No Fear Digital Humanities! Text Mining Historical Documents with the Gale Digital Scholar Lab

The British historian E.H. Carr famously likened historical facts to “fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean”. Today, advances in digital humanities allows scholars to make use of exciting new tools to cast wide-ranging nets into this vast ocean, helping to identify macro trends and patterns that would have been impossible to find via traditional methods. However, such “digital humanities” techniques often demand mastery of coding skills and arcane IT jargon, often causing interested humanities scholars to think twice before trying. Well, fear no more! Gale Digital Scholar Lab is a new intuitive platform that allows uninitiated users to make full use of cutting edge text mining technology intuitively without the need of any programming language or special IT skills beyond the mouse and the keyboard. Join Senior Product Manager Masaki Morisawa in this session where he will guide users on how to conduct statistical and natural language analysis on thousands of historical texts such as newspaper backfiles, government documents, and much, much more.