Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 represents the beginning of a new series of yearly collections of work in the digital humanities. The collection picks up where the first Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012) collection left off, tracing the developments of the digital humanities over the past four years while also looking forward to and setting the pace for the future annual output. Gold and Klein lay out the future directions of the series, for instance “critical making in the humanities; feminist debates in the digital humanities; and the global humanities” (570). Although there are essays included in this volume that address the issues above in detail, this volume takes a wide-angle view of the field and covers significant ground.

One of the key aspects of the collection is the variety of media included, such as modes that the editors describe as “gray literature” (569). In addition to conventional articles the volume includes writing from digital humanities blogs, interviews, conference presentations and roundtables. The collection is also available online via an open-access platform. The digital version is interactive: readers can “interact with the material by marking passages, and adding terms to a crowdsourced index; the platform also includes atom feeds and APIs” (online edition: “About”). A particular strength of this online edition is how thoroughly hyperlinked references are. For example, in Scott Selisker's excellent “Digital Humanities Knowledge: Reflections on the Introductory Graduate Syllabus,” Selisker hyperlinks within the body of his text to five different syllabi, including his own, posted openly on personal blogs and university pages. Many of these syllabi link to other openly accessible articles, podcast episodes and YouTube clips. Such networked availability of resources makes Selisker's discussion of what makes a good syllabus a wonderfully interactive experience.

Technical innovations aside, the selection of essays is strong, both online and in print. A significant number of contributions address diversity in the digital humanities. For example, Miriam Posner's “What's Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities” argues that the digital humanities need to go further than simply a greater inclusion of, or increased emphasis on, gender and race. Posner calls for the field to attend to the conventional structures of power and the uncritical assumptions that can underlie particular work in the digital humanities. Posner writes that

Although this is no easy task, Posner highlights some key areas of change and outlines a number of academic projects that have worked against the grain. This level of clarity in foregrounding good practice is essential for the wider community of digital scholarship and it is excellent to see such strong examples included in this collection.

A different kind of wide focus is provided by Bethany Nowviskie in a republished blog post “On the Origin of ‘Hack’ and ‘Yack’,” which offers a personal history of the THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) community as well as the birth of the infamous “more hack; less yack” slogan (66). Nowviskie argues that, although the phrase has been used most commonly as a “straw man” (69) rather than in earnest, its repetition can still be harmful. In avoiding being drawn into its “either–or” (69) logic, researchers can learn some significant lessons about the kind of digital humanities practice that does not set practitioners against one another. The cry that “we require fewer slogans” (69) echoes throughout the collection and speaks to the current atmosphere within the digital humanities.

A particularly strong section that highlights the volume's focus on exchange is “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities,” which reproduces four brilliant and provocative talks from a roundtable at the 2013 MLA convention. The presentations by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Richard Grusin, Patrick Jagoda and Rita Raley are a response to a proposal set by the MLA selection committee regarding the relationship between digital humanities and neoliberal university policy. These succinct, lucid and imaginative proposals created a wide variety of responses on blogs and Twitter at the time and three years later the ideas presented continue to be relevant. The inclusion of this kind of format within the collection captures significant historical moments in the field while also sustaining a spontaneous and contemporary tone.

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 is an excellent collection for scholars both within and outside the field. It is an important example of best practice regarding open-access and digital edition innovation. Most of all, it represents an encouraging insight into the new annual series which is set to be pathfinding, both in its content and in its presentation.