Can Digital Humanities teach us more about Political Extremism?

Graphs generated by Gale Primary Sources Term Frequency tool

│By Chris Houghton, Head of Digital Scholarship, Gale International

Studying extremist groups has, sadly, never been more relevant or more important. Can text mining and data analysis be used to enhance this study, and potentially make discoveries that could help with the ongoing fight against political extremism? In this blog, I provide some suggestions of how scholars might benefit from utilising these research methods, by showing what can be uncovered by combining Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism archive with the Gale Digital Scholar Lab.

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Platform or Publisher? The debate is older than you might think.

Photo of laptop showing YouTube
The articles linked to in this post may contain images and language that some may find distressing. Any opinions stated in the articles are those of the authors. All articles are from The Daily Mail Historical Archive add-on module (2005-2016).

│By Kyle Sheldrake, Strategic Marketing Manager – Insights and Development│

Social media and other platforms have greatly increased the ability to spread misinformation and promote division. To many people, demands for platforms such as YouTube and Facebook to take such responsibility may seem relatively new. Many would link it to the rise (or should we say wider public awareness) of “fake news,” hate speech, deliberate misinformation and political bias in the wake of Brexit and questions around Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory.

But is this a recent phenomenon, or has it been an ongoing part of YouTube’s history?

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Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism Archive: Why create it and why is it important now more than ever?

|By Rachel Holt, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources|

When telling friends and family that I was working on a digital archive focusing on right-wing extremists, far-left militants and a wide range of radical movements in between, the most common response was ‘why’? To answer that I must explain the motivation that triggered this project, as well as why such an archive is important now more than ever.

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