Technology

Ways To Improve Discoverability at Your Library

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| Magaly Taylor, Usage and Discovery Product Manager |

Discovery is a crucial aspect of working with eResources for content providers and libraries. It encompasses actions related to searching, retrieving, and accessing relevant content that end users may not be aware of. The term ‘Discoverability’ is key here. It refers to the extent to which eResources are searchable in a discovery system, and it directly influences the ease with which users can find the information they need, thereby enhancing their overall experience. In this post I will explore the complexities of discovery and how to enhance discoverability in libraries.

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Leveraging Large Language Models for Post-OCR Correction of Nineteenth-Century British Newspapers

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Montage of images from this blog post, mixed with images from British Library Newspapers archive

│By Alan Thomas, AI Research Engineer at the Centre for Machine Intelligence, University of Sheffield│

Poor optical character recognition (OCR) quality is a major obstacle for humanities scholars seeking to make use of digitised primary sources such as historical newspapers. To improve the quality of noisily OCR’d historical documents, we introduce BLN600 – an open-access dataset derived from Gale’s British Library Newspapers – and showcase the potential of large language models (LLMs) for post-OCR correction using Llama.

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Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers: A Retrospective

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│By Megan Sullivan, Senior Product Manager, Gale Primary Sources│

The COVID-19 pandemic and pivot to remote instruction shed light on a longstanding challenge in the humanities and related disciplines – how can instructors effectively incorporate digital primary sources into their pedagogy?

According to a 2021 study by ITHAKA S&R, two of the key obstacles to teaching with primary sources are: (1) discovery tools are not optimised to help instructors locate resources for classroom use and (2) students do not always have the required skills to find and evaluate relevant primary sources. These two problems were top of mind when designing the Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers which are now approaching the three-year anniversary of their initial release.

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Coding for Humanists: Python Notebooks in Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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

Recently, three Python Notebooks were added to Gale Digital Scholar Lab to offer additional flexibility in processing and analysing text data. Each of the Notebooks can be downloaded by a researcher, then used or adapted to suit individual needs. This blog post offers some considerations for those interested in incorporating Python-based workflows into their text analysis pipeline but aren’t quite sure where to start.

This blog can also be read in conjunction with Women’s History Month in Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Named Entity Recognition, Python Notebooks, and an Intrepid Female Diarist which offers some practical programming insights into a project using Named Entity Recognition.

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Gale Accelerate: The Best of Gale for You

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│By Tom English, Strategic Initiatives Manager – EMEA│

When the world was locked down in March 2020 due to the covid 19 pandemic, students and researchers very suddenly lost access to valuable primary source materials. To compensate for such a swift and sudden loss of access to physical primary source materials, academic libraries needed to quickly obtain access to large swathes of digital primary sources.

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The Influence of British Media on its Politics: Insights from Gale Primary Sources

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│By Satakshi Rahi, Gale Ambassador at King’s College London│

Exploring the profound influence of British media on its politics unveils a narrative shaped over centuries of transformation. From the advent of print journalism to today’s digital dominance, British media has wielded significant power in shaping public opinion, driving policy agendas, and defining political discourse. Leveraging insights from Gale Primary Sources, this exploration delves into pivotal historical moments and contemporary challenges, providing a nuanced perspective on how British media continues to mould the political landscape.

The material from Gale‘s extensive archives highlights the crucial role of media literacy and informed engagement in navigating today’s complex media landscape, ensuring transparency and accountability in public discourse while acknowledging British media’s pivotal role in shaping the nation’s political narrative.

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Playing Games with Data: Building Interactive Narratives with Twine

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

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute, at the University of Victoria, BC, has taken place every June since 2001. The intensive week of workshops, lectures, papers and social gatherings has a long history of active engagement in learning, conversation and discussions of research and methodologies.

I have had the opportunity to attend each year since 2011 and have participated in 5-day workshops on topics ranging from text encoding, digital project management, mapping, data visualization, IIIF viewers, python programming, cloud computing and DH for department chairs and deans. As an academic with an active research agenda and regular engagement in both undergraduate and graduate classrooms, I have come to greatly value the in-depth and diverse conversations taking place during the week, and 2024 has been no exception.

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Finding Meaning in K-Means: Clustering Analysis in Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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

Of the six tools in Gale Digital Scholar Lab, clustering is often considered the most challenging methodology to interpret effectively. This blog post will explore the nature of this analysis tool and offer some tips for running an analysis.

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Plans, Charts, Images and Drawings: Eighteenth Century Collections Online as a Source of Visual Information Transmission

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│By Sirkku Ruokkeinen, University of Turku, Finland│

In 1786, the Scottish economist William Playfair (1759–1823) published the Commercial and Political Atlas, reporting on the trade balance between England and continental Europe, West Indies, and North America. The work included something never before seen in print: line and bar charts. These statistical tools, although familiar to many of us now, are in fact quite complex devices and necessitate some understanding of their structure for a successful reading. So how were Playfair’s eighteenth century readers able to understand them?

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Building Projects in Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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│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.

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