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Digital Humanities and Data Mining: The Key to Efficient Seminar Preparation

January 17, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors
Header image - piles of leather bound books with spines facing outwards

│By Becca Leeland, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

Anyone that says to a humanities student ‘all you have to do is read a book and have an opinion’ is someone who’s never had to prepare for a seminar! Seminars are the foundation of my degree – they guide me to the crucial works in a given field, they give me the space to explore ideas, and sharpen my skills in argument and writing. But they can also be daunting, especially when you’re presented with the work of the finest minds in history and are expected to make sense of it; you know you’re intelligent, you know you can do this, but sometimes you just need a little push in the right direction…

*Enter Gale Digital Scholar Lab.*

Gale Digital Scholar Lab is designed to make data mining and primary research more efficient with a three-step process of build, clean, and analyse. Utilising some of these techniques, you can gain a solid idea of where the texts are going and what to look out for, something that is really helpful when you start reading the material more closely.

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Categories Digital Humanities, For Students, Gale Ambassadors Tags Analysis Tools, Becca Leeland, Digital Humanities, Digital Literacy, dissertation, Gale Ambassadors, Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Gale Digital Scholar Lab selection, Learning, metadata, nGrams, politics, primary source literacy, Student, Student Life, study tips, teaching, Topic Modelling, Undergraduates, University of Exeter, visualisation

Working with Datasets, A Primer

October 25, 2022 by Gale Review Team
Notes from a DH Correspondent

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

This month’s blog post will discuss datasets – what they are, and how they might be used by a researcher or student who plans to use digital tools to generate answers to questions they have about their data. The timing of this post coincides with the release of Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s newest feature: downloadable datasets, pre-curated for use in the classroom or by individual users. We’ll look at some of the options for working with these datasets, and end with some suggestions for sourcing open plain text data for curation and analysis.

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Categories Digital Humanities, Gale News, Gale Publishers, Thought leaders Tags Analysis Tools, DH Correspondent, Digital Humanities, Digital Literacy, Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Gale Digital Scholar Lab selection, Gale News, Learning, metadata, OCR, Product Development, Product Team, Sarah Ketchley, study tips, teaching, Teaching Tips, Thought Leadership

A Global Community: Learning and Networking Opportunities for Digital Humanists

October 5, 2022September 20, 2022 by Gale Review Team
Notes from a DH Correspondent

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

If you speak with many Digital Humanists and discuss their route into the field, a large number will reference the training opportunities afforded by annual conferences, institutes, and workshops. These events provide a forum to develop new skills, with opportunities for hands-on practice. At the same time, attendees can learn about current project work, digital tools and methodologies and, importantly, these events provide an opportunity to mingle with peers. Digital Humanities conferences are somewhat unique in that they attract audiences from many academic disciplines, who all share the common interest of incorporating methods of digital scholarship into their research or pedagogical workflow. The Digital Humanities team at Gale is no exception, with many of us attending conferences, since our goal is to continue the ongoing development of Gale Digital Scholar Lab to ensure that it’s a relevant, functional and user-friendly platform. Many of the conferences have continued in an online format over the past couple of years, with a gradual shift back to in-person or hybrid gatherings.

As well as highlighting some of the main conferences and publications to be aware of as a Digital Humanist, this post will provide a range of resources for training, also sharing other useful networks like the Digital Humanities Slack channel. It’s not exhaustive but will provide a good starting point for those who wish to start their DH journey, brush up on existing skills, or learn about current research.

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

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Identifying Themes and Topics in Archives Using Gale Digital Scholar Lab

July 6, 2022June 28, 2022 by Gale Review Team
Notes from our DH Correspondent

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

Getting to grips with the scope and content of a digital primary source archive held by an institution’s library can be daunting, particularly if the archive consists of thousands of documents in a variety of formats. For an individual researcher, the task of sifting through vast quantities of data in the quest for material that is relevant for a particular research topic is something that can take years to accomplish. This blog post will explore some of the ways a researcher can use Gale Digital Scholar Lab in conjunction with Gale Primary Sources as a platform for exploratory analysis to gain insights into the topics and themes represented in a chosen archive.

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Categories Digital Humanities Tags Clustering, DH Correspondent, Digital Humanities, Digital Literacy, Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Gale Digital Scholar Lab selection, Learning, metadata, primary source literacy, Sarah Ketchley, study tips, Topic Modelling, visualisation

Doing the Digital Laundry? Notes on Cleaning Unstructured Text Data

May 24, 2022 by Gale Review Team
Notes from our DH Correspondent

│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.

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Categories Digital Humanities, Thought leaders Tags Analysis Tools, DH Correspondent, Digital Humanities, Digital Literacy, Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Gale Digital Scholar Lab selection, metadata, nGrams, OCR, Parts of Speech, Product Team, Sarah Ketchley, sentiment analysis, Technology, Topic Modelling, visualisation

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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