Digital Humanities posts covering new technology and developments

Groups and Notebooks: Using Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s latest features in the DH classroom

December 2, 2024June 26, 2023 by Gale Review Team

│By Sarah Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│

The field of digital scholarship tends to be collaborative, since any given project may involve disciplinary experts, developers, librarians, archivists, and students. Management of workflow and data can be challenging unless there is careful planning from the outset about record-keeping, group working practices, the sharing of information and goals for project sustainability and longer-term archiving. These practical considerations are the same for research projects and for those built in the classroom.

The ability to create Groups was recently added as a feature to the Gale Digital Scholar Lab platform, along with a flexible ‘Notebook’ tool for documenting decisions and outcomes. This blog post will consider how Group spaces can be used to facilitate classroom project-building by students in an undergraduate classroom, using a recent course I taught in the Information School at the University of Washington as a case study. The practicalities of using the Groups/Notebook features were discussed in my previous blog post, including details about how a teacher might go about adding students to new groups within the Lab, then managing classroom workflow via record-keeping in the team’s Notebook.

Digging into Datasets in Gale Digital Scholar Lab

October 3, 2023May 9, 2023 by Gale Review Team

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

This dataset post is a follow-up to Working with Datasets, a Primer which discussed text datasets of primary sources and explored how to access and work with them in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. Here, we’ll look at the topics of the first eight datasets in the Lab in more detail, the types of documents included in each set, and consider how a user may work with them for analysis. Our next blog post will showcase classroom-based use of the Lab’s datasets as an introductory pathway into the field of digital humanities.

Taking Your Master’s Dissertation to the Next Level: Using Gale Digital Scholar Lab for Research

October 3, 2023April 4, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Tamar Atkinson, Gale Ambassador at the University of Liverpool│

Primary sources can be a great resource for Master’s dissertation research, providing a deeper understanding of history. Whilst they make handy supportive evidence to back up the points you want to make in an assessment, is there a way to take them further? Within Gale Digital Scholar Lab, you can find a whole range of data-mining visualisation tools and other resources that can allow you to bring elements of Digital Humanities methodologies into your research, through an easy, step-by-step process. This can add great insights to any work!

Birds of a Feather, Work Together – Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Groups

December 2, 2024March 7, 2023 by Gale Review Team

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

December 2022 saw the release of the new ‘Groups’ feature in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. This blog post will consider the nature and benefits of teamwork in Digital Humanities (DH) and highlight Group workflows in the Lab that support effective collaborative practices.

Digital Humanities and Data Mining: The Key to Efficient Seminar Preparation

October 3, 2023January 17, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

Header image - piles of leather bound books with spines facing outwards

│By Becca Leeland, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

Anyone that says to a humanities student ‘all you have to do is read a book and have an opinion’ is someone who’s never had to prepare for a seminar! Seminars are the foundation of my degree – they guide me to the crucial works in a given field, they give me the space to explore ideas, and sharpen my skills in argument and writing. But they can also be daunting, especially when you’re presented with the work of the finest minds in history and are expected to make sense of it; you know you’re intelligent, you know you can do this, but sometimes you just need a little push in the right direction…

*Enter Gale Digital Scholar Lab.*

Gale Digital Scholar Lab is designed to make data mining and primary research more efficient with a three-step process of build, clean, and analyse. Utilising some of these techniques, you can gain a solid idea of where the texts are going and what to look out for, something that is really helpful when you start reading the material more closely.

King Tut and Digital Humanities: A Pedagogical Case Study

October 3, 2023November 22, 2022 by Gale Review Team

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

The Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MELC) at the University of Washington has a history of supporting work in Digital Humanities (DH) dating back to the 1980s. More recently, the department has offered regular introductory classes in DH, which I have taught since 2015. These are usually topical in nature, i.e., the data we work with in class is related to a particular Middle Eastern theme, often related to travel or archaeology in Egypt, which is my area of research interest. This Spring Quarter 2022, my undergraduates and graduates participated in a class called ‘Digital Media – King Tut and Digital Humanities’ to learn about the theory and processes of building DH projects based on data related to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, one hundred years ago.

Investigating the Evolution of Twenty-First Century Pop Culture Using Digital Humanities Techniques

October 3, 2023November 8, 2022 by Gale Ambassadors

| By James Carney, Senior Gale Ambassador at King’s College London |

Since the new millennium’s infancy, popular culture and famous lifestyles have captivated the public to an ever greater extent. From the emergence of social media, to the escapism provided from global crises or even the marketability of celebrities in late stage capitalism, the facets of stardom’s grip are numerous. Pop culture has always been a platform for performance – be that of one’s talent, beauty, wealth or quirkiness – but in the twenty-first century, fan reaction and engagement have assumed a far more prominent role in these public theatrics. The political, social and artistic zeitgeist has become rooted not only in celebrity action, but in the increasingly deterministic public reaction too. Gale resources can be used to present the emergence of such a dichotomy through records of both output and interpretation, illuminating the dynamics of the twenty-first century’s evolved popular culture for both academic enquiry and entertainment.

Working with Datasets, A Primer

October 3, 2023October 25, 2022 by Gale Review Team

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

This month’s blog post will discuss datasets – what they are, and how they might be used by a researcher or student who plans to use digital tools to generate answers to questions they have about their data. The timing of this post coincides with the release of Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s newest feature: downloadable datasets, pre-curated for use in the classroom or by individual users. We’ll look at some of the options for working with these datasets, and end with some suggestions for sourcing open plain text data for curation and analysis.

Launch of British Library Newspapers, Part VI: Ireland 1783-1950

October 3, 2023September 27, 2022 by Gale Review Team

|By Rachel Holt, Gale Primary Sources Acquisitions Editor|

It is with great excitement that Gale announces the launch of the sixth instalment of the British Library Newspapers series. This latest module entitled Ireland 1783-1950 will add an additional 80 titles to the series and, as the name suggests, these were all published in Ireland in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A Global Community: Learning and Networking Opportunities for Digital Humanists

October 3, 2023September 20, 2022 by Gale Review Team

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

If you speak with many Digital Humanists and discuss their route into the field, a large number will reference the training opportunities afforded by annual conferences, institutes, and workshops. These events provide a forum to develop new skills, with opportunities for hands-on practice. At the same time, attendees can learn about current project work, digital tools and methodologies and, importantly, these events provide an opportunity to mingle with peers. Digital Humanities conferences are somewhat unique in that they attract audiences from many academic disciplines, who all share the common interest of incorporating methods of digital scholarship into their research or pedagogical workflow. The Digital Humanities team at Gale is no exception, with many of us attending conferences, since our goal is to continue the ongoing development of Gale Digital Scholar Lab to ensure that it’s a relevant, functional and user-friendly platform. Many of the conferences have continued in an online format over the past couple of years, with a gradual shift back to in-person or hybrid gatherings.

As well as highlighting some of the main conferences and publications to be aware of as a Digital Humanist, this post will provide a range of resources for training, also sharing other useful networks like the Digital Humanities Slack channel. It’s not exhaustive but will provide a good starting point for those who wish to start their DH journey, brush up on existing skills, or learn about current research.