A blog from Gale International
│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│
The outcomes of digital scholarship are often ‘non-traditional’, and may include digital exhibits, websites, databases, or interactive visualisations and narratives. The underlying organisational structure of such public scholarship is that of a project, usually with a distinct triggering research question and a definitive end point. Scholars may work with collaborators or contributors from multiple disciplines.
│By Clem Delany, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│
What does Environmental History mean to you?
On sitting down to write a brief explanation of what environmental history is, I have spent the last twenty minutes staring into space thinking about Pando. Pando is, as I’m sure the sophisticated and well-travelled audience of this blog will know, the largest and heaviest living organism on earth. Pando covers 100 acres and is around 10,000 years old. That means that when Pando first began its long, slow life, there were woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed cats still living, although increasingly finding their parties a little light on company.
Pando is a tree. It is a quaking aspen in Utah; in appearance it is over 45,000 individual quaking aspens, but below ground it has a single root system. Each ‘tree’ is a clone of its neighbours, a stem of one single organism. And it is on my mind because I am trying to think of a pithy way to describe environmental history, an area of study where many different disciplines and topics meet, connected at their roots as different expressions of one phenomenon: human interaction with the natural world.
│By Phil Virta, Senior Acquisitions Editor│
Queer history is full of groups and individuals that took a stand against injustices, fought to change discriminatory laws, advocated for acceptance, and spoke out for those who might otherwise remain marginalized. Studying this history can inspire and educate us as we face ongoing challenges in society such as homophobia, transphobia, attacks on women’s rights, and a willingness to eliminate any mention of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Archives of Sexuality and Gender: Community and Identity in North America (ASG VI) offers interesting perspectives on society, sexual identity, community building, and gender issues. It presents a history of North American society with materials that cover activism, social justice issues, disabilities, women’s rights, alternative sexualities, sexuality and religion, and ethnic communities. The collections detail how identities developed in different social conditions, and how communities grew around dedicated, sometimes courageous, individuals and organized groups.
In this venture Gale Primary Sources has partnered with the ArQuives, Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives; the GLBT Historical Society; the Elihu Burritt Library (Central Connecticut State University); and Colegio de México, which represents Canada, the United States, and Mexico. This archive comprises 28 collections that provide a personal historical perspective, helping researchers get to know the individuals and groups involved.
│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│
Every March is Women’s History Month! In keeping with the themes of digital scholarship explored in the ‘Notes from our DH Correspondent’ series, and to celebrate a lesser-known historical female figure, in this month’s post I’ll discuss how I am exploring some of my text research data using a new enhancement to Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s embedded analysis pathways.
│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│ Introduction Continuing our exploration of the digital tools accessible through Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s intuitive interface, the Parts-of-Speech (PoS) tool enables the researcher to gain granular insights into the different parts of speech used in each document in a content set. This post will highlight the main … Read more
│By Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr., Graphic Designer, Editor and Writer responsible for the Pacific Coast Counterculture Collection│
More than fifty years have passed since the rebellion of American youth during the 1960s that became known as the Counterculture. Now, this exciting and colourful movement is the subject of Gale Primary Sources’ Pacific Coast Counterculture Collection, which is part of their new digital archive Power to the People: Counterculture, Social Movements and the Alternative Press, Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century. The digital collection contains a unique mix of printed material – pamphlets, publications, periodicals and more – that captures the diversity, creativity and impact of individuals and small groups that emerged during this intense time.
│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│
This is a follow-up blog post to last month’s overview of working with Storymaps in the DH classroom. We will consider a few more ways to engage students in the creative and intellectually rigorous process of building Digital Humanities projects, conducting analyses, and demonstrating the outcomes of a quarter or semester’s-worth of work. Developing timelines, exhibits and maps involves making use of Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s export functionality, which includes the ability to download:
This exported information can then be used as the underlying data for a variety of interactive and public-facing student assignments.
│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│
It’s back-to-school season, and the next two ‘Notes from Our DH Correspondent’ blog posts will focus on non-traditional assignments in the DH classroom. Often, Humanities classes culminate in a final paper or essay which is a worthwhile exercise in sifting through relevant information to answer a question or propose a thesis. A syllabus that incorporates Digital Humanities methodologies, however, often blends subject content with technical and analytic proficiencies, meaning an essay may not be the best medium to showcase student learning in this scenario. Below we consider tools for digital storytelling which blend text, image, and analysis results to create engaging and interactive assignment outputs.
│By David Rosson, Doctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki│
A big-picture goal for the Computational History research group at the University of Helsinki is to develop methods for studying how ideas spread during the Age of Enlightenment. This was a time period marked by notable thinkers and burgeoning ideas about reason, science, human nature, the state, and society as a system operating on certain principles. These ideas have profoundly shaped the modern world we live in today and in many ways still bear influence on current affairs.
An indispensable resource for studying historical discourse in this period is Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), which covers a considerable portion of books published in Britain between 1700 and 1800. Our research group has been working with the datasets and building research infrastructure on top of Gale’s primary sources for more than a decade. One of the latest examples of our researcher-oriented tools is a web interface, Reception Reader, that helps with the tasks of exploring text reuse patterns in ECCO documents.1
│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.