to digital humanities initiatives shaped by large corpora and large-scale correction. Gregory Crane’s question about what to do with a million books matters because raw image scans and faulty OCR are not enough. Search, analysis, and genuine research require better text. That need has encouraged systems in which machines do initial capture and humans perform correction, annotation, and refinement.

Laura Mandell’s TypeWright, Martin Mueller’s idea of collaborative curation, and the Transcribe Bentham project all exemplify this logic. For Jones, the point is not that expertise disappears into the crowd. The point is that labor is redistributed intelligently. Some tasks can be handled by many non-specialists; others require trained scholars; still others are best done by machines. Digital humanities becomes, in this model, a practical arrangement of human and machine capacities. Its characteristic form is neither solitary interpretation nor blind automation, but structured cooperation.

The final movement of the chapter returns to games through alternate reality games and “games with a purpose.” Jane McGonigal’s I Love Bees and Find the Future show how play can mobilize collective intelligence across digital and physical space. Foldit, the ESP Game, and other crowd-based systems demonstrate that game structures can be used to generate metadata, solve scientific problems, and enrich archives. Jones stresses that what matters is not superficial gamification but cooperative competition: forms of engagement in which people, software, rules, and designed environments jointly produce meaning.

That is why the chapter ends by bringing everything together. Solving a CAPTCHA, tagging an image, transcribing Bentham, playing Mario Kart, participating in an ARG, or reconstructing the code of Agrippa all reveal the same underlying structure: human and machine intelligences operating together across material systems. The 2012 collaborative cracking of the Agrippa code functions as a coda because it restages the work as open, collective, and scholarly rather than mystical. Jones’s final claim is that this hybrid, recursive, crowd-aware model is not peripheral to the digital humanities. It is close to their best definition.

Chapter 4: “Places”

Chapter 4 argues that one of the most important shifts in digital culture has been the move from imagining the Internet as a separate, immaterial “cyberspace” to experiencing it as something anchored in the physical world through location. Steven E. Jones presents mapping technologies as one of the clearest signs of this transformation. GPS, Google Maps, Google Earth, and location-aware mobile devices do not simply help users navigate; they change how culture understands networks, space, and presence. In his account, the rise of geolocation is one of the material foundations of what he calls the “eversion” of cyberspace, the turning inside out of the digital so that it saturates everyday reality rather than standing apart from it.

The chapter begins by emphasizing how ordinary location-based interfaces have become. Pins, flags, check-ins, route suggestions, satellite images, and data-rich maps are now so familiar that it is difficult to remember how recent this condition is. Jones ties this familiarity to a decisive technical and political shift: the release of more accurate GPS signals for civilian use after selective availability was turned off in 2000. That change, followed by the rapid development of services such as Google Maps and Google Earth, made location not just a specialist tool but a mass cultural framework. The result was not merely better navigation. It was a reorganization of digital experience around place.

Jones is careful to demystify GPS. He argues that most people still imagine it as a nearly magical satellite system that looks down from above and tells them where they are, but the reality is far more distributed and grounded. GPS works through a mesh of satellites, terrestrial monitoring stations, phone hardware, wireless networks, cell towers, servers, and constantly updated databases. A smartphone locating itself is not simply receiving a pure signal from space. It is negotiating among different infrastructures and combining several streams of information. In this sense, geolocation becomes a model for understanding the network itself: complex, layered, hybrid, and deeply embedded in the material world.

This demystification matters because it breaks the old fantasy of the digital as placeless. Jones shows that even the blue dot on a map is the visible endpoint of a long chain of earthly systems, institutions, and labor. Assisted GPS, cached Wi-Fi data, cell-tower triangulation, and crowd-generated map corrections all demonstrate that location is produced collaboratively and provisionally. The network is not floating above reality. It is stitched into roads, antennas, devices, databases, and everyday movement. By stressing this, Jones reframes geolocation as a key example of how the digital humanities should think: not in terms of disembodied information, but in terms of data always tied to places, infrastructures, and human practices.

From there, the chapter moves into a literary and cultural history of locative imagination. Jones uses Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash to show how the early 1990s still conceived digital experience primarily as immersion in a separate virtual realm. In that novel, the Metaverse includes a floating Earth interface, a spectacular digital object used from within virtual reality. Jones notes the historical irony that this fictional interface helped inspire Keyhole’s EarthViewer 3D, which later became Google Earth. Yet the key difference is decisive: Stephenson’s character uses Earth while logged into a virtual world, whereas actual users employ Google Earth and Google Maps in relation to the physical world around them. The center of gravity has shifted from virtual enclosure to geographic embedding.

Jones treats that difference as a marker of a broader cultural transition. He points to attempts to recreate Google-Earth-like experiences inside Second Life, but he sees these as exceptions rather than the main trajectory of digital culture. The dominant use of mapping technologies is not to enrich virtual worlds from within; it is to navigate, annotate, search, and interpret the real world through networked devices. That inversion matters because it shows that digital systems no longer gain cultural force chiefly by inviting people to escape reality. Instead, they gain force by layering information onto reality, making the physical world itself searchable, mappable, and computationally legible.

This is why Jones contrasts two science-fiction trajectories. In Ready Player One, he sees a nostalgic revival of the old cyberspace fantasy: a damaged real world from which people flee into a fully immersive online universe. Even when the novel criticizes that condition, it still depends on a rigid split between online life and real life. Jones reads details such as the book’s “dichotomy wear” as a symptom of digital dualism, the assumption that the two worlds remain fundamentally separate. The critique never really escapes the framework because it continues to treat immersion as the central destiny of digital media.

