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
