Students learn invaluable skills they can apply in a variety of settings and applications
 

Across the nation, there has been renewed debate over the value of humanities degree programs as campus leaders look to overcome steep budget challenges. But as the participants in Dr. Sarah Ketchley’s “Introduction to Digital Humanities” class at the University of Washington (UW) learned, humanities programs in general—and digital humanities (DH) initiatives in particular—hold great value by helping students develop essential skills that will serve them well in whatever field they choose.

Aided by tools in the DH ecosystem, such as Gale Digital Scholar Lab, the undergraduate students in Dr. Ketchley’s class learned how to collect and analyze large sets of information, such as newspaper articles about a particular topic.

“They’re learning how to manage data, which is a really important skill,” Dr. Ketchley said. “They’re also learning how to ask—and answer—questions about the data in order to respond to a research question. This is a skill that can be applied to any work that students might be asked to do in the future.”

Dr. Ketchley’s students worked together in small groups on their research projects, building on each other’s work and making shared discoveries. This collaborative approach to research is also invaluable in preparing students for the jobs of the future. 

As Dr. Ketchley noted, “Being able to work collaboratively is another critical skill that today’s employers are looking for.”

Using robust digital analysis tools
 

Digital humanities involves the use of technology to aid in the analysis of texts, which are often historical in nature, as well as other resources. In her class at UW, Dr. Ketchley—an affiliate instructor within UW’s Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures department—teaches students current digital humanities tools and methods.

Her most recent cohort involved 32 students. For the course’s culminating project, the students broke into eight groups. Each group chose a pre-curated content set and designed a research question they would answer after analyzing their collection.

The collections featured topics such as coverage of the Watergate Hotel break-in within newspaper editorials, perceptions of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement, and information about the 1986 murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. They included primary source documents from Gale Primary Sources collections.

Students had to gather, sort, and “clean” the data from their collections to prepare it for querying. Then, they used some of the many tools within Gale Digital Scholar Lab to analyze the texts. They could use an ngram tool to chart the frequency of certain keywords or phrases with the documents, for instance, or they could perform sentiment analysis to determine if the overall news coverage was positive, negative, or neutral in tone.

Students could also export the findings of their analyses and embed these as graphical visualizations of the data to support the conclusions in their research exhibits. 

Learning widely transferrable skills
 

Students said the experience taught them a lot about using digital tools to analyze collections of texts.

“The Lab is a great all-in-one tool for digital humanities students and researchers,” one student said. “Having access to all of Gale’s databases, optical character recognition software, and a simple graphical user interface to run different text analyses is super nice.”

The Lab’s new Groups feature enhanced their ability to work together on projects, allowing students to share content sets and data visualizations and add or remove content both synchronously and asynchronously. The Notebook feature facilitated communication between group members.

As one student observed: “It was great to be able to see what others were working on and read their notes.”

The Groups feature also helped Dr. Ketchley understand who contributed what to each project. Having students record what they were doing in the Notebook helped her ensure that students grasped key concepts.

“It has revolutionized my teaching,” she said.

But it was the students who benefitted the most. In the process of learning DH tools and techniques, they also learned important critical thinking and analysis skills they’ll be using in a wide variety of settings and applications in the future.

To follow the journeys of not just those who are new to digital humanities, but also those at intermediate and advanced levels of using DH tools, download these case studies of Gale research fellows at both the Committee on LGBT History and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Sarah Ketchley, PhD, is an Egyptologist, art history scholar and a lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Washington, where she teaches introductory and graduate-level classes in digital humanities. She is also a senior digital humanities specialist at Gale.

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