By contrast, Stephenson’s later novel Reamde is, for Jones, a more accurate narrative of the contemporary moment. Although it includes a massively multiplayer game world, the real action unfolds across borders, roads, safe houses, airports, internet cafés, GPS devices, surveillance systems, and communication networks. The game and the world constantly interact, but neither replaces the other. What matters is movement across thresholds, the practical geography of infrastructure, and the friction between digital systems and material environments. Jones sees in Reamde a literary recognition that networks are no longer best imagined as pure virtuality; they are bound up with terrain, logistics, and the ordinary constraints of Earth.

The same point is reinforced through Stephenson’s 1996 Wired essay “Mother Earth Mother Board” and Andrew Blum’s later book Tubes. Both works insist that the Internet is physical: cables, routers, landing stations, manholes, business deals, and political arrangements. Jones highlights Stephenson’s ironic reversal of the old cyber rhetoric. Instead of letting cyberspace dematerialize the world, he makes wires re-materialize cyberspace. Blum carries that logic forward by insisting that the Internet is always somewhere. For Jones, this is not just a technological observation. It is a conceptual correction with major implications for how scholars should think about networks, history, and culture.

The chapter then pivots to games, because games make visible the tight relationship between maps, data, and spatial awareness. Jones argues that games have always involved a form of orienteering. Whether in tabletop games, text adventures, fantasy books, or open-world video games, players navigate model worlds by combining environmental perception with abstract information. Maps are not secondary decorations. They are part of how a world becomes playable. In this sense, games have long trained users in the mental habits required by locative media: reading terrain, interpreting symbols, switching between immersive perspective and abstract overview.

His main example is Skyrim, whose expansive world and navigational systems illustrate how contemporary game spaces resemble digital cartography. Jones notes that fan communities created interactive Skyrim maps using the Google Maps API, and that official companion apps let players use phones or tablets as live navigational aids during play. The significance is not that the real world has become a game in some simplistic way. Rather, games have begun to imitate the mapped, data-rich world that people now inhabit through Google-style interfaces. The visual and cognitive conventions of everyday geolocation and modern game navigation increasingly mirror one another.

Jones extends that insight through geocaching, Munzee, alternate-reality games, and augmented-reality art. All of these practices turn navigation itself into play. They transform the act of moving through physical space into a game of discovery, capture, or interpretation. For Jones, this makes clear that maps are fundamentally about the layering of data onto worlds. A game is a world-model plus rules and information; a map is a world-model plus coordinates, labels, and interpretable signs. Both depend on the user’s ability to inhabit two frames at once: the embodied experience of moving through a world and the abstract system that describes it.

That duality leads Jones into the chapter’s explicit digital-humanities argument. Drawing on Jason Farman, Edward Tufte, and Franco Moretti, he presents maps as long-standing cultural technologies that combine representation and data. Moretti’s importance here is methodological. Maps can reveal patterns that ordinary reading cannot easily detect, because they abstract, reduce, and reconfigure literary or historical materials in ways that generate new questions. Jones endorses that logic but presses it in a distinctly material direction. Mapping is not only a way of visualizing texts. It is a way of reconnecting humanities inquiry to the physical substrates—territory, transit, demography, institutions, climate, built space—within which culture happens.

He therefore describes the spatial turn in the humanities as something more than a change in metaphor. Early talk of borders, margins, crossroads, and centers often remained figurative. What matters in the newer work, Jones argues, is a movement toward place-linked data and toward models that take geography seriously as a material condition. Globalization, paradoxically, has not made place irrelevant. It has made place newly visible as a site where data, movement, institutions, and everyday life intersect. GIS and related tools enable scholars to treat place not as backdrop but as a dynamic analytical field.

The comparison between Virtual Harlem and Digital Harlem is the chapter’s most sustained case study of that shift. Virtual Harlem began in the late 1990s as an immersive reconstruction of the neighborhood during the Harlem Renaissance. Users could move through modeled streets, hear music, encounter buildings associated with writers and performers, and, at one stage, imagine the project becoming a kind of visual historical database. Jones treats it with respect as an ambitious and genuinely innovative experiment from an earlier era of humanities computing, one aligned with the dream of immersion and with the expensive institutional infrastructure of VR.

Yet Jones also shows the limits of that paradigm. The project’s later version inside Second Life carried traces of community and historical layering, but it also felt empty and ghostly, in part because platforms built for avatar-based social interaction depend on sustained live participation. Immersion alone does not guarantee durable scholarly usefulness. By contrast, Digital Harlem chose a less spectacular but more analytically powerful form: maps, overlays, document archives, and databases tied to actual street addresses. What began as a supposedly temporary use of Google Maps became, in Jones’s telling, a turning point. It demonstrated that the geospatial web and accessible GIS tools could support serious historical interpretation more effectively than elaborate virtual reconstruction.

This contrast lets Jones make a broader claim about the emergence of the digital humanities itself. Around the mid-2000s, the combination of APIs, open-source tools, off-the-shelf platforms, accessible GIS, and mobile mapping created a new scholarly environment. Instead of building entire worlds from scratch, researchers could recombine existing services, attach their own data, publish to wider publics, and experiment iteratively. That technical shift favored a different intellectual style as well: less total simulation, more layered interpretation; less fascination with virtual presence, more interest in networks, archives, evidence, and material context. In Jones’s view, that is one of the defining conditions under which the “new” digital humanities took shape.

