A blog from Gale International
│By Damian Almeida, Training and Digital Communications Executive, Gale│
In the midst of World War II, there are many stories of bravery, loss, and unexpected kindness. One such story that often goes untold is that of the 700 orphaned Polish children who found refuge in New Zealand. This is the story of their journey, the circumstances that led to their displacement, and how New Zealand became a sanctuary for these young survivors.
│By Alan Thomas, AI Research Engineer at the Centre for Machine Intelligence, University of Sheffield│
Poor optical character recognition (OCR) quality is a major obstacle for humanities scholars seeking to make use of digitised primary sources such as historical newspapers. To improve the quality of noisily OCR’d historical documents, we introduce BLN600 – an open-access dataset derived from Gale’s British Library Newspapers – and showcase the potential of large language models (LLMs) for post-OCR correction using Llama.
│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│
This month’s blog post will discuss how to start the work of sourcing research documents in Gale Primary Sources (GPS) archives, before transitioning seamlessly to Gale Digital Scholar Lab to create content sets, clean OCR text data, and conduct analyses of this material to answer research questions. With this methodology, researchers are able to use the rich contextual detail and varied navigation options to begin compiling their corpus of text data outside of the Lab, which can be an attractive option if the user has an existing working knowledge of specific GPS archives, such as The Times Digital Archive, Women’s Studies Archive, or Nineteenth Century Collections Online.
There is a standardised user experience across GPS and the Lab, making the transition from one to the other familiar and streamlined. However, there are options to view documents in GPS that aren’t yet available in the Lab, which may make combining both access points useful so that no document slips through the cracks!
│By Megan Sullivan, Senior Product Manager, Gale Primary Sources│
The COVID-19 pandemic and pivot to remote instruction shed light on a longstanding challenge in the humanities and related disciplines – how can instructors effectively incorporate digital primary sources into their pedagogy?
According to a 2021 study by ITHAKA S&R, two of the key obstacles to teaching with primary sources are: (1) discovery tools are not optimised to help instructors locate resources for classroom use and (2) students do not always have the required skills to find and evaluate relevant primary sources. These two problems were top of mind when designing the Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers which are now approaching the three-year anniversary of their initial release.
│By Liping Yang, Senior Manager, Academic Publishing│ The Flodden was a barque or three-masted sailing ship originally constructed in Britain and later sold to Australia and registered in Melbourne. On June 22, 1883, the ship departed from Fremantle, Western Australia, bound for Shanghai, carrying a cargo of 806 tons of sandalwood. Unfortunately, on August 23, … Read more
│By Carolyn Beckford, Gale Product Trainer│
Joseph Boulogne, later adopted as Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was born in Guadeloupe, a former French colony. He was a French violinist, conductor, composer, and a soldier.
Boulogne was the first classical composer of African descent to attain widespread acclaim in European music. He composed an array of violin concertos, string quartets, sinfonia concertantes, violin duets, sonatas, symphonies, stage works, and opera comique. He was also a contemporary and rival of Mozart, although it’s likely that racism obscured his recognition as a great composer.
│By Masaki Morisawa, Senior Product Manager│ In the February 1991 issue of the National Geographic there is an aerial photo of a strange architectural structure in Hong Kong. What at first glance seems like a giant post-apocalyptic fortress, on closer examination reveals itself to be a jumble of many small buildings crammed so close together … Read more
│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│
Recently, three Python Notebooks were added to Gale Digital Scholar Lab to offer additional flexibility in processing and analysing text data. Each of the Notebooks can be downloaded by a researcher, then used or adapted to suit individual needs. This blog post offers some considerations for those interested in incorporating Python-based workflows into their text analysis pipeline but aren’t quite sure where to start.
This blog can also be read in conjunction with Women’s History Month in Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Named Entity Recognition, Python Notebooks, and an Intrepid Female Diarist which offers some practical programming insights into a project using Named Entity Recognition.
│By Tom English, Strategic Initiatives Manager – EMEA│
When the world was locked down in March 2020 due to the covid 19 pandemic, students and researchers very suddenly lost access to valuable primary source materials. To compensate for such a swift and sudden loss of access to physical primary source materials, academic libraries needed to quickly obtain access to large swathes of digital primary sources.
│By Emma Harris, Associate Editor, Gale Primary Sources│
Gale Primary Sources offers a multitude of digital archives for all manners of historical research. But researchers may not realise that Gale’s archives can be used to explore one popular area of history – family history, or genealogy. Researching family history can often have its limitations, particularly geographical, yet digital archives help to break down these barriers, allowing researchers to find material from a range of locations that would usually not be accessible without travel.
Over the years, my family has been mapping out the history of our relatives, creating a broader picture of where we came from. So, aware of all the useful documents in Gale Primary Sources, I decided to see what extra information I could glean on my relatives, whilst also showing how certain Gale archives are especially useful for genealogical research.