Digital Humanities Library Lab: Exploring digital collections, 3 March 2017

Wrapping up

It has been quite a challenge to limit what is covered in a three-hour workshop and allow enough time to cover it properly. I will mention a couple of items that sadly did not make the cut.

Honourable mention: JSTOR Data for Research

If you wish to try these kinds of techniques on another resource, consider JSTOR Data for Research (DfR).

To get very far with this source, you would need to have someone with programming experience in your team, and there was not enough time to cover that level of coding in this workshop.

Another time?: Illustrated London News Historical Archive 1842-2003

Some research and exploration requires the University to have access to a specially-ordered hard drive copy of a collection. One resource in particular that I have begun exploring is Gale Cengage Illustrated London News Historical Archive.

So what could be done with this hard drive copy that could not be done with the regular web interface? For one, the hard drive contains the full-text of each issue of the newspaper. In this case, it contains JPG images for each page, in a well-defined file structure. So we could write some code to analyse the images for each week in the collection, look at the front cover to determine the average or dominant colour, then illustrate a timeline or calendar with the colours. We could then correlate the colour with some quantity such as the national interest rate on that issue’s date, to ask if there is a relationship between issue cover colour and the economy. Or compare to an analysis of the text to look for overall optimism (or pessimism) with time.

Would that be interesting to you?

Other collections

I am building a new subject guide for using Library collections in Digital Humanities research. Only the page on Collections is ready to use yet. It lists some of the resources of particular interest.

Please do not share this resource with students yet.

Copyright and licence agreements

See the Library’s Copyright Guidance for information and support.

Conclusions

In this workshop, we have begun to look at how Library collections and resources can be used in Digital Humanities research, and what some of the advantages and challenges of it may include.

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