Paper Digital Humanities Australasia 2018

DH for the many, not just the few: Introducing the Gale Digital Scholar Lab  (52)

Seth Cayley 1
  1. Gale, a Cengage company, Andover, HAMPSHIRE, United Kingdom

What is the impact of Digital Humanities on the publishing industry? Broadly, DH can be seen as part of a movement to make both research outputs and the raw materials of that research more open and accessible. Good publishers will embrace this and support the needs of the community.

Gale is the publisher of primary source archives such as ECCO and the Times Digital Archive. As such, we have been digitising the humanities for more than 15 years. However, this is not the same as supporting digital humanities.

In recent years, we have realised it is vital for the research community for the data underlying those collections to be more openly available, to enable new types of research questions and interrogation of those sources.

In this presentation, Seth will provide case studies of some of the research projects from around the world that have emerged from using this Gale data, all independent from Gale itself.

Such projects have highlighted challenges that researchers and libraries face even when data is accessible. The lessons we have learned from this have led Gale to develop the Digital Scholar Lab, which will be available at no extra charge to all libraries in Australia with Gale archives from September 2018. The Lab will not only make it easier to access data for Text and Data Mining projects, but also provides tools for those taking their first steps into DH.