Gale Launches Online Digital Humanities Course for Undergraduate Students
New Course Provides Instructors with Out-of-the-Box Digital Humanities Materials for Teaching Text and Data Mining with Primary Sources
MINNEAPOLIS, April 1, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference -- To teach undergraduate students critical digital and data literacy skills through engagement with primary source archives and text and data mining tools, Gale, part of Cengage Group, has launched "Introduction to Digital Humanities." This new online course allows instructors to integrate complete or individual modules or select specific activities into their teaching for use in their curriculum. This free course is currently in beta and available in the Gale Digital Scholar Lab (the Lab) Learning Center at no additional cost to Gale Primary Sources and Lab customers. Read The Gale Review blog to learn more about the course.
"Introduction to Digital Humanities" addresses a growing need in higher education. A recent Gale survey revealed that humanities and social science faculty, librarians, and administrators ranked "Critical Thinking with Primary Sources" and "Introduction to Text and Data Mining" as the topics of most interest for potential new courses.
Developed with input from working educators, the course directly addresses this demand by providing faculty and librarians with instructional content tied to learning objectives for teaching with Gale Primary Sources and Gale Digital Scholar Lab, ultimately saving them valuable time and effort in course development.
The course includes six modules that provide students with a well-rounded understanding of the digital humanities workflow, from initial research to final presentation. The six modules include:
- Using Digital Archives: introduces students to the fundamentals of working with digital primary source collections.
- Mining Text and Data: explores techniques for extracting valuable insights from large volumes of textual information.
- Building Content Sets: teaches students how to curate and organize relevant primary source materials for their research projects.
- Cleaning Data: a crucial step to remove irrelevant text and characters to prepare for analysis.
- Analyzing Data: delves into various methods and tools for interpreting processed information.
- Creating and Publishing Projects: guides students through the process of presenting their findings to their classmates or a wider audience.
"We created the 'Introduction to Digital Humanities' course to give instructors who are new to digital humanities access to out-of-the-box materials for teaching text and data mining with primary sources all in one place," said Dr. Sarah Ketchley, senior digital humanities specialist and lead author of the course at Gale, and affiliate instructor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Washington. "By offering flexible resources aligned with the SAA-ACRL/RBMS Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy, the course enables educators to customize content for their academic needs."
Key features of the course include:
- Assignable content tied to learning objectives and aligned with Bloom's taxonomy: ready-made, high-quality content includes readings, discussion questions, and activities, saving time for instructors.
- Comprehensive course content: covers introduction to primary sources through creating and publishing a project, equipping students with critical digital, data, and artificial intelligence literacy skills.
- Flexible integration: the course is integrated within Gale Digital Scholar Lab, includes links to Gale Primary Sources and the Lab, and can be used with any Gale Primary Sources archives.
"Many professors beginning this type of work lack formal training in these techniques," said Dr. Megan VanGorder, assistant professor at Governors State University. "Having knowledgeable individuals develop vetted digital humanities curriculum outlines is invaluable because it ensures that instructors have reliable, well-structured resources to effectively teach and integrate methods into their courses."
By the end of the course, students will:
- Gain proficiency in using text mining tools and methods.
- Understand the theoretical and practical foundations of how and why digital archives of primary sources are created.
- Be able to critically analyze the results of computational analysis.
- Create and manage text corpora (or content sets).
- Develop well-documented text-mining projects.
- Build digital literacy skills and think critically about data and technology in the humanities.
These skills are important for academic degrees in the humanities and are increasingly in demand skills for careers outside of the academy.
Gale's "Introduction to Digital Humanities" is an online course that explores the intersection of technology, data, and humanities scholarship through Gale Primary Sources and Gale Digital Scholar Lab. Over the course of six modules, students are introduced to digital archives, how to perform text and data mining on primary sources, and how to create projects and publications from their work. Each module includes learning objectives and materials, including an orientation to a theme or topic, relevant reading, discussion prompts, and activities, all tied to Bloom's taxonomy, a widely recognized framework for categorizing educational goals.
Gale is committed to continuously improving our products based on customer feedback. Over the next year, we invite faculty and librarians to share how they're teaching with these course materials.
Gale will showcase the course at the ACRL Conference, April 2-5, in Minneapolis at the Gale booth #708.
For more information on Gale's "Introduction to Digital Humanities" online course, visit the web page.
About Cengage Group and Gale
Cengage Group, an education technology company serving millions of learners in 165 countries, advances the way students learn through quality, digital experiences. The company currently serves the K-12, higher education, professional, library, English language teaching and workforce training markets worldwide. Gale, part of Cengage Group, provides libraries with original and curated content, as well as the modern research tools and technology that are crucial in connecting libraries to learning, and learners to libraries. For more than 65 years, Gale has partnered with libraries around the world to empower the discovery of knowledge and insights – where, when and how people need it. Gale has 500 employees globally with its main operations in Farmington Hills, Michigan. For more information, please visit www.gale.com.
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Kayla Siefker, Gale, part of Cengage Group
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SOURCE Gale, part of Cengage Group
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