The chapter reinforces this point through examples such as Neatline and Ryan Cordell’s mapping of the publication history of Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad.” These projects use maps not as illustrations but as exploratory instruments. By layering timelines, archives, demographic information, transport routes, and publication data, they uncover patterns in circulation and reception that would otherwise remain obscure. Jones emphasizes that this work is often qualitative in aim even when it relies on quantification and abstraction. What matters is not data for its own sake, but the way mapped data can generate historically meaningful questions and make interpretation more rigorous.

Finally, Jones turns to Mark Sample’s Haunts and to William Gibson’s Spook Country to describe the cultural logic of locative media as a form of haunting. In these examples, digital layers attached to physical places make hidden histories appear in situ. A street corner can hold an invisible archive until a device, platform, or artwork calls it forth. Jones treats “haunting” as a metaphor parallel to “eversion”: both describe the experience of encountering digital structures not in a separate realm but at the seam where information crosses into ordinary space. The digital is felt as a presence in the world, not an elsewhere beyond it.

The chapter ends by insisting that this geolocative condition is also a model for digital humanities collaboration. Locative art in Gibson’s fiction requires artists, programmers, and system hackers working together, just as digital humanities projects usually join technical expertise with cultural interpretation. That final analogy matters. For Jones, Chapter 4 is not only about maps or GPS. It is about a new epistemic and institutional condition in which place, data, infrastructure, design, scholarship, and play converge. “Places” is therefore one of the key chapters in the book’s larger argument, because it shows that once cyberspace is everted, the humanities must learn to read the world itself as layered, networked, and computationally augmented.

Chapter 5: “Things”

Chapter 5 argues that one of the clearest consequences of the “eversion” of cyberspace is that ordinary objects are no longer merely physical objects. They increasingly exist as hybrid entities: things wrapped in data, tagged, tracked, and made legible to networks. Jones opens by showing that the world around us is turning into an environment of data-bearing objects, from RFID-tagged goods to QR-coded items and machine-readable serial numbers. In that sense, the Internet of Things is not just a technical development but a cultural condition. It reveals that the network is not floating above material life. It is embedded in objects, and objects now circulate through the world as both matter and information.

To explain this shift, Jones turns to the history of tagging technologies. Barcodes were an early step, but RFID made the transformation much more decisive because objects could now broadcast identity and location without direct human intervention. He uses Kevin Ashton’s language about the Internet of Things to show how, even in the late 2000s, it still felt necessary to insist against the old cyberculture fantasy that the digital was somehow more real or important than the material. Jones treats that insistence as historically revealing: the ideology of cyberspace had been so powerful that even obvious facts about material objects had to be restated.

From there, the chapter moves to Bruce Sterling’s concept of the spime. A spime is not just a gadget with software inside it. It is an object whose full lifecycle can be tracked, mined, and understood through the data attached to it. What matters is not only what the object is at a given moment, but the history of extraction, manufacture, circulation, use, repair, and disposal that becomes visible through metadata and networked records. Jones emphasizes Sterling’s larger point that a thing is best understood as a condensed technosocial process rather than a mute chunk of matter. The meaning of the object is inseparable from the relations that produce and follow it.

Jones then distinguishes the Internet of Things from the older dream of the “smart house.” The smart house imagined a fixed environment full of embedded intelligence: appliances and rooms pre-scripted to react to occupants. The Internet of Things, by contrast, is more modular, flexible, and distributed. Instead of one centralized, theatrical “intelligent” setting, it depends on cheap sensors, small processors, open standards, and network protocols that let many different things connect. That difference matters because it shifts attention away from singular large machines and toward a world of many interoperable, low-cost, data-generating objects. The model is less a totalizing futuristic house than a reconfigurable ecology of tagged things.

At that point, Jones asks the key humanities question: why should any of this matter to humanists? His answer is that the humanities have always been, at base, disciplines of things. However abstract their arguments may become, they depend on material artifacts: manuscripts, books, paintings, instruments, monuments, archives, and every other physical trace that carries culture through time. Humanists have long argued about authenticity, provenance, preservation, and interpretation because they already work at the level of material objects. The Internet of Things therefore does not bring matter into the humanities from outside. It intensifies a material problem the humanities have always confronted.

The chapter then deepens its theoretical frame through Bill Brown’s Thing Theory. Brown distinguishes between objects as entities we organize and use, and “things” as what exceeds our conceptual control. Jones uses this distinction to argue that the humanities can learn from the stubborn opacity of things. A thing is not exhausted by the meaning we assign to it. It has a remainder, a dimension that resists being reduced to an instrument for human purposes. This makes material culture intellectually productive precisely because it interrupts the easy sovereignty of the interpreting subject.

Jones places this line of thought alongside Marxist and Frankfurt School traditions, especially the attention Walter Benjamin gave to everyday commodities and the urban object-world of modernity. Looking at mundane things is politically and intellectually important because it challenges idealist histories that privilege ideas over conditions, abstractions over artifacts, and elites over ordinary life. The material object can anchor a different kind of history: one attentive to surfaces, infrastructures, and minor forms of experience. At the same time, Jones shows that the turn to things is not only political. It also enlarges the range of what counts as a legitimate object of humanistic inquiry.

From there, the chapter moves into speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. Jones introduces thinkers such as Levi Bryant and Ian Bogost to show a more radical attempt to decenter the human altogether. In this view, reality is not organized around human perception. Objects exist on their own terms, alongside countless other beings and systems, whether natural, technical, fictional, or abstract. Jones is interested in this move because it pushes the humanities beyond a purely subject-centered framework. Once things are granted their own ontological weight, the humanities must reckon with worlds that are not simply arranged for human interpretation.

