The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media

A splendid, sensitively written, solidly researched and thoroughly enjoyable reference work on the defining technologies of our day. A reference work that you want to read from cover to cover is an extraordinarily rare thing, The authors and editors of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media have achieved a work worthy of that attention and have done with world of digital scholarship a substantial favor in the process. A quick glance at an entry on a subject you know well should be enough to convince you both of the merits of the entry and the substantial thought that went into selecting and situating the entries in such a readable and logical way... In a field where change comes so quickly and memories are fleeting, even for those who have grown up in and studied the computing revolution, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media fills a void in scholarship and provides the needed authority to mark and gauge digital media's lineage and impacts. It is just what our culture needed.

The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media represents a valuable and lasting contribution to the field of media studies by revealing current attitudes toward media as digital and material, preserved in bits while moving through multiple communities of practice, and key in unraveling the multiple entwinements between culture and technology. Comprehensive and accessible, there are an impressive 154 entries in the Guide that in combination offer a glimpse of the current state of scholarly work in digital media that is both detailed and broad... It will serve as a key resource to which future students and scholars alike can turn for its representation of the current state of digital media studies.