A Century of Change: How Soviet Union Policies Reshaped Kazakhstan’s Demographics

|By Alisher Romankul, Year 11 Student at NIS of Kyzylorda, Kazakhstan|

It is believed that the Kazakhs, who lived a nomadic culture for hundreds of years, faced a number of demographic crises in the twentieth century under the rule of the USSR. Since the beginning of industrialisation in the Soviet Union and before the collapse of the USSR, the ethnic and demographic situation in the country has changed dramatically.

This blog post will explore industrialisation, the famine of 1931-1933, deportation in the Kazakh SSR, World War II, and the development of virgin lands and discuss how the collapse of the USSR affected the population in the country.

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Courting Primary Sources: Historical Opportunities from Briefs filed with the U.S. Courts of Appeals

│By Bennett Graff, Manager, Acquisitions, Gale Primary Sources

The family of titles that comprise The Making of Modern Law series is a critical part of the Gale Primary Sources portfolio.  Titles in the series reveal aspects of our social, economic, religious, and political history through documentation that come from a universe of data that is both part of and yet, in notable ways, distinct from the kinds of materials one might regard as “typical” of archival collections. Aside from their obvious worth to legal scholars, how can these materials be of value to researchers from other disciplines?

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A Classroom Compendium: Digital Humanities Resources for a New School Year

│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Sr. Digital Humanities Specialist│

For the start of a new academic year, this month’s Notes from our DH Correspondent blog post is a useful resource indexing all the Notes posts to date. They are categorised below to support instructors to plan, build and deliver classroom DH curricula.  This is a great page to bookmark!

Each resource can be supplemented with detailed material in the Learning Center in Gale Digital Scholar Lab which provides step-by-step instructions in written and video formats, covering every aspect of working in the platform. 

Need additional support? Our DH team will be happy to answer your questions! Just email us at [email protected]

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The Untold Story of the 700 Orphaned Polish Children of New Zealand

│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.

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Bridging the Gap: Gale Primary Sources and Gale Digital Scholar Lab

│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!

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Kowloon Walled City: An Accident of Hong Kong History

│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

Coding for Humanists: Python Notebooks in Gale Digital Scholar Lab

│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.

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Gale Accelerate: The Best of Gale for You

│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.

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Exploring Genealogy in Gale 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.

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