For Students Archives - Page 5 of 11

Writing Sensitive Personal Histories

October 3, 2023June 13, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Jade Burnett, Gale Ambassador at the University of Sheffield│

Throughout this academic year I have been working on an MA dissertation on the marriages of members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). In working on this dissertation, I have tried to piece together the personal lives of people who existed largely in the political sphere. While this work is hugely interesting and deeply fulfilling academically, it can also be very tricky, with the writing of personal histories bringing up a range of difficulties surrounding how academics can seek to sensitively piece together the intimate lives of individuals. I hope that this blog post can offer readers some tips and tricks on how to approach writing these histories.

Using Gale Historical Newspapers to Explore the Representation of Coastal Wreckers

October 3, 2023June 6, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

|By Ellen Boucher, Gale Ambassador at the University of Bristol|

One of my History modules this year, Outlaws, focused on the robbers, bandits and smugglers on the outskirts of society. For my final presentation for the module, I chose to study maritime wreckers using Gale’s Historical Newspapers, to explore how Daphne du Maurier’s novel Jamaica Inn, published in 1936, fitted into a changing narrative surrounding wreckers. ‘Wreckers’ was the name for those who would strip grounded or wrecked ships of valuable contents. Originally, they have been portrayed as dangerous criminals, in marked difference to other pirates and thieves we studied during this module, whose history has often been romanticised. Instead, wreckers, who were typically opportunists who saw themselves as having a right to the bounty from ships, were portrayed as dangerous and murderous criminals who would purposefully lure ships to wreck. This is the type of wrecker Daphne du Maurier presents in her antagonist, Joss Merlyn, a cruel and violent criminal.

Digging into Datasets in Gale Digital Scholar Lab

October 3, 2023May 9, 2023 by Gale Review Team

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

This dataset post is a follow-up to Working with Datasets, a Primer which discussed text datasets of primary sources and explored how to access and work with them in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. Here, we’ll look at the topics of the first eight datasets in the Lab in more detail, the types of documents included in each set, and consider how a user may work with them for analysis. Our next blog post will showcase classroom-based use of the Lab’s datasets as an introductory pathway into the field of digital humanities.

Taking Your Master’s Dissertation to the Next Level: Using Gale Digital Scholar Lab for Research

October 3, 2023April 4, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Tamar Atkinson, Gale Ambassador at the University of Liverpool│

Primary sources can be a great resource for Master’s dissertation research, providing a deeper understanding of history. Whilst they make handy supportive evidence to back up the points you want to make in an assessment, is there a way to take them further? Within Gale Digital Scholar Lab, you can find a whole range of data-mining visualisation tools and other resources that can allow you to bring elements of Digital Humanities methodologies into your research, through an easy, step-by-step process. This can add great insights to any work!

An Undergraduate’s Companion: Finding Primary Sources Using Gale’s Alternative Search Tools

October 3, 2023March 21, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Georgia Winrow, Gale Ambassador at Lancaster University│

Knowing where to get started with a new undergraduate research project, coursework essay or dissertation can be a daunting task. Whether you are provided with a focus to guide your work or not, getting to grips with collecting your primary source material, reading, analysing, and working out where they fit within your work can seem overwhelming! Luckily, with the Gale Primary Sources digital archives you have a range of search tools at your disposal intended to make the process that bit easier. Through an example research project using Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), this blog post will outline alternative search tools and resources available in Gale’s digital archives, and how they can be used most effectively when carrying out your own undergraduate research.

Keeping Your Love of Literature Alive While Studying at University

October 3, 2023February 28, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

Image of young woman sat on the floor of a library, reading

│By Chloe Ann Hooper, Gale Ambassador at the University of Glasgow│

Although what inspired me to enrol in an English Literature degree course was my love of reading, throughout my undergraduate studies I found that, after spending hours a day making my way through reading lists, the last thing I wanted to do was pick up another book! Having since spoken to friends who studied the same course as me, I’ve found out that I wasn’t the only one who had felt this way – it actually seems to have been a fairly common experience. I didn’t realise that at the time, however, and thought that I was a fraud for passing the course while not acting like a stereotypical “reader”.

What took my friends and I a long time to realise is that reading a book to study it in class is a very different experience to reading a book for fun. Even after graduation, getting back to reading what you love can be a long and frustrating process which is why I decided to put this blog post together. Chances are that you’re not going to be reading a lot of action-packed mystery novels or YA romance/adventure books while at university, but after exploring Gale’s literature resources I found a few tools that students can use to stay inspired by and engaged with the written word.

How to Make Use of British Security Service Documents

October 3, 2023February 21, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Jade Burnett, Gale Ambassador at the University of Sheffield│

British Security Service files from Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism archive have a huge amount to tell us about British political life in the twentieth century. These files deal with the activities of extreme British political figures and movements. At first, these files may seem somewhat inaccessible, compiled in large folders, containing information which spans long periods of time and refers to a range of different figures, often with little context. However, once you get an understanding of how the archival documents are best used and approached, there are huge benefits to using them for academic research.

How Might a Creative Writing Student Use Gale Primary Sources When Working With the Horror Genre?

October 3, 2023February 7, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Holly Kybett Smith, Gale Ambassador at the University of Portsmouth│

If you’re currently studying Creative Writing at an undergraduate or Master’s level, you may find yourself wondering what resources are available – and relevant – to you. Every university library has its selection of critical texts on writing, and the internet puts dozens of author interviews and advice columns at your fingertips, so you may pass over primary source archives at first glance. My initial impression of these resources was that they were the domain of more ‘serious’ academics in the humanities; that I somehow wasn’t supposed to use them, even though I found them interesting. It was worth, however, revising my opinion and taking another, better look. In this article, I aim to share the ways in which a Creative Writing student might use Gale Primary Sources to their benefit. I am focusing on the Horror genre, as this is my area of interest, though much of this advice is applicable to students writing in other genres.

From Grimm to Gothic and Everything In Between: The Evolution of the Horror Genre

October 3, 2023February 2, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

Screenshot of newspaper review of the film 'Scream'

|By India Marriott, Gale Ambassador at the University of Nottingham|

From the dawn of time, humans have been sharing stories of horror. From fairy tales of children lost in the woods to supernatural tales of ghosts and ghouls, tales of horror are interwoven throughout human history. However, in terms of Western culture, tales of horror began to appear throughout the eighteenth century in the form of the Gothic novel, after which several shifts in culture have taken place which impacted the Horror genre, from Romantic ideals, featuring an intensity of human emotion, to Victorian strict morality and rationality, right through to modern slasher films and the numerous subgenres that currently exist within the Horror genre.

Digital Humanities and Data Mining: The Key to Efficient Seminar Preparation

October 3, 2023January 17, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

Header image - piles of leather bound books with spines facing outwards

│By Becca Leeland, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

Anyone that says to a humanities student ‘all you have to do is read a book and have an opinion’ is someone who’s never had to prepare for a seminar! Seminars are the foundation of my degree – they guide me to the crucial works in a given field, they give me the space to explore ideas, and sharpen my skills in argument and writing. But they can also be daunting, especially when you’re presented with the work of the finest minds in history and are expected to make sense of it; you know you’re intelligent, you know you can do this, but sometimes you just need a little push in the right direction…

*Enter Gale Digital Scholar Lab.*

Gale Digital Scholar Lab is designed to make data mining and primary research more efficient with a three-step process of build, clean, and analyse. Utilising some of these techniques, you can gain a solid idea of where the texts are going and what to look out for, something that is really helpful when you start reading the material more closely.