Digital Humanities posts covering new technology and developments

Introducing My Students to Digital Humanities Research Techniques

October 3, 2023June 7, 2022 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford│

Digital resources are vital to conducting academic research and teaching the next generation of scholars. As educators, teaching with technology can be daunting. In my previous blog posts PhDing in a Pandemic: The Impact of COVID-19 on Research and Teaching and Top 10 Tips for Teaching with Primary Sources, I’ve written about how you can help students get to grips with using a range of Gale Primary Sources including Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Burney Newspapers, and British Literary Manuscripts Online. But how do you help your students take the next step as digital humanists in a growing discipline? Teaching them how to use an innovative resource such as Gale Digital Scholar Lab is one way which you as an educator can help students develop their research skills and methodologies in a changing scholarly landscape.

Doing the Digital Laundry? Notes on Cleaning Unstructured Text Data

October 3, 2023May 24, 2022 by Gale Review Team

│By Sarah L Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│

An integral part of the workflow of any digital humanities project involving text generated automatically by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the correction of so-called OCR errors. The process is also called ‘data cleaning’. This post will explore some of the considerations researchers should be aware of before starting to clean their data in Gale Digital Scholar Lab, using the built-in text cleaning tool. It will also offer additional resources for working with data in other formats outside of the Lab.

How Gale Digital Scholar Lab Could Support Alternative Research Methods

October 3, 2023May 3, 2022 by Gale Ambassadors

|By Rob Youngs do Patrocinio, Gale Ambassador at University College London|

Academic research has evolved drastically in recent years, with new technology revolutionising research methods. One impact is the growing influence of quantitative analysis within the Humanities and Social Sciences. This has impacted research and student curriculums. I am currently a third-year student at University College London (UCL) studying History and Politics of the Americas with languages. Last year, my course included a ‘Research Methods’ module. The quantitative section of this module introduced me to the value of digital humanities (DH), particularly R-Studio which we took time to practise and utilise in our university projects. My institute’s different DH workshops were useful in that they enhanced the module and enriched my course as it presented a new approach to social scientific research. This challenged me to further question the complexities of QUAN vs QUAL/mixed-methods research, and to what extent they are mutually inclusive/exclusive in different research contexts.

Creating an Export Workflow with Gale Digital Scholar Lab

October 3, 2023April 26, 2022 by Gale Review Team

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

This digital project was prompted by the broad research question: how was archaeology reported in The Illustrated London News (ILN)? The ILN is a publication notable for its fine illustrations and contributions by some of the pre-eminent archaeologists of the day. Gale Primary Sources offers access to the entire run of the newspaper covering the period 1842-2003. This blog post describes a workflow for the preliminary investigation of the data: initial content set creation, cleaning, analysis, export and visualization. At the outset, the research questions were necessarily broad:

Which words were most prevalent in articles reporting on archaeological digs?
What themes or topics are most prevalent in the dataset?
What was the overall feeling about this type of reporting? Was it reported favourably?
Is it possible to identify which archaeologists were directly contributing to the publication and how many contributions they made?

Engaging in the practical process of curation and analysis offers opportunities to refine these questions, and almost inevitably suggests new avenues for future exploration.

Exploring Receptions of Classical Literature with The Times Digital Archive and Gale Digital Scholar Lab

October 3, 2023April 19, 2022 by Gale Ambassadors

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

Classical Reception Studies refers to the interpretation, imaginings and reimaginings of the classical world since antiquity. It can illuminate the enduring pertinence of the ancient world throughout history – particularly in the cultural realm where its influence is most pronounced. Gale digital archives and, more recently, the Gale Digital Scholar Lab can markedly benefit any undertaking into this area by exposing the nature of classical reception across the ages, but also the discourses that surrounded and emerged from various interpretations of the ancient past.

Practical Pedagogy with Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Part II: Approaches to Project-Based Teaching and Learning

October 3, 2023March 29, 2022 by Gale Review Team

Header image - Notes from a DH Correspondent

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

One of the most significant shifts that has been taking place in humanities research in recent years is the movement towards team-based projects and public scholarship, in contrast to more traditional models of individual scholarship that favour print publication. The teams that form to engage in digital scholarship are often interdisciplinary, reflecting the diverse skillsets needed to create and publish digital research. A digital scholarship team may comprise disciplinary scholars, computer programmers, data scientists, specialists in informatics and design, and could be made up of faculty, staff, students, and consultants. Similarly, the digital humanities classroom offers students the opportunity to learn the skills required to successfully participate in team-based projects. This blog post suggests ways to incorporate project-based activities in the class using Gale Digital Scholar Lab.

Practical Pedagogy with Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Part I: Developing Your Syllabus and Learning Objectives

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

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

There are many advantages to incorporating work with digital tools in the humanities classroom. As students graduate and transition to the workplace, demonstrable digital literacy is often a pre-requisite for employment, so students are keen to learn such skills, and to articulate what they have learned in a way that makes sense in professional settings.

The next two posts in this ‘Notes from our DH Correspondent’ series will highlight how classroom use of Gale Digital Scholar Lab provides an accessible entry point for faculty who want to teach Digital Humanities (DH) methodologies using text-based humanities data and offer a learning experience that is both relevant and enriching for students. Part I will provide suggestions and examples for drafting a syllabus and for identifying appropriate learning objectives in the DH classroom. Part II will cover ways to present the platform to students new to the field of DH or to working with historical primary source archives, along with suggestions for incorporating project-based learning, developing granular rubrics and options for assessing student work.

A Sense of Déjà vu? Iteration in Digital Humanities Project Building using Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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

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

This post explores the iterative process of digital humanities project work in Gale Digital Scholar Lab, which provides a user-friendly interface for text mining historical primary source documents from Gale Primary Sources and plaintext material uploaded by researchers. The post discusses how each stage of the curation and cleaning process (Build, Clean, Analyse) is impacted by the need for a flexible and regenerative mindset and workflow that is less linear in nature, more cyclical and iterative.

New Experience for Gale Digital Scholar Lab

October 3, 2023November 30, 2021 by Gale Review Team

|By Gale Digital Scholar Lab Product Management team|

Gale Digital Scholar Lab creates new possibilities by offering solutions to the most common challenges facing researchers in the digital humanities today. Since its launch in 2018, the team has engaged with librarians, instructors, and students to find out what they’d like to see in the tool and how they use it for research, teaching, and learning. Based on those continuous conversations, the team regularly makes improvements to the user experience.

Unearthing and Decolonising the Rasta Voice

October 3, 2023November 16, 2021 by Gale Ambassadors

| By Robert Youngs do Patrocinio, Gale Ambassador at University College London|

This post will focus on raising awareness of the Rasta struggle to practise their religion, principally using Gale’s Archives Unbound collections, an extensive database of primary sources included in Gale Reference Complete that many university students such as myself can utilise when conducting all types of research. It currently comprises 382 collections (more are added each year), and includes a compelling collection titled: Rastafari Ephemeral Publications from the Written Rastafari Archives Project. The Rastafarianism movement can be traced back to its beginnings in 1930s Jamaica and its strong connections with the coronation of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie (1930) who remains a principal figure in the Rastafarian religion. As the political cartoon below illustrates, the Rasta faith is rooted in an ideology which believes that Africa is paramount to black individuals obtaining freedom and escaping their physical, spiritual, emotional and historical oppression and struggle against slavery. As a religious belief system, I think that it is important to become mindful of Rastafari traditions and invest time in accessing elements of this culture, due to the significance of its relationship to the black experience and post-slavery trauma.