Digital Humanities

For more about how Gale supports Digital Humanities research, study and collaboration, and to learn more about the cutting-edge tool Gale Digital Scholar Lab, visit Gale’s Digital Humanities Hub.

A Classroom Compendium: Digital Humanities Resources for a New School Year

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│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Sr. Digital Humanities Specialist│

For the start of a new academic year, this month’s Notes from our DH Correspondent blog post is a useful resource indexing all the Notes posts to date. They are categorised below to support instructors to plan, build and deliver classroom DH curricula.  This is a great page to bookmark!

Each resource can be supplemented with detailed material in the Learning Center in Gale Digital Scholar Lab which provides step-by-step instructions in written and video formats, covering every aspect of working in the platform. 

Need additional support? Our DH team will be happy to answer your questions! Just email us at [email protected]

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Leveraging Large Language Models for Post-OCR Correction of Nineteenth-Century British Newspapers

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Montage of images from this blog post, mixed with images from British Library Newspapers archive

│By Alan Thomas, AI Research Engineer at the Centre for Machine Intelligence, University of Sheffield│

Poor optical character recognition (OCR) quality is a major obstacle for humanities scholars seeking to make use of digitised primary sources such as historical newspapers. To improve the quality of noisily OCR’d historical documents, we introduce BLN600 – an open-access dataset derived from Gale’s British Library Newspapers – and showcase the potential of large language models (LLMs) for post-OCR correction using Llama.

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Bridging the Gap: Gale Primary Sources and Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│

This month’s blog post will discuss how to start the work of sourcing research documents in Gale Primary Sources (GPS) archives, before transitioning seamlessly to Gale Digital Scholar Lab to create content sets, clean OCR text data, and conduct analyses of this material to answer research questions. With this methodology, researchers are able to use the rich contextual detail and varied navigation options to begin compiling their corpus of text data outside of the Lab, which can be an attractive option if the user has an existing working knowledge of specific GPS archives, such as The Times Digital Archive, Women’s Studies Archive, or Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

There is a standardised user experience across GPS and the Lab, making the transition from one to the other familiar and streamlined. However, there are options to view documents in GPS that aren’t yet available in the Lab, which may make combining both access points useful so that no document slips through the cracks!

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Coding for Humanists: Python Notebooks in Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│

Recently, three Python Notebooks were added to Gale Digital Scholar Lab to offer additional flexibility in processing and analysing text data. Each of the Notebooks can be downloaded by a researcher, then used or adapted to suit individual needs. This blog post offers some considerations for those interested in incorporating Python-based workflows into their text analysis pipeline but aren’t quite sure where to start.

This blog can also be read in conjunction with Women’s History Month in Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Named Entity Recognition, Python Notebooks, and an Intrepid Female Diarist which offers some practical programming insights into a project using Named Entity Recognition.

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A Two-Way Relationship – Collaborating with Scholars in the Gale Fellowship Program

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│By Chris Houghton, Head of Academic Partnerships│

The Gale Fellowship program is now in its third year of providing financial support, training, archival access and professional opportunities for scholars around the world. In 2022, Gale developed its Fellowship program to provide opportunities for scholars in Asia and Australasia to apply for full funding for a three-month residential stay at Oxford University, in partnership with the Bodleian Library.

Successful applicants to the Gale Scholar Asia Pacific, Digital Humanities Oxford Fellowship are guests at Jesus College and given full access to the vast resources of the Bodleian. Alongside this, the Fellows are provided with extensive training and support from Gale in Gale Primary Sources and Gale Digital Scholar Lab to aid their professional development in digital humanities research methods.

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Playing Games with Data: Building Interactive Narratives with Twine

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│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute, at the University of Victoria, BC, has taken place every June since 2001. The intensive week of workshops, lectures, papers and social gatherings has a long history of active engagement in learning, conversation and discussions of research and methodologies.

I have had the opportunity to attend each year since 2011 and have participated in 5-day workshops on topics ranging from text encoding, digital project management, mapping, data visualization, IIIF viewers, python programming, cloud computing and DH for department chairs and deans. As an academic with an active research agenda and regular engagement in both undergraduate and graduate classrooms, I have come to greatly value the in-depth and diverse conversations taking place during the week, and 2024 has been no exception.

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United Farm Workers and Chicano Literature: Primary Sources as a Tool for Language and Cultural Studies

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│By Ray Linn, Gale Ambassador at Maynooth University│

I started studying Spanish nearly 8 years ago now, but it never interested me so much as last year, in the final year of my undergrad degree, when I enrolled in a Chicano/a Literature module. I hadn’t studied literature much previously, but in that class, I learned how essential it is to living. It allows us to connect with people whose experiences are different from our own, and to see the world through lenses that were previously unknown. But reading requires context. Using primary sources allows me to contextualize what I read when it comes from cultures and histories I’m unfamiliar with, allowing my view to expand and my understanding to grow.

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Finding Meaning in K-Means: Clustering Analysis in Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│

Of the six tools in Gale Digital Scholar Lab, clustering is often considered the most challenging methodology to interpret effectively. This blog post will explore the nature of this analysis tool and offer some tips for running an analysis.

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Refugees, Relief and Resettlement: The Early Cold War and Decolonization – The Building Blocks of a Digital Archive

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│By Lindsay Whitaker-Guest, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

This year, the global population of forcibly displaced and stateless people has grown to 130.8 million according to figures released by UNHCR. Existing global conflicts such as the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict, as well as environmental and climate disasters, are all contributing to the increasing numbers of people without homes to call their own.

Sadly, these journeys of displacement are not new. Population displacement is a fact of human history, and scholars and researchers can explore episodes in the twentieth century of refugee crises through primary sources in the latest module of Refugees, Relief and Resettlement. This post explores the primary source collections included in this new module and how editors at Gale Primary Sources approach turning poorly catalogued collections into fully searchable digital archive products.

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Plans, Charts, Images and Drawings: Eighteenth Century Collections Online as a Source of Visual Information Transmission

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│By Sirkku Ruokkeinen, University of Turku, Finland│

In 1786, the Scottish economist William Playfair (1759–1823) published the Commercial and Political Atlas, reporting on the trade balance between England and continental Europe, West Indies, and North America. The work included something never before seen in print: line and bar charts. These statistical tools, although familiar to many of us now, are in fact quite complex devices and necessitate some understanding of their structure for a successful reading. So how were Playfair’s eighteenth century readers able to understand them?

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