Many disciplines use written texts as source material for their research, including journalism, history, political science, cultural and literary studies, business, law and education. Technology has given us the ability to digitise written materials, meaning that some amazing primary sources collected by galleries, libraries, archives and museums are now available online as text. In addition, large volumes of text are now born digital and readily available for research, from transcripts of parliamentary and political debates to news and social media.
Can we access and use these sources to ask new research questions? Is there a way we can understand or interpret a collection of books, surveys or speeches all at once? The answer to both these questions is—yes, via digital scholarship.
Digital scholarship, using computational methods to mine and analyse text, has enabled new ways to read and compare texts within different contexts or across time, cultures or geographies.
Want to learn more about digital text analysis and how it can revolutionise your research? Researcher Education and Development (RED) are now offering two workshops:
An introduction to digital texts and tools for HASS research
Discover ways to find, capture, transcribe and prepare digital texts for computational analysis. Explore tools to conduct sentiment, discourse, content and other text analyses across newspaper, literature, historical or primary source material for research.
Date: 31 March 2021
Time: 10 am – 12.30 pm
Registrations close: 4 pm, 30 March 2021
GALE Digital Scholar Lab
Explore GALE Digital Scholar Lab, an innovative online tool for searching, preparing and analysing text as data from Gale’s Primary Sources archive collections. The Lab opens new possibilities for digital scholarship, allowing natural language processing tools to be applied to raw text data (OCR), facilitating discoveries and new insights.
Six commonly used digital text analysis tools are included in the Lab including ngrams, named entity recognition, topic modelling, parts of speech, sentiment analysis and clustering. Best of all, you don’t need to have any programming experience to make use of the Lab!
Date: 6 April 2021
Time: 10 am – 11.30 am
Registrations close: 4 pm, 2 April 2021
