A blog from Gale International
|By Rachel Holt, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources|
When telling friends and family that I was working on a digital archive focusing on right-wing extremists, far-left militants and a wide range of radical movements in between, the most common response was ‘why’? To answer that I must explain the motivation that triggered this project, as well as why such an archive is important now more than ever.
Thoughts from BookMachine’s latest event ‘Scholarly Publishing: Crossing the Rubicon’
The Jam Factory, Oxford, 7 September 2017
Last Thursday, as I trundled slowly towards Oxford (kicking myself for accidentally catching a slow train – who knew there were quite so many stations between Reading and Oxford?!) I wondered what was in store at BookMachine’s latest event, ‘Scholarly Publishing: Crossing the Rubicon’. The venue, The Jam Factory, Oxford, was alive with conversation and had a very welcoming atmosphere. Winding my way through tables of busily socialising people, I found the room where the discussion was taking place.
By Vicky Pavlicic, Senior Marketing Manager at Gale International
Come and Visit the Gale Booth and Enter our Photo Competition – we are at stand B79/80!
We want to find out from you why you think digital resources specific to research and teaching are so important.
Come along to meet us, take a photo and answer the statement “I love Digital Resources because_______” and we will enter your name into a prize draw to win a compact Panasonic Lumix Digital Camera. The winner will be announced on Wednesday afternoon, just in time to take pictures at the gala dinner!
By Seth Cayley, Gale Vice President, