As this diverse and informative introduction from Sydney University Press reveals, literary scholarship has been at the vanguard from the beginning, unlocking knowledge through the automation of tasks that had been utterly impractical with the laborious manual methods previously available. Some of the earliest adopters in the research community were using the power of the new machines to compile, index and compare literary and other texts. Computational stylistics, scholarly editing and bibliography all boomed with the radical improvement in productivity and accuracy that speed, power and precision offered, and whole new sets of questions became possible. Yet such advances tended to take place away from centre court: often well away.

Today, however, the main game has come to the innovators, for two key reasons. For one thing, the way we undertake research is being influenced by the new ways we now conduct business, interact socially, and entertain and inform ourselves. The world is deeply wired, and the humanities research domain is no exception. The bundle of practices loosely aggregated under the rubric Web 2.0 perfectly suits the modern research enterprise – collaborative, widely distributed, federated and searchable, with emphases on openness, accessibility and user-production. The other change that has taken place is the gradual exposure of the humanities and the qualitative social sciences to research infrastructure assets and funding. Formerly the exclusive preserve of the physical, biological and quantitative social sciences, public and institutional support for new kinds of research capability in the human and social disciplines has produced astounding results in a very short time.

This is where Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon have stepped in. The editors convened a conference in 2008 to examine the impact of these new opportunities upon Australian literary studies. The present volume is the outcome of that exploration of the issues arising at a turning point in the development of the field. The result is an accessible yet authoritative survey of the main resources that are being developed, the kinds of work that are now being done, and the mood of the room at this critical moment in the evolution of the eHumanities.

Collections derived from conferences can sometimes be patchy in quality and a little dated by the time they reach the bookshops, but Resourceful Reading avoids those pitfalls: the contributors offer a consistently high standard of work, keenly relevant to the state of play right now and into the near future. Divided into three sections – overviews of the discipline’s trajectory and health, detailed case studies of e-research projects and outlines of the major digital literary research resources – the book presents an up-to-date picture from the leading exponents in the field. The volume has been expertly edited, with the welcome inclusion of an accurate and detailed twenty-page index.

An obvious target market for this book is the large and growing number of humanities scholars already immersed in digital methods, particularly those within literary studies, and these readers will not be disappointed. But those who stand to gain the most from dipping into this volume belong to the wider community of humanities scholars who tend not to attend conferences with an e in their titles. It is part of my job to go to those conferences, so I am more keenly aware than most of just how much value the average humanities scholar would derive from exposure to some of the exciting, imaginative and ground-breaking work that is being done by their digitally adventurous colleagues. If only they were here, I often think, to gain a sense of the enormous potential of this work to transform our research practices. This approachable collection will help to reach those scholars, at least within the field of Australian literary studies, by exposing the ideas, resources and exemplars to a wider audience than any single academic event could ever hope to do.

Another important audience that will benefit significantly from immersion in this collection is the broad coalition of developers, policy-makers and funders of research infrastructure, tools and networks. There is significant goodwill within this sector towards the efforts of the humanities to develop their digital capabilities, and a palpable willingness to engage and assist where they can. The cultural gap is wide, however, and the essays in this book will go a long way towards helping these people to deepen and refine their appreciation of the perspectives, traditions, needs and expectations of practitioners in the humanities.

There is one off-note, however, that is sounded in several places throughout this volume, and it introduces a few weaknesses. The editors and several of the contributors set the emergence of digital methods, dubbed the new empiricism, against the recent dominance of theory – ‘theory’, in the editorial parlance – which, one is clearly expected to agree, wielded a tyrannical and detrimental influence over literary studies in Australia throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

As the beneficiary of an undergraduate literary education in the early to mid-1990s, I certainly know what they are talking about, although many others would not – there is no attempt to define or describe the rather specific sense in which the word ‘theory’ is deployed here, for the benefit of interested readers outside the humanities. It would be a shame if this lack of clarity diminishes the volume’s value to policy-makers, sympathetic technologists and funders of research and research infrastructure. It would also be a pity if this rather partisan stance ends up alienating the many humanities researchers who harbour less antipathy towards those theoretical developments.

But obscurity and gratuitous pugilism are relatively minor flaws. The main defect introduced by this slippage between the very particular sense of ‘theory’ and its more general meaning is an unalloyed and naïve faith in the objective power of all things empirical. In the rush to embrace this new empiricism as the benevolent liberator of the humanities from the occupying armies of ‘post-ists’, it is all too easy to forget that no human activity is devoid of attitude, expectation, ideology and theory: including (and, at times, especially) science.

Several voices are raised in caution on this score within Resourceful Reading, particularly regarding the potential for an over-reliance upon empirical findings to displace or suppress more nuanced and culturally situated considerations, in a kind of data-fascism. Yet the editors characterise this concern as ‘one of the legacies of theory’, and that reaction flows through the volume to some extent. This is a tactical mistake. It is unhelpful, not to say incorrect, to imply that an awareness of the limitations of empirical methods is some sort of artefact of a factional war between disembodied theory and a materially grounded empiricism. I am sure that the editors do not subscribe to such a false dichotomy, but in their enthusiasm to carve out a place for the new empirical vogue, they have overstated their case a little.

Very clever and effective scientific processes have been developed over many centuries to help counter myriad forms of experimental bias. Yet decisions about selection, design, representation and analysis are always part of any empirical exercise, and they cannot help but reflect the attitudes of experimenters. There is no pre-discursive reality, in the words of Lacan, only the dream of it: every experience of the world is mediated by our senses, our expectations, our ideologies and our notions of how it all hangs together. There is no theory-free space, not even in rigorous empirical science, and it is vital for humanities scholars to retain their sensitivity to the all-too-human elements that inflect every human activity; and to exercise always the scepticism that makes the scientific method work so well in the first place. 