Digital Humanities

and the Transformation

of Historical Studies

11 January 20177th PULINET National Conference Chiang Mai, Thailand

Masaki MorisawaSenior 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. URLhttp://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/3USpS4

Dr Kat GuptaUniversity of Nottingham

The Times and Suffrage

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

Mercurius Elencticus (1647) (London, England), July 19, 1648 - July 26, 1648; Issue 35. p8

Athenian Gazette or CasuisticalMercury (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

of 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