A blog from Gale International
│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.
│By Becca Gillott and Chris Houghton, Gale Digital Scholar Lab team│
From newspaper columns to academic reports, “The Humanities in Crisis” is a common refrain. It is a widely held fear that, in societies increasingly focused on the risks and benefits of technology in the fourth industrial revolution, studying what it means to be human is seen as increasingly irrelevant.
Irrespective of these fears, the evidence indicates that the teaching of humanities is increasingly under strain in higher education. Where we are in the UK, every summer sees the closure of yet another set of humanities departments. Higher Education assessment criteria like the UK’s Research Excellence Framework and Teaching Excellence Framework have a growing focus on measuring not just the quality, but the impact of disciplines.
This focus on impact has led to interesting developments in higher education institutions as humanities departments find new ways of working and collaborating within and without the institution.
│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 Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│ Introduction 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 … Read more
│By Isabelle Partridge, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│
Emotion, nature and individualism are some of the key themes of Romanticism. This cultural movement became popular in Western Europe during the late eighteenth century and was expressed primarily through art and literature. However, the major intellectual movement which preceded Romanticism was the Enlightenment, during which philosophers emphasised rationalism in the pursuit of knowledge. Thus, Romanticism has often been posed as an opposite reaction to the Enlightenment.
Through using Gale Primary Sources, I have gained access to a number of notable works from the Romantic period, from paintings to poems, as well as the opportunity to explore how these works have been perceived since their initial creation. Primary sources highlight how Romanticism was a dynamic and varied movement. Romanticism responded not only to the Enlightenment, but the many political and social developments, such as revolution and industrialization, which had created a backdrop for the turn of the nineteenth century.
│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 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 Nicolas Turner, Gale Ambassador at Leiden University│
The release this year of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer biopic has focused attention on the ‘Red Scare’ of the early 1950s in the United States, a period of history filled with all the ingredients of a thriller: double agents, secret recordings, and dramatic revelations. As Nolan’s film reminds us, however, there was also a very real human cost to the persecutions, with – in the words of the historian Ellen Schrecker – an impact on “the lives of thousands of people”.1
I have always been fascinated by this McCarthyite moment, in which the tide of history seemed to suddenly go out, leaving people stranded with beliefs that had previously been acceptable but were now framed as treasonous or worse. I was therefore thrilled to discover in Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism archive a treasure trove of documents that offered direct access to the experiences of those living through that dramatic moment – including, most tantalisingly of all, J. Robert Oppenheimer himself.
|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.