A blog from Gale International
│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 Philip Virta, Senior Acquisitions Editor |
Disability studies is a growing field in academia that examines disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon. Seeing how far we have come as a society in terms of equal rights for people with disabilities is heartening, yet how has disability been viewed both historically and contemporarily?
│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│
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 features of the tool and provide tips about setup and options for displaying and refining analysis results. We’ll wrap up with a few examples of this quantitative analysis method used in research projects and publications.
│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│
One of six embedded tools in Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Named Entity Recognition (NER) processes Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text data and captures information about a range of words defined as ‘entities’, detailed below. The tool is ideally suited for text-based analysis, including text encoding and mapping. This blog post will discuss some of the highlights of the Lab’s NER tool, and things to bear in mind when creating an analysis configuration. We’ll finish with a couple of sample use cases to inspire your own NER analysis.
│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 Liping Yang, Senior Manager, Academic Publishing, Gale|
November 2023 marks the 180th anniversary of Shanghai being opened to foreign trade in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of Nanjing and the Treaty of the Bogue, which were signed after the First Opium War between China and Britain.
Coincidentally, in the same month, Gale Primary Sources rolled out a thematic digital archive that features the history of Shanghai. Titled China and the Modern World: Records of Shanghai and the International Settlement, 1836–1955, this new archive provides an extraordinary primary source collection vital to understanding and researching the social, political, and economic history of the Anglo-America-dominated yet highly globalised International Settlement in Shanghai, as well as the history of modern China.
│By Heather Colley, Doctoral Student at the University of Oxford│
The history of technological development is synonymous with a history of cultural criticism that questions the applications and ramifications of that very tech. The work of Walter Benjamin is perhaps some of the most significant and perennial in the realm of technology criticism; and, in the age of artificial intelligence, some ideas from his seminal “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”1 offer a useful lens into ever-present – and increasing – concerns about relationships between art, authenticity, criticism, and “mechanical production.”
│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 Becca Bowden, Gale Digital Scholar Lab Product Manager|
Gale is pleased to announce its second ‘Gale Digital Humanities User Engagement Program’. Following on from the success of the program in 2022, we are excited to invite eight new Gale Primary Sources and Gale Digital Scholar Lab users to collaborate closely with the Digital Humanities production team at Gale. The members of the Digital Humanities User Engagement Program will provide feedback throughout the product development process, keeping the voice of the researcher at the center of the product experience.
│By Lucy Dow, Associate Acquisitions Editor and Cheryl Moody, Marketing Manager│
The recently published Archives Unbound collection Food History: Printed and Manuscript Recipe Books 1669-1990 contains 36 manuscript recipe books and 328 printed recipe books from the Winterthur Library and Museum in Delaware. The majority of the books are in English, with a few in French and German. The published volumes come from the UK, USA, France and Germany; the manuscript volumes are, most likely, from the UK and USA.
Thrilled to be releasing this exciting new archive collection, we ran a historical baking competition between Gale staff in which the unique and illuminating primary sources piqued the interest of colleagues in numerous departments within Gale. And thus arose Gale’s inaugural Food History Bake Off!