Ian Bogost becomes especially important in the chapter because he offers not just a philosophy but a method. His “alien phenomenology” asks what it might mean to approach the world from the standpoint of things, while his idea of carpentry turns fabrication into argument. Instead of writing only about objects, one can make artifacts that expose how objects structure experience. Jones treats this as a powerful model for digital humanities work because it collapses the boundary between theory and making. A designed artifact, a game, a script, or a device can itself become a mode of philosophical and humanistic inquiry.

Bogost’s A Slow Year gives Jones a concrete example of this principle. The work mixes minimalist Atari games, generated poetry, code, and book form in a deliberately hybrid publication. Its point is not technical novelty for its own sake. Rather, it slows perception down and forces attention onto small objects, temporal rhythms, and machine-mediated acts of observation. Jones reads it as exemplary of a digital humanities attentive to thingness: not a humanities that simply digitizes content, but one that uses digital forms to think through how humans, machines, and objects co-constitute experience.

This leads to one of the chapter’s central claims: digital things are not immaterial. Jones draws on Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work with born-digital materials to insist that computers only create the illusion of immateriality. Files, interfaces, and networked objects always depend on physical media, hardware, storage systems, signal paths, and machine conditions. For Jones, this is a crucial corrective. The task of the digital humanities is not merely to move cultural objects into the digital realm, but to understand how “thingness” persists there and how digital objects must themselves be preserved, interpreted, and historicized as artifacts.

Jones then broadens the argument from interpretation to practice. He recalls the history of humanities computing, from punch-card concordances to SGML, TEI, HTML, XML, and digital archives, and argues that the newer digital humanities has expanded the repertoire of scholarly making. Scholars do not only write articles and monographs. They also encode texts, build databases, design tools, create platforms, and assemble digital collections. What is new is that this making has become more self-conscious, experimental, and theoretically loaded. It increasingly resembles design fiction or Bogost’s carpentry: making as a way of thinking.

The chapter locates this practical energy in spaces such as THATCamp and in the broader Maker movement. Jones stresses that DH experimentation often now includes hardware as well as software: Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, LEDs, sensors, circuits, wearables, and hacked devices. He treats this not as a distraction from humanistic work but as evidence that the field has absorbed the lesson of eversion. If the digital now inhabits physical space and physical objects, then scholarly engagement with code alone is insufficient. One must also engage the material interfaces, sensors, and infrastructures through which digital culture is built and felt.

Limor Fried and Adafruit become exemplary figures in this part of the chapter. Fried represents a maker ethos in which technical experimentation is educational, open, and interdisciplinary. Jones highlights the surprising fact that artists were often as excited as engineers by device hacks such as those involving the Kinect. That matters because it shows how technical objects can become shared cultural media. Fried’s own devices for interrupting public screens or locally blocking wireless signals also reveal another strand in Jones’s argument: small-scale making can be critical, performative, and even oppositional. Hardware experiments can function as thought experiments about power, space, and technological intrusion.

Anthony Dunne’s concept of Hertzian space sharpens this insight. Dunne argues that the electromagnetic environment in which we live is physical, even if it is mostly invisible. Jones uses that idea to push against the old vocabulary of “dematerialization.” Electronic objects do not disappear into pure software. They become hybrids of matter and radiation. This is why the figure of the transducer matters so much in the chapter. A transducer converts one form of energy into another, and Jones turns it into a master metaphor for the present: the contemporary world is organized by repeated passages between signal and object, code and surface, network and artifact.

William Turkel helps Jones translate that metaphor directly into digital humanities method. Turkel argues that scholars should think less in terms of digitization and more in terms of transduction. A manuscript, artifact, or image is not annihilated when digitized; rather, its existing data shadow is captured, extended, transformed, and recirculated. Just as important, the process can move in both directions, from analog to digital and back again. Jones adopts this view because it keeps the original artifact in play while also recognizing that its surrogates, metadata, and interfaces are real parts of its historical existence. DH, on this account, studies and participates in the two-way traffic between matter and data.

The final third of the chapter turns to video games as the most vivid popular expression of these ideas. Jones discusses the Open Kinect project, the hacker culture around Microsoft’s sensor device, and the broader design lineage connecting Kinect, the Wii, the Nintendo 3DS, and the Wii U. His point is that these systems do not make objects disappear. On the contrary, they multiply and foreground them. Controllers, cameras, LEDs, accelerometers, cartridges, tagged cards, and handheld screens form distributed constellations in physical space. Gameplay no longer occurs only “inside” a machine or on a screen; it spills into rooms, gestures, tables, and social arrangements.

The culmination of the chapter is Jones’s reading of Skylanders. He treats the game as a near-perfect allegory of eversion because collectible figurines circulate back and forth across the boundary between plastic toy and digital character. Place the figure on the Portal of Power and it comes alive on-screen; remove it and it returns to being an object in the hand. But the toy also stores data, accumulates history, travels across platforms, and participates in a larger ecology of cards, QR codes, posters, portals, consoles, mobile apps, and online worlds. Skylanders is not merely a children’s franchise. It is a cultural model of how objects now function: tagged, persistent, mobile, and active across physical and digital domains.

Jones strengthens that reading by linking Skylanders to 3D printing, maker culture, and personal fabrication. The figurines themselves emerge from digital models turned into physical prototypes through fabrication processes that mirror the game’s own logic of moving between software and object. He then notes how similar principles appear in Disney Infinity and other mixed-reality systems. The larger conclusion is clear: contemporary culture is increasingly organized around repeated acts of conversion between physical and digital forms. That is why video games matter so much here. They are not marginal entertainments but one of the richest everyday laboratories for understanding the new relation among things, data, design, and human meaning.

The chapter closes by folding this insight back into the mission of the digital humanities. If today’s world is composed of layered things—objects saturated with metadata, interfaces, histories, and networked affordances—then the humanities need methods equal to that complexity. They must interpret artifacts, preserve born-digital materials, build new tools, study infrastructures, and take seriously popular media such as games as sites where contemporary ontology becomes visible. Chapter 5 therefore makes a strong claim: the digital humanities is not merely about texts on screens. It is a field called to study, and often to make, the hybrid things through which culture now happens.

Chapter 6: “Publications”

Chapter 6 argues that one of the most revealing subjects for digital humanities is publishing itself. Jones treats the field as unusually well placed to examine the conditions of its own production, because digital humanists do not merely consume scholarship in digital form; they build archives, encode texts, design interfaces, create metadata systems, and experiment with platforms for circulation and discussion. For that reason, publishing is not presented here as a secondary issue, but as a core intellectual problem. The chapter asks what it means for the humanities to become public through digital systems, and how that question changes once publication is understood as a process shaped by platforms rather than as a finished object resting on the authority of print.

To sharpen that point, Jones contrasts the humanities with the sciences. In scientific fields, preprints, repositories, rapid circulation, collaborative authorship, and ongoing public discussion had already become normal long before most humanities disciplines began to change their publishing habits. The humanities, by contrast, still largely depended on the slow model of the single-author article or monograph, filtered through peer review and delivered through journals or university presses after a long delay. Digital humanities enters this landscape as an agent of disturbance. It begins importing some features long common in scientific communication, while also forcing the humanities to reconsider why it publishes as it does and whether its inherited forms still match its actual intellectual life.

Jones does not isolate the academic problem from the wider world. A major strength of the chapter is the way it situates scholarly publishing inside the broader upheaval of commercial publishing, bookselling, and reading culture. The decline of chains, the changing role of bookstores, the rise of Amazon and e-readers, and the unstable coexistence of paper, devices, and apps all matter because academic publishing does not float above the market and culture that surround it. The academy often imagines its publishing crisis as something internal and professional, but Jones insists that the pressure comes from a much larger transformation in how texts circulate, how readers encounter them, and how institutions support or fail to support them.

At the same time, he is wary of melodrama. One of the chapter’s recurring moves is to reject the easy story that print is dying and digital is replacing it in a simple, linear way. Jones thinks the language of crisis is often too theatrical and too deterministic. It encourages people to speak as though “print” were a single historical destiny and as though electronic media had arrived to displace it once and for all. He argues instead for a more contingent view: book culture is changing unevenly, commercially and technologically, and different forms survive, mutate, or acquire new symbolic value in relation to one another. The real issue is not whether the book is dead, but what kinds of public discourse different publishing arrangements make possible.

That leads him to the academic version of the problem. The crisis of scholarly publishing, in his account, comes from a cluster of institutional contradictions: declining subsidies for university presses, shrinking library budgets, expensive journal bundles, and continuing tenure expectations that still reward traditional print publication. Those pressures make the old model harder to sustain without making it any less professionally compulsory. What is at stake, then, is not merely the economic survival of presses but the ability of scholars to participate in public intellectual exchange. Publishing, for Jones, is not just credentialing. It is the mechanism through which scholarship becomes social, enters conversation, and acquires a life outside the solitude of research.

From there the chapter turns to what Jones calls the analog backlash. He is interested in the renewed affection for paper, physical books, tactility, craftsmanship, and the sensory experience of reading, especially as digital reading becomes ordinary. He reads this reaction neither as trivial nostalgia nor as a fully coherent anti-digital movement. Instead, he treats it as evidence that the transition to digital forms has made the materiality of texts newly visible. Once screens dominate, people become more conscious of what the codex had been doing all along as an object, an interface, and a cultural symbol.

Andrew Piper becomes important here because he offers Jones a serious way to move past lazy oppositions. Piper’s argument, as Jones presents it, is that we should stop staging the conflict as one between noble print and shallow digital media. That binary hides more than it reveals. Piper pushes for electronic interfaces that do not merely mimic pages and bookish surfaces, and Jones broadly agrees. The problem with many digital reading environments is not that they are digital, but that they fake print badly. Skeuomorphic page-turning and decorative simulations of paper do little to rethink reading. They sentimentalize the codex instead of learning from its functions or inventing new affordances.

Yet Jones also notices that the pull toward tactility is telling us something real. In a world increasingly organized by screens, the desire to restore touch, thickness, texture, and material presence is not meaningless. It expresses a cultural anxiety about disembodied textuality. What matters is not the simplistic claim that paper is better than screens, but the more interesting fact that digital culture itself has generated a sharper awareness of the body of the book. That is why Jones treats analog enthusiasm as symptomatic: it reveals how uncertain the transition remains and how much readers still need conceptual and emotional frameworks for thinking about what is gained and lost across media.

His examples make that point vividly. He looks at highly physical publications and projects that seem, at first glance, to defy digitization. Beck’s Song Reader appears to resurrect sheet music as an almost obsolete form, turning an “album” into a boxed set of printed scores that listeners must perform for themselves. But the project does not remain purely analog for even a moment. Its life depends on networked circulation, recordings, online video, and participatory reinterpretation. What looks like resistance to digital culture is in practice inseparable from digital distribution and collaborative media behavior.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes works the same way. It was marketed as a defiantly tactile object, even as a kind of anti-e-reader artifact. Jones acknowledges why it received that treatment: the book is visibly material, sculptural, and dependent on the cut page as a physical form. But once he examines how it was actually made, the simple opposition collapses. The work required complex design systems, specialized printing processes, digital tools, and coordinated technical labor. Even an artifact celebrated for its stubborn physicality turns out to be hybrid in both conception and production. For Jones, that hybridity is the real lesson.

The chapter’s central claim begins to crystallize here: what many people call an analog backlash is better understood as a cultural symptom of transition. These works do not restore some pure pre-digital condition. They emerge from inside digital modernity and often depend on it. Their real significance lies in how they force attention back onto material form, embodiment, production, and mediation. They do not defeat the digital; they expose the fantasy that digital texts were ever immaterial in the first place. In that sense, the backlash is not outside the system Jones describes but a sign of the “eversion” that structures the whole book: the network has turned outward into ordinary life, and the material world has become impossible to separate from digital systems.

This is why Jones spends time on skeuomorphism. He uses examples from Apple’s software design to show how digital interfaces often preserve the look of older media after the old function has disappeared. Page-turn animations and faux textures are not innocent design choices for him. They reveal a transitional culture that wants the reassurance of older forms even while moving into new environments. He draws on Johanna Drucker to argue that such gestures can distract from the more important question of how reading actually works in digital space. Instead of cosmetically imitating books, designers should think about the operations, rhythms, updates, collaborations, and forms of navigation that digital reading makes possible.

Tim Carmody’s “bookfuturism” gives Jones a vocabulary for a more intelligent position. Carmody rejects both reactionary worship of print and utopian worship of technology. Jones sees that stance as deeply aligned with digital humanities, even when it arises outside the academy. He treats the world of blogs, journalism, design culture, and experimental publishing not as peripheral to DH but as part of the same wider formation. The line between academic and nonacademic innovation is porous, because the same people, tools, and assumptions circulate across them. In that sense, digital humanities belongs to a broader ecosystem of experiments in communication, authorship, and publicness.

Robin Sloan becomes the chapter’s most important cultural case study. Jones reads Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore as the first major novel of the new digital humanities because it dramatizes the exact mixed reality that DH wants to inhabit. The novel refuses the cliché that books and computers stand on opposite sides of a civilizational divide. Instead, it presents print and digital media as different but related technologies, each with distinct affordances and blind spots. Google-scale computation can do certain things brilliantly, but it can also miss the material and typographic evidence embedded in physical books. The novel’s mystery depends on that fact.

What matters even more to Jones is the form of intelligence the novel models. Solving the problem in Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore requires typography, archival awareness, digital magnification, algorithmic tools, collaborative play, and something like game logic. Jones is drawn to the way the novel fuses books, databases, makers, scanners, metadata, and embodied spaces into one continuous cultural field. That is why he reads it as more than a clever geek fantasy. It stages an ideal of mixed-reality scholarship and creativity in which physical artifacts and computational systems do not cancel one another but interact. The world it imagines is not anti-digital and not anti-book. It is resolutely hybrid.

This mixed-reality ideal then feeds into Jones’s discussion of the academic monograph. Using Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s work, he argues that the problem is not simply that books are becoming obsolete. The monograph persists, but often in a diminished, socially disconnected form. Fitzpatrick’s zombie metaphor helps Jones describe a system that is neither fully alive nor properly dead. Scholarly books still organize prestige and professional advancement, yet the communicative life that should justify them often feels stunted. Publication remains mandatory, but the social relations that make publication meaningful are too often weak, delayed, or absent.

Jones extends that metaphor by turning to Frankenstein. This is one of the chapter’s sharpest moves. New scholarly forms, he suggests, can seem monstrous because they are visibly assembled, stitched together from old and new parts, neither natural nor fully settled. The mistake is to respond like Victor Frankenstein: to recoil from what has been made and deny responsibility for it. The real problem with Victor’s creature is not that it is artificial, but that it is created without an adequate social world prepared to receive it. Jones uses this analogy to insist that publishing is always social. New platforms and hybrid forms will fail if they are treated as purely technical inventions instead of as structures meant to sustain public exchange.

That argument opens onto what he calls platform thinking. Here the chapter shifts from cultural metaphor to infrastructure. Jones’s point is that publishing in the digital age has to be understood in terms of platforms: layered systems that connect hardware, software, interfaces, workflows, storage, metadata, review, circulation, and readership. He borrows from platform studies to show that a platform is not just a device or an app but a foundation that enables and constrains what can be built on top of it. Once humanities scholars think this way, publishing stops looking like the delivery of a finished manuscript into an abstract medium called print and starts looking like a designed environment with social and technical consequences.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence serves as Jones’s main example of this new logic. He emphasizes not just the book’s content but the way it was made: posted online, opened to paragraph-level commentary, revised in public, and developed through open peer review before becoming a press book. That process matters because it reimagines scholarly publication as iterative, conversational, and visibly networked. Jones treats ventures like MediaCommons and MLA Commons as attempts to create not merely outlets but infrastructures for scholarly interaction. Their significance lies in the premise that publication is always already platformed and that successful platforms are fundamentally social systems.

From there Jones surveys the tools and environments that embody this shift. WordPress, Anthologize, Scalar, CommentPress, and GitHub all matter not only because they host content but because they suggest new models of scholarly production. Some enable multimodal long-form work, others facilitate open annotation, and others bring the logic of version control and collaborative revision into humanities writing. GitHub is especially revealing because it imports free and open-source software culture into scholarly communication. Even when humanists use it symbolically, the platform still teaches a lesson: texts can be versioned, forked, revised, and shared as collective objects rather than treated only as sealed, finished statements.

Jones does not pretend these changes are frictionless. He notes the tensions inside DH between programmers and non-programmers, between traditional monographs and experimental publications, and between symbolic allegiance to openness and the practical demands of scholarly work. But he still sees platform thinking as transformative because it changes the very conception of publication. A platform is not a container to be filled; it is a structure to build on. Once that becomes visible, the material infrastructure of scholarship—servers, software, standards, interfaces, social networks, workflows—enters the humanities field of vision as part of meaning rather than mere support.

The closing section drives the point home by reflecting on the book we are reading. Jones admits that his own monograph is formally conventional: a single-author book from a recognized press, not open access, still legible within the older system. But even this supposedly traditional object was born digital in its production, dependent on files, cloud storage, mobile writing, electronic references, and digital exchanges. He pairs that fact with his contribution to the open-access Debates in the Digital Humanities, which went through extensive peer-to-peer commentary and revision on a digital platform. The conclusion is blunt and important: even “print” scholarship is already a messy, collaborative, technologically mediated practice. The old word is no longer precise enough. Chapter 6 therefore presents the future of humanities publication not as a clean replacement of print by digital media, but as an ongoing struggle to invent forms, platforms, and social relations capable of making scholarship genuinely public again.

Chapter 7: “Practices”

In Chapter 7, Steven E. Jones brings the book to its culminating argument by focusing on practice. He begins with the rise of digital humanities at the MLA convention, especially the moment when DH became visible enough to attract not only enthusiasm but suspicion. By 2013, digital humanities was no longer a niche concern inside literary studies; it had become a conspicuous institutional presence. That visibility, however, came with criticism. Panels such as “The Dark Side of Digital Humanities” raised concerns about labor, managerial power, corporatism, and the possibility that DH might serve technocratic or neoliberal agendas rather than the critical mission of the humanities.

Jones does not dismiss those criticisms. On the contrary, he treats them as serious and necessary. He accepts that the humanities must remain a site for preserving cultural memory, sustaining forms of knowledge that are not immediately useful, and criticizing power rather than simply adapting itself to the newest technological systems. But his point is that this critique should not rest on a lazy assumption: that practical engagement with technology is automatically instrumentalist, or that making things somehow excludes thought. The chapter is built against that simplification.

For Jones, the central mistake is the inherited opposition between theory and practice. He argues that the idea of theory as purely verbal, detached, and superior to making is itself too narrow. To support this claim, he turns to the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, which insists that knowledge takes multiple forms and moves across words, objects, images, installations, environments, and data. In that framework, making is not beneath thinking. Making is one of the ways thought takes shape.

That shift matters because digital humanities had often been described as a “set of practices,” and critics sometimes heard that description as an admission of theoretical weakness. Jones reverses the implication. He suggests that building, coding, designing, prototyping, and curating can function as modes of argument. He draws on Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell’s defense of “building” in the humanities, as well as Lev Manovich’s provocative notion that a prototype can itself be a theory. The point is not merely that building deserves academic credit. It is that making can produce understanding in ways writing alone cannot.

Jones then narrows the chapter to two emblematic examples he encountered at MLA in Boston: the work of Amaranth Borsuk and the thought of Bethany Nowviskie. These examples matter precisely because they do not fit the most stereotypical image of DH as text mining, data visualization, or archive building. Instead, they show digital humanities at the boundary where the digital and the physical meet. For Jones, that boundary is the real terrain of the “eversion” he has been tracing throughout the book: the turning outward of digital culture into ordinary material life.

The first example is Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between Page and Screen, an augmented-reality artists’ book displayed in the Electronic Literature Exhibit. Jones treats it as a revealing object because it is both unmistakably literary and unmistakably technological. The book contains almost no conventional printed text on its interior pages. Instead, each page bears a visual marker that, when held before a webcam, generates animated text on the screen. The reader does not simply read either a page or a screen. The reading experience occurs in the mediated space between them.

Jones describes the work in detail because its form carries the argument. The computer screen shows the reader holding the printed book while translucent verbal structures appear to rise from the page. Some of these are concrete poems; others are letters exchanged between the personified figures “Page” and “Screen.” This creates not only a poetic performance but a conceptual one. The object stages a dialogue between print and digital media without allowing either side to win. Instead of asking the reader to choose between paper and screen, it constructs an intermedial relationship in which each depends on the other.

This is why Jones sees Between Page and Screen as more than a clever literary experiment. It becomes, in his account, a theory object. It does not merely discuss the changing conditions of reading; it embodies them. The work turns an abstract debate over the death of print into a material reading procedure. It makes the conflict tangible, then dissolves the old binary by forcing the reader to inhabit the mixed space where physical codex and digital animation cooperate. The work therefore becomes “poetry of the eversion”: literature shaped by a world in which data and material objects constantly interpenetrate.

Jones strengthens that claim by placing Borsuk and Bouse within the longer history of book art. He links their project to popup books, die-cut books, and especially the work of Dieter Roth. Roth’s sculptural books exploited the physical depth of the codex, transforming page-turning into a spatial event. Borsuk and Bouse inherit that tradition, but push it outward. Instead of taking the reader deeper into the layered body of the book, they move the reading space above the page into augmented reality. What matters is continuity as much as novelty. The digital here does not abolish book history; it extends and remixes it.

The chapter therefore treats Borsuk’s project as evidence that digital humanities is not just about tools but about contemporary conditions of mediation. Jones emphasizes her broader notion of “data poetics,” an artistic practice responsive to a world saturated by invisible information flows. In such a world, barcodes, metadata, GPS traces, social networks, and algorithmic records become part of ordinary life. Borsuk’s art responds by making those hidden layers palpable. Jones generalizes from this example: DH, like data poetics, is one response to living inside a pervasive information environment that no longer feels separate from everyday experience.

The second major example is Bethany Nowviskie, whose work allows Jones to move from augmented reading to fabrication. He presents her as one of the formative figures of the new digital humanities, especially because her career traversed graduate work, collaborative project building, library-based innovation, and the alt-ac world. In her MLA talk, Nowviskie begins not with abstraction but with a daily habit: arriving at the Scholars’ Lab and starting a 3D printer before turning to email or meetings. Jones lingers on this image because it dramatizes his main claim. Code becomes object. The digital wants, as it were, to become material.

For Jones, Nowviskie’s fascination with 3D printing is not a gimmick. It signals a second phase after mass digitization. Digitization converted physical archives into digital form. Fabrication and mixed-reality interfaces promise a new loop: from physical to digital and back again into material artifacts. That loop redefines humanities computing. No longer is it only about scanning, markup, or online editions. It also includes consumer-accessible fabrication, locative media, wearable devices, and augmented-reality experiences that pull humanistic content off the screen and back into embodied life.

Jones deepens the point through an email exchange with Nowviskie, who reflects on the moment when cyberspace stopped feeling like an alternate world and became part of ordinary existence. For her, this shift was marked not just by mobile devices and fabrication technologies but also by social platforms and the normalization of real-name identity online. The web no longer seemed like a place one visited as a heightened or alternate self. It came to people where they already were. That perception is one of Jones’s clearest restatements of eversion, and he shows how it directly shaped the orientation of DH.

Nowviskie also gives Jones a social history of how that shift entered the humanities. It did not happen automatically. It happened through people carrying ideas across institutional boundaries. She describes her efforts to bring design, interactivity, and software-development perspectives from outside academic humanities computing into collaborative scholarly work. Jones calls this “tech transfer,” and he treats it as crucial. The new digital humanities emerged not only from abstract theoretical shifts but from contact with open-source communities, game culture, startup labor, and library software development.

That social account leads to one of the chapter’s most important claims: the new DH is partly a maker culture inside the humanities. Nowviskie describes the appeal of fun, novelty, craft, and the satisfaction of making something tangible. Jones does not trivialize this. He treats play, tinkering, and experimentation as serious epistemic modes. Just as Stephen Ramsay had defended exploratory messing around with code, Nowviskie’s attachment to 3D printing, wearables, physical computing, and mapping tools shows how scholarly understanding can arise through manipulation, assembly, testing, and design. Practice is not an accessory to knowledge. It is a way of discovering what knowledge might become.

Jones is also careful not to romanticize fabrication. He admits that, in the humanities, 3D printing can seem speculative, fetishized, or overhyped. It may appear more symbolic than useful. But that is precisely why it interests him. The 3D printer is both a practical device and a cultural emblem. It symbolizes the desire to connect digital representations to embodied, manipulable things. Even when applications are still emerging, the technology reveals a larger horizon for humanities work: a horizon in which archives, artifacts, and cultural objects can be modeled, copied, handled, and reimagined through feedback loops between software and material form.

He then points to concrete institutional uses, especially in archaeology, history, and museums. Here 3D scanning and printing can create surrogates of fragile artifacts for study, teaching, and public access. The Smithsonian becomes a key example, showing how objects that would otherwise remain inaccessible can be scanned, printed, and circulated in new ways. Jones sees this not as a break with humanistic values but as an extension of them. The humanities have always cared about artifacts. In an everted era, those artifacts become data-enriched and reproducible, which opens new questions about access, pedagogy, and the meaning of materiality itself.

The chapter closes by broadening the meaning of literacy. Borrowing from Neil Gershenfeld, Jones suggests that fabrication restores an older, richer sense of literacy as mastery of available means of expression, not just reading and writing. This matters because many humanists still preserve an anti-technological self-image, as if distance from making were proof of seriousness. Jones rejects that posture. In his view, the most promising digital humanities work no longer treats the physical and the digital as separate domains. Through figures like Borsuk and Nowviskie, Chapter 7 argues that DH is becoming a materially engaged, experimentally minded, mixed-reality humanities—one that turns outward into the world and thinks by making.

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Ver também

• mcluhan — A materialidade das mídias como mensagem em McLuhan precede e ressoa com o argumento de Jones de que a digitalização nunca é desmaterialização.
• sociedade_rede — Castells constrói a sociologia da rede que Jones pressupõe; as divergências (Castells enfatiza fluxos, Jones insiste na fricção material) são produtivas.
• gurri_revolt_of_the_public — Gurri e Jones rastreiam as consequências políticas da cultura digital em rede, chegando a diagnósticos complementares sobre autoridade e legibilidade.
• Máquinas de Megalothymia — A crítica de Jones à “ideologia de plataforma” (retórica “social” mascarando extração) conecta ao argumento tímico: plataformas exploram o desejo de reconhecimento sem construir pertencimento real.
• no_enxame_ensaio_denso — O crowdsourcing como computação humana distribuída em Jones dialoga com a lógica do enxame como inteligência coletiva sem agente central.
• A Ideologia do Vale do Silício - Uma Análise — Jones e a análise da ideologia do Vale compartilham o alvo: a retórica da disrupção que apaga as condições materiais e sociais da tecnologia.