Skip to content
The Gale Review

The Gale Review

A blog from Gale International

  • Welcome to The Gale Review
  • Digital Humanities
  • For Students
  • For Academics
  • Subscribe to The Gale Review
  • All Blog Posts

Gale and Digital Humanities: A Potted History

June 28, 2021October 3, 2018 by Kyle Sheldrake
The following two tabs change content below.
  • Bio
  • Latest Posts
My Twitter profile

Kyle Sheldrake

Kyle has moved up and down the UK working across academic and schools publishing, marketing everything from dense reference works to beautifully illustrated primary school textbooks, to almost every country in the world. He’s a fanboy of social sciences (even though his own academic background is in Literature, Art History and Philosophy), and can often be found in the wild doing vague imitations of exercise or listening to podcasts on a whole variety of things.
My Twitter profile

Latest posts by Kyle Sheldrake (see all)

  • Platform or Publisher? The debate is older than you might think. - January 13, 2021
  • ‘An artist who can get away with this’: The Press Response to Yves Klein’s 1957 London Exhibition - October 25, 2018
  • Gale and Digital Humanities: A Potted History - October 3, 2018
  • “There is no other remedy”: The Argument for Free Trade in the First Issue of The Economist - August 2, 2018
  • ‘So complex and vital an organ’: 65 Years Since the First Successful Open Heart Surgery - September 6, 2017

In 2014, Gale became the first humanities primary source publisher to give customers access to the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text that underpins all our resources, both through Text and Data Mining (TDM) drives and through single-document OCR download on the Gale Primary Sources platform.

The OCR download function on the Gale Primary Sources platform.

In the intervening four years, Gale has worked closely with researchers, scholars and teachers worldwide to understand how they’re using this OCR data to advance scholarship, make discoveries and further research. In doing so, we have built up a clear picture of some of the key barriers to successfully taking on a Digital Humanities project, and some of the challenges that customers have had when text mining archival content, both from Gale and others.

These challenges can broadly be summarised as:

  1. Access to relevant data in a format optimised for analysis
  2. Hosting, organising and sharing of large amounts of OCR and metadata
  3. Existing tools are difficult to use

What was the result? Gale Digital Scholar Lab – Gale’s brand-new cloud-based text and data mining environment, which combines familiar open-source tools with Gale’s unmatched digital archive collections in an integrated platform.

The Gale Digital Scholar Lab has been developed in conjunction with DH scholars and in partnership with the wider DH community, to address the three crucial challenges outlined above. By integrating an unmatched depth and breadth of digital primary source content with the most popular digital humanities tools, Gale Digital Scholar Lab provides a new lens to explore history, empowering researchers to generate innovative research and reach original conclusions.

The Gale Digital Scholar Lab homepage at launch.

At launch Gale Digital Scholar Lab  includes approximately 166 million pages of Gale’s unique primary source material, digitised from the world’s premier research libraries, optimised for analysis. The Gale Digital Scholar Lab allows quick and efficient creation of bespoke Content Sets that can save researchers weeks, or even months, when compared to traditional methods. Plus, as a cloud-hosted tool, it removes the onus on libraries and faculties to host, manage and organise vast amounts of OCR data.

By integrating the most-requested open-source analysis tools in the Gale Digital Scholar Lab and providing simple options for customisation, Gale allows scholars of all experience levels to run powerful analysis and extract meaningful visualisations that can be used to form the basis of a Digital Humanities project.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Related

Categories For Librarians, Technology Tags data analysis, Data Mining, data visualisations, DH, DH community, DH project, Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship, Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Gale Primary Sources, metadata, OCR, Optical Character Recognition, TDM
Inside the BNP: Being a Mole in the British Far-Right
Surprising Search Results: From Crystal Therapy to Singing Bowls

Subscribe

Never miss a post! (You will be sent an automated privacy policy to opt-in with before you receive any updates).
Loading

Categories

  • Gale News and Teams
    • Gale Ambassadors
    • Gale News
    • Gale Publishers
  • Key Categories
    • Digital Humanities
    • For Academics
    • For Librarians
    • For Students
    • Thought leaders
  • Topic Categories
    • Anniversaries
    • Arts and Culture
    • Current Issues
    • Science and the Environment
    • Society and Politics
    • Sport
    • Technology

Popular tags

1800s 1900s Archives of Sexuality and Gender Archives Unbound Artemis British Library Newspapers China China and the Modern World Colonialism Daily Mail Daily Mail Historical Archive Digital Humanities Digital Literacy diplomacy Durham University Eighteenth Century Collections Online feminism Gale Ambassador Gale Ambassadors Gale Digital Scholar Lab Gale Primary Sources Gender Studies government History Illustrated London News newspapers nineteenth century Nineteenth Century Collections Online NUI Galway politics Publishing team State Papers Online study tips teaching The Telegraph The Telegraph Historical Archive The Times The Times Digital Archive Times Digital Archive twentieth-century history University of Helsinki University of Liverpool University of Portsmouth Victorian visualisation

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Gale, a Cengage Company.

  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Link

Gale, a Cengage Company, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover SP10 5BE

© 2023 The Gale Review
 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.