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Creating an Export Workflow with Gale Digital Scholar Lab

April 26, 2022 by Gale Review Team
Notes from our DH Correspondent

│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.

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Categories Digital Humanities, Gale Publishers, Society and Politics, Thought leaders Tags advanced search, Analysis Tools, Archaeology, DH Correspondent, Digital Humanities, Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Illustrated London News Historical Archive, Illustrated London News selection, metadata, newspapers, nGrams, OCR, Product Team, Sarah Ketchley, sentiment analysis, Topic Modelling, visualisation

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

January 25, 2022 by Gale Review Team
Notes from our DH correspondent design

│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.

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Categories Digital Humanities Tags DH Correspondent, Digital Humanities, Digital Literacy, Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Gale Digital Scholar Lab selection, metadata, Product Development, Product Team, Sarah Ketchley, Technology, visualisation

Discover the History of British Hong Kong Through Handwritten Documents – Now Available in “Easy Mode”!

June 4, 2021February 11, 2020 by Gale Ambassadors
HTR example

│By Pauli Kettunen, Gale Ambassador at the University of Helsinki│

One of the best aspects of Gale Primary Sources is the ability to search all the text in the archives. This is made possible by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). With this technology, any text visible in the scans (effectively photos of the primary sources) is transformed into script which can be read by a search engine, allowing the user to find relevant content much more easily. Until recently OCR has only been an option with printed texts, which has left handwritten records far less accessible in text-based searches. This can be a serious hindrance in trying to find relevant sources, as I will showcase. In addition, deciphering handwriting which dates back over a hundred years is often a significant hurdle for anyone without much experience in palaeography; even if you find the documents relevant to your project, comprehending them is another matter.

In other words, the experience of many students deciphering historical handwritten documents today feels like playing a video game in “hard mode”, something that you cannot do unless you are prepared for a lot of frustration! Fortunately, as OCR technology has developed, Gale now provides an “easy mode” for handwritten primary sources! Like a supportive character in a video game, the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) will help you on your quest to discover the secrets of fascinating old documents.

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Categories Digital Humanities, For Students, Gale Ambassadors, Society and Politics, Technology Tags advanced search, China and the Modern World, Crime Punishment and Popular Culture, Digital Humanities, Digital Scholar Lab, Discovery Tools, full text, Gale Ambassadors, Gale Primary Sources, handwriting, handwritten sources, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Britain and China 1841–1951, HTR, metadata, new technology, nineteenth century, OCR, Opium War, palaeography, Pauli Kettunen, Students, study help, Technology, Term Frequency tool, Term Popularity tool, University of Helsinki

Gale and Digital Humanities: A Potted History

June 28, 2021October 3, 2018 by Kyle Sheldrake

In 2014, Gale became the first humanities primary source publisher to give customers access to the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text that underpins all our resources, both through Text and Data Mining (TDM) drives and through single-document OCR download on the Gale Primary Sources platform. In the intervening four years, Gale has worked closely with … Read more

Categories For Librarians, Technology Tags data analysis, Data Mining, data visualisations, DH, DH community, DH project, Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship, Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Gale Primary Sources, metadata, OCR, Optical Character Recognition, TDM

Digital Humanities at the British Society for 18th Century Studies (BSECS) Conference

March 11, 2020February 15, 2017 by Gale Review Team

By Seth Cayley, Gale Vice President, Gale Primary Sources. Seth collaborates with our US product teams to direct Gale’s international archive programme.

In January, I had the pleasure of attending the annual British Society for 18th Century Studies (BSECS) Conference. This is one of the liveliest academic conferences that I attend, and always features a diverse array of sessions. Amongst my personal highlights from this year’s conference were a thought-provoking panel on Black Georgians, and a plenary lecture on the culture of letter-writing between women.

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Categories Digital Humanities, Gale Publishers, Technology, Thought leaders Tags British Society for 18th Century Studies, conference, Data Mining, Digital Humanities, ECCO, eighteenth century, metadata

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