All Blog Posts - Page 16 of 50

A Sense of Déjà vu? Iteration in Digital Humanities Project Building using Gale Digital Scholar Lab

October 3, 2023January 25, 2022 by Gale Review Team

│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist, Gale│

This post explores the iterative process of digital humanities project work in Gale Digital Scholar Lab, which provides a user-friendly interface for text mining historical primary source documents from Gale Primary Sources and plaintext material uploaded by researchers. The post discusses how each stage of the curation and cleaning process (Build, Clean, Analyse) is impacted by the need for a flexible and regenerative mindset and workflow that is less linear in nature, more cyclical and iterative.

The COVID Impact: New Modes of Presenting Your PhD Research During a Pandemic

October 3, 2023January 19, 2022 by Gale Ambassadors

|By Meg Ison, Gale Ambassador at the University of Portsmouth|

In this blog post I will discuss the impact of the pandemic on the PhD experience, and focus on how and why online conferences and blog posts have become new and extremely effective ways for PhD students to disseminate their research.

Classified Before the Fall of Saigon: Exploring U.S. Declassified Documents Online

October 3, 2023January 11, 2022 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Torsti Grönberg, Gale Ambassador at the University of Helsinki│

On August 30, 2021, the United States Armed Forces completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan. History rarely repeats, but it does rhyme. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban and the following airlift of allied personnel out of the city reminded me keenly of the Fall of Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, to the North Vietnamese on May 30, 1975. The parallels between the ends of these armed conflicts seem endless and the images of desperate Afghans crowding the Kabul airport bring with them a sense of déjà vu. In this blog post I will showcase the usefulness of Gale’s US Declassified Documents Online archive and examine the trail of breadcrumbs left by declassified US documents dated shortly before the Fall of Saigon, during the Vietnam War. What was the US government focusing on? Who was President Gerald Ford writing to? What kinds of reports and memos were landing on Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s desk?

Announcing a New Partnership Between Gale and the British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies

October 3, 2023January 5, 2022 by Gale Review Team

Design made combining Gale and BSECS logos

│By Chris Houghton, Head of Digital Scholarship│

Gale is delighted to announce a partnership with BSECS, the British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. This partnership provides free access to Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) for all non-affiliated members of the society who are UK residents. From 1 February 2022, any member of BSECS resident in the UK without an existing affiliation to a UK or Ireland higher education institution will be able to apply for access to this seminal resource at no cost.

Free Speech in a “Post-Truth” Era – The Value of Digital Archives

October 3, 2023December 14, 2021 by Gale Ambassadors

| By James Carney, Gale Ambassador at King’s College London |

As a literature student, I have studied the power of language for myriad and varying purposes in a range of historical contexts. My studies have exposed me to the fact that language is inherently political – the way in which we construct verbal expression can reflect and compound the powerful forces that command us like hierarchies, social structures, identities or even biases. An example that comes to mind is the profound racism in the name given to South America’s most notable sea – the Caribbean. Popularised by the cartographer Thomas Jeffreys, the word finds roots in the Spanish word for cannibal (carib), and is a name which conquistadors enforced on the natives of this region. The political nature of language is clear from this example – in line with the constructed ‘civilising’ mission of imperialism, language came to reflect prevailing perceptions of the Spanish conquerors in relation to their (problematically) ‘savage’ subjects.

The Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers – A Student’s Perspective

October 3, 2023December 7, 2021 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Ellie Brosnan, Gale Ambassador at Durham University│

Primary sources are central to a range of academic disciplines but particularly History where the need to engage independently and deeply with archival material grows as students progress through their course. I remember well the way we were introduced to History and the concept of primary sources at school, making our own mocked-up documents. Emulating figures from the past, we wrote on tea-stained paper, imagining how past individuals might have felt about the events of their time. This was great fun but, as one progresses through the education system and moves on to analysing real historical documents, our engagement with History must become increasingly sophisticated and, by university-level, the quantity and complexity of the primary sources with which we must engage can become overwhelming. Plus, the breadth of questions we must ask – who wrote the source and why – on top of the broader context in which it was created, is a lot to recognise, understand and consider. This is where Gale’s Learning Centers come in! Released in October 2021, they help students get to grips with a primary source archive. Currently included in twelve of the Gale Primary Sources archives, they will later be available in all Gale archives.

Pride and Protest: LGBT+ Disability Activism in the US, 1985-1995

October 3, 2023December 3, 2021 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Mo Clarke, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

Disabled. A word many find uncomfortable. Indeed, it seems much of society still assumes that to be disabled is to be broken, but while it is true that many people with disabilities experience ableism and insufficient support, resources and facilities, activists have long fought against the presumption that to be disabled is inherently bad. Rather than a curse or insult, their disability is a part of their identity and a source of pride. Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender reveal that disability rights have also been a focus for another minority group in the United States: the LGBT+ community. In the 1980s and 1990s LGBT+ activists made great strides towards improving the lives of disabled people.

New Experience for Gale Digital Scholar Lab

October 3, 2023November 30, 2021 by Gale Review Team

|By Gale Digital Scholar Lab Product Management team|

Gale Digital Scholar Lab creates new possibilities by offering solutions to the most common challenges facing researchers in the digital humanities today. Since its launch in 2018, the team has engaged with librarians, instructors, and students to find out what they’d like to see in the tool and how they use it for research, teaching, and learning. Based on those continuous conversations, the team regularly makes improvements to the user experience.

African Hairstyles – The “Dreaded” Colonial Legacy

October 3, 2023November 23, 2021 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Nonkoliso Andiswa Tshiki, Gale Ambassador at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa│

My primary school had very strict rules regulating how the African students’ hair should look when we were at school. Hair extensions, for instance, were prohibited. Students were only allowed to have natural hair hairstyles which were deemed neat, such as cornrows. We were particularly prohibited from having dreadlocks; disobeying this rule resulted in expulsion. I am aware that many other school authorities in the rural areas in South Africa forced students to cut their hair so short throughout their schooling career they were effectively bald.

Unearthing and Decolonising the Rasta Voice

October 3, 2023November 16, 2021 by Gale Ambassadors

| By Robert Youngs do Patrocinio, Gale Ambassador at University College London|

This post will focus on raising awareness of the Rasta struggle to practise their religion, principally using Gale’s Archives Unbound collections, an extensive database of primary sources included in Gale Reference Complete that many university students such as myself can utilise when conducting all types of research. It currently comprises 382 collections (more are added each year), and includes a compelling collection titled: Rastafari Ephemeral Publications from the Written Rastafari Archives Project. The Rastafarianism movement can be traced back to its beginnings in 1930s Jamaica and its strong connections with the coronation of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie (1930) who remains a principal figure in the Rastafarian religion. As the political cartoon below illustrates, the Rasta faith is rooted in an ideology which believes that Africa is paramount to black individuals obtaining freedom and escaping their physical, spiritual, emotional and historical oppression and struggle against slavery. As a religious belief system, I think that it is important to become mindful of Rastafari traditions and invest time in accessing elements of this culture, due to the significance of its relationship to the black experience and post-slavery trauma.