A comprehensive guide to artificial intelligence for academic library professionals, covering theory, practice, and ethical considerations for integrating AI tools and services into library operations and scholarly support.

How are digital humanists drawing on libraries and archives to advance research and learning in the field of religious studies and theology? How can librarians and archivists make their collections accessible to digital humanists?

The goal of this volume is to provide an overview of how religious and theological libraries and archives are supporting the nascent field of digital humanities in religious studies. The volume showcases the perspectives of faculty, librarians, archivists, and allied cultural heritage professionals who are drawing on primary and secondary sources in innovative ways to create digital humanities projects in theology and religious studies. Topics include curating collections as data, conducting stylometric analyses of religious texts, and teaching digital humanities at theological libraries.

The shift to digital humanities promises closer collaborations between scholars, archivists, and librarians. The chapters in this volume constitute essential reading for those interested in the future of theological librarianship and of digital scholarship in the fields of religious studies and theology.

XQuery is the best language for querying, manipulating, and transforming XML and JSON documents. Because XML is in many ways the lingua franca of the digital humanities, learning XQuery empowers humanists to discover and analyze their data in new ways.

Until now, though, XQuery has been difficult to learn because there was no textbook designed for non-programmers or beginner programmers. XQuery for Humanists fills this void with an approachable guidebook aimed directly at digital humanists.

Clifford B. Anderson and Joseph C. Wicentowski introduce XQuery in terms accessible to humanities scholars and do not presuppose any prior background in programming. It provides an informed, opinionated overview and recommends the best implementations, libraries, and paradigms to empower those who need it most. Emphasizing practical applicability, the authors go beyond the XQuery language to include the basics of underlying standards like XPath, related standards like XQuery Full Text and XQuery Update, and explain the difference between XQuery and languages like Python and R. This book will afford readers the skills they need to build and analyze large-scale documentary corpora in XML.

In this paper, I provide an introduction to deepfakes and related machine-learning technologies for theologians, assess their danger as well as potential uses, and advocate for developing a spirituality of critical empathy in response.

What potential does digital humanities have to shape the practice of theology? Are there theological questions at stake? This essay is exploratory, aspiring to identify points of contact between the digital humanities and theology.