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.

Collisions: Driving Through Digital Humanities in Search of Roadkill

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│By Gilberto Mazzoli, ESEH-Gale Fellow│

In 2024 I have been one of four recipients of the ESEH-Gale Fellowship in Digital Environmental Humanities. This fellowship has been a good opportunity to explore some aspects of my research in environmental history in a different way and helped to make my current research more visible.

This fellowship not only allowed me to access for seven months, numerous online Gale Primary Sources archives related to the environmental history of the United States and to experiment with tools contained in the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, but enabled me to develop a part of my research project related to the creation of digital interactive maps. This pushed me to learn new technical skills, like GIS, and to think differently about some aspects of my research in environmental history.

In this brief account I reflect on my first experience with digital humanities and on the challenges faced during my research.

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Understanding Ngrams

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│By Becca Gillot, Gale Digital Scholar Lab Product Manager│

One of the easiest tools to understand and use in Gale Digital Scholar Lab is the Ngram tool. This blog post will explain the tool itself, how to use it to explore your content set, and some tips and tricks for getting the most out of your visualisations.

The Ngram Tool

The Ngram tool is one of the easiest to understand in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. The tool works its way through the cleaned OCR that you have created (by applying a cleaning configuration to your content set) and counts how many times an ‘Ngram’ appears, before displaying that data as either a word cloud or a bar graph.

The Ngram tool is great for getting a high-level overview of your content set, so you can see at a glance the themes, key concepts, and ideas contained in the documents you are exploring. This type of distant reading is particularly great for large content sets that can be unwieldy to explore using close reading, or for content sets you’re not familiar with, but can also be used to analyse specific texts, such as an individual monograph. Even if you know your material really well, the Ngram tool can be a great way of presenting that knowledge as an accessible snapshot that others can quickly understand.

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Gale-SHAFR Fellows Explore New Digital History Methods

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│By Jess Ludwig, Director, Product Management│

On a recent humid summer morning in Arlington, Virginia, participants in the Gale-Society for the History of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) fellowship presented exciting research findings at SHAFR’s 2025 annual conference.

SHAFR was founded in 1967 and “is dedicated to the scholarly study of the history of American foreign relations.” In 2024, Gale and SHAFR partnered to create a fellowship; as part of the program, Gale made available Gale Primary Sources archives tailored to each fellow’s research agenda; access to the primary sources text and data mining platform Gale Digital Scholar Lab; and a stipend.

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Learning from the Ground Up – Hacking History in Oxford with Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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Hacking History Oxford Digital Humanities Skills Workshop

│By Chris Houghton, Head of Academic Partnerships│ This blog post details the Gale Hacking History event run in collaboration with Digital Scholarship @ Oxford in May 2025. It also reflects on the value of using hackathons to teach digital humanities tools and methodologies, enabling participants with no knowledge of DH to collaboratively develop projects and … Read more

From the Physical-to-Digital Archive and Back: A Gale Fellow’s Account of Trials and Errors

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│By Vanessa Bateman, ESEH-Gale Fellow│

When I received the 2024/2025 ESEH-Gale Non-Residential Fellowship in Digital Environmental History I was just starting the early stages of my first solo book project. I had done enough research to develop my book’s main themes, structure, and research questions, but I had not started the writing process because I still had some gaps to fill.

As someone new to the Digital Humanities (DH), I applied to the Gale Fellowship because I wanted to learn how DH methodologies could elevate my research and eventually expand my output beyond a traditional academic book. As a Gale Fellow, I received training in different research and analysis methods that could be achieved in Gale Digital Scholar Lab, and access to the Gale Primary Sources.

Below I share an account of how I had to problem solve and pivot my research in the digital space, and some findings I made that will be useful in the future. Sharing moments when research didn’t go according to plan, I believe, is just as important as a polished finished project.

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A New Course in Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Introduction to Digital Humanities

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

In today’s rapidly evolving academic landscape, digital tools are reshaping the way we study literature, history, and culture. As digital humanities (DH) becomes increasingly central to research and teaching, instructors—particularly graduate students and early-career faculty—often find themselves faced with the challenge of integrating digital methodologies into their courses. To address this need ‘Introduction to Digital Humanities‘ offers a structured, assignable course designed to equip students with essential digital research skills. It provides an accessible, hands-on approach to digital humanities, helping instructors save valuable time while fostering critical data literacy in students.

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Hacking History with Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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

On 5th December 2024, the Gale Digital Scholar Lab team, in association with Loyola University Chicago, University Libraries, offered a hands-on workshop freely available to researchers, educators, librarians, and anyone interested in exploring innovative ways to improve their digital humanities (DH) research skills. “Hacking History” brought together a diverse community for a day of collaboration, conversation and collegiality – along with some friendly competition between teams to create digital projects over the course of the day. 

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Representations of Girls in History of Disabilities: Disabilities in Society, Seventeenth to Twentieth Century

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│By Lucy McCormick, Gale Ambassador at the University of Birmingham│ Earlier this year, Gale launched History of Disabilities: Disabilities in Society, Seventeenth to Twentieth Century – a rich digital archive of monographs, manuscripts, and ephemera, sourced from the New York Academy of Medicine. This offers countless avenues for exciting historical research. To provide an example, … Read more

Exploring Sentiment in Historical Texts With Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s New “Sentiment by Timeframe” Visualisation

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

Gale Digital Scholar Lab has introduced a new visualisation feature in the Sentiment Analysis tool: Sentiment by Timeframe. This enables researchers to bring additional depth to sentiment analysis for historical texts. This tool is part of an ongoing effort to expand the capabilities of the Lab’s six digital humanities tools and is designed to support researchers in analysing, interpreting, and visualising data across various historical documents.

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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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