Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Historical Studies 11 - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Digital Humanities and the Transformation

• f Historical Studies

11 January 2017 7th PULINET National Conference Chiang Mai, Thailand Masaki Morisawa Senior Product Manager, Gale, International Asia

About Gale

• HQ in Farmington Hills, Michigan, USA
• One of the foremost library reference publishers
• Has many well-established imprints, including:

– Gale – Charles Scribner’s Sons – Macmillan Reference USA

• Publishing formats include:

– Print library reference, such as thematic encyclopedias, annual directories, literary biographies/criticisms, etc. – eBook versions of print publications and an eBook platform – Aggregated Journal databases – Subject-specific Databases combining various content together – Microform collections and serials – Gale Primary Sources: digital archives of historical material

(About Me)

• Masaki Morisawa
• Based in Tokyo, Japan
• Product support for Asia
• Lived in the USA as a child
• Studied English Literature
• Married (sorry!)
• Has a daughter (6 yrs)

and a son (3 yrs)

“The Books of the Future” (1869)

The Pall Mall Gazette 15 Sept 1869

British Library Newspapers

…146 years later: “distant reading” (2015)

Beals, M.H. “Boutique Big Data: Reintegrating Close and Distant Reading of 19th-Century Newspapers”

http://mhbeals.com/boutique-big-data-reintegrating-close-and-distant-reading-of-19th-century-newspapers/

Institutions are investing in DH, even though budgets for humanities is declining DH is multidisciplinary DH is seen as a way of making humanities students more employable.

Why is Digital Humanities important for institutions?

Supporting the Digital Humanities

• 1. Gale Primary Sources Platform
• 2. Raw Data Delivery
• 3. Digital Humanities “Sandbox”

(Under active development)

• 1. Gale Primary Sources platform
• 36 products, or 272 selectable modules on a single platform
• Cross-search and analyze material across multiple content sets

Full-text Search with hit-term highlighting

Searching 138,000,000 pages from 36 different products

Term Frequency Analysis

Term Frequency Analysis

Term Frequency Analysis

Term Cluster Analysis

• 2. Raw Data Delivery
• When rights permit, Gale

makes the XML data behind its digital archives available upon request to purchasers of the product version

• Data delivered includes full-text

OCR as well as more than 75 metadata fields

http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/343 Dr Glen Roe (and team) Australian National University

ECCO and “Commonplaces”

SHAW., G. BERNARD, and VIOLET R.

• MARKHAM. "Woman Suffrage." Times 31 Oct.

1906: 8. The Times Digital Archive. URL http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/3USpS4

Dr Kat Gupta University of Nottingham

The Times and Suffrage

Professor John O’Brien University of Virginia (collaborating with University

• f Nebraska)

Mercurius Elencticus (1647) (London, England), July 19, 1648 - July 26, 1648; Issue 35. p8 Athenian Gazette or Casuistical Mercury (London, England), Saturday, October 1, 1692; Issue 10. p1

Burney and poetry hunting

• 3. Gale Digital Humanities “sandbox”
• Gale is currently developing a new Digital

Humanities platform:

– Cloud-based – Clean, analysis-ready text content from multiple sources (including non-Gale) – Access to powerful natural language processing tools from multiple providers

• We envision this platform as an online lab

environment where researchers can perform sophisticated analyses beyond the scope of our usual interface.

• This platform is currently under

development.

Conclusion

• Digital technology is allowing researchers to answer questions relevant

to the humanities in entirely new ways

• While “Digital Humanities” is hard to define, it is attracting the attention
• f institutions and researchers worldwide
• Gale, through its Primary Sources program, is committed to support

researchers and institutions in this growing field by:

– Providing rare primary source content on a unified platform with intuitive digital discovery and analysis tools – Providing raw XML data of such content to purchasing institutions for digital analyses of greater sophistication – Developing a new cloud-based lab environment that allows detailed analyses beyond the scope of the regular interface