Funded by Gale, the Gale Scholar Asia Pacific, Digital Humanities Oxford Fellowships program supports scholars for a short period of research into a digital humanities–related topic at the University of Oxford, using the Centre for Digital Scholarship of the Bodleian Libraries. The goal of the program is to encourage emerging digital humanities scholarship in the Asia-Pacific region.
We welcome Gale DH Fellows, Paul Pickering and Chou Wu as they talk about their individual research projects and the impact that spending time at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford has had on their research experience.
Watch the 2nd year Gale-Oxford DH Fellows talk about their experiences at the University of Oxford and how the fellowships have helped enhance their research and develop new collaborative opportunities at Oxford.
Dr. Xiurong Zhao, Renmin University of China, ChinaProject: The Use of GIS to Map Infectious Diseases in Victorian England
The Use of GIS to Map Infectious Diseases in Victorian England seeks to find new answers about the causes of infectious diseases and their spread, and the social impacts of these diseases. By using tools from Gale Digital Scholar Lab, the project will utilize new research methods to produce disease maps to support new information and resources that are easily accessible to the public. GIS provides an excellent means for visualizing and analyzing epidemiological data—revealing trends, dependencies, and inter-relationships that would be more difficult to discover in tabular form.
Dr. Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, Australian National University, AustraliaProject: Transnational Liberalism: A Linked Data Case Study of Australian Political History
Transnational Liberalism: A Linked Data Case Study of Australian Political History will leverage datasets to answer questions about the political landscape in colonial Australia, the wider Asia-Pacific region, and the British world more generally during the mid- to late-1800s. The project provides comprehensive insight into the origins of the Liberal Party, which has dominated the national government of Australia for 62 years (since WWII) and shaped the Asia-Pacific region for decades.
Watch the first year cohort of Gale DH Fellows talk about their experiences at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford and the impact the fellowships have had on their digital humanities research. Learn too from Bodley's Librarian, Richard Ovendon and the Gale team about the wealth of resources available to the fellows at the Bodleian as well as Gale’s ongoing support of new digital humanities research.
The following candidates were awarded the Gale Scholar Asia Pacific, Digital Humanities Oxford Fellowships in the 2021–2022 academic year.
Project: The Communication Circuit of Chinese Christian Books (1807–1949)
Dr. Chen’s project aims to extend his doctoral work on Chinese and Western book culture and cultural exchange by examining Chinese Christian books. His work builds on previous research using Gale Primary Sources and will utilize access to the Bodleian holdings of books by Chinese missionaries. Dr Chen’s ambition to contribute to the scholarly Chinese community in Oxford, and to share his learning with colleagues in Nankai, were particularly welcomed.
Project: Clientage, Politics and the Elizabethan Regime: Digital Humanities and New Perspectives
Dr. Hsuan-Ying Tu aims to take advantage of extensive late sixteenth-century Bodleian holdings and State Papers Online from Gale Primary Sources to investigate the personal and political relationships through which information flowed and formed the court and government bureaucratic systems. She will use digital humanities methods to unravel the web of deliberately complex papers left by Elizabethan "spymasters."
Project: Digitizing Samuel Beckett’s Novel Watt: The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and Beyond
Dr. Byron’s project aims to widen historical understanding of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt by placing it within the historical context of its composition during the Second World War. He will work with sources from Gale Primary Sources and add to these archives through his project, which will capitalize on Oxford’s existing expertise on modern literature and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, led by Professor Dirk van Hulle.
The recruiting panel was particularly impressed by Dr. Byron’s ambition to open complex manuscripts to a wider readership through building digital "clues" and pathways so readers can explore contexts and the relationships of this work to contemporary issues of political radicalisms and migration.