Product Team – Page 2 – The Gale Review

The Second Gale Digital Humanities User Engagement Program

October 17, 2023 by Gale Review Team

|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.

Baking Through Time: Gale’s Food History Bake Off!

November 22, 2023October 10, 2023 by Gale Review Team

│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!

Re-imagining Assignments in the DH Classroom: StoryMaps

October 4, 2023September 19, 2023 by Gale Review Team

│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.

Understanding Recent Enhancements to Sentiment Analysis in Gale Digital Scholar Lab

March 1, 2024August 22, 2023 by Gale Review Team

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

Sentiment Analysis can be described as an exploratory form of analysis that reveals trends or patterns in positive, negative or neutral sentiment of a collected set of documents (a ‘Content Set’). This type of analysis can identify avenues for further research or investigation at both a macro (Content Set) and micro (document) level.¹ Sentiment Analysis is one of the six analysis tools available in Gale Digital Scholar Lab where it was recently updated to include an expanded sentiment lexicon which offers opportunities to further refine analysis results. This blog post will discuss these enhancements and offer suggested pathways to work with Sentiment Analysis both in the classroom and for research.

Groups and Notebooks: Using Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s latest features in the DH classroom

October 3, 2023June 26, 2023 by Gale Review Team

│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.

Birds of a Feather, Work Together – Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Groups

October 3, 2023March 7, 2023 by Gale Review Team

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

December 2022 saw the release of the new ‘Groups’ feature in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. This blog post will consider the nature and benefits of teamwork in Digital Humanities (DH) and highlight Group workflows in the Lab that support effective collaborative practices.

King Tut and Digital Humanities: A Pedagogical Case Study

October 3, 2023November 22, 2022 by Gale Review Team

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

The Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MELC) at the University of Washington has a history of supporting work in Digital Humanities (DH) dating back to the 1980s. More recently, the department has offered regular introductory classes in DH, which I have taught since 2015. These are usually topical in nature, i.e., the data we work with in class is related to a particular Middle Eastern theme, often related to travel or archaeology in Egypt, which is my area of research interest. This Spring Quarter 2022, my undergraduates and graduates participated in a class called ‘Digital Media – King Tut and Digital Humanities’ to learn about the theory and processes of building DH projects based on data related to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, one hundred years ago.

Working with Datasets, A Primer

October 3, 2023October 25, 2022 by Gale Review Team

│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.

A Global Community: Learning and Networking Opportunities for Digital Humanists

October 3, 2023September 20, 2022 by Gale Review Team

│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.

Conspiracy Theories in the Archives

October 3, 2023August 9, 2022 by Gale Review Team

|By Rebecca Bowden, Gale Digital Scholar Lab Product Manager|

Everybody has heard one conspiracy theory or another. Some buy into them wholeheartedly, others mock them and call out their absurdity. Whichever camp you fall into, there is undoubtedly something fascinating about conspiracy theories! They’re akin to the myths and legends that ancient civilisations used to explain the world around them – tales of manipulative gods and hidden cities. Yet one could argue that those civilisations had an “excuse” – they did not have the years of advanced scientific discovery that we now enjoy! Even with this scientific knowledge, however, conspiracy theories still emerge and take hold, often growing ever more elaborate and determined, even whilst they’re being actively discredited.

There are the famous ones: Area 51, accusations that Princess Diana was murdered, that 9/11 was planned by the US Government, that there was a second gunman at the assassination of JFK, or that Kennedy was killed using an umbrella. Or a government plot. The CIA! The Mafia! Fidel Castro! Everyone’s heard of those. Then there are the more unusual conspiracy theories which may be entirely new to you, many of which still have the ability to baffle us with their absurdity. All of them appear within Gale Primary Sources. In this blog post, we delve deeper into the world of conspiracy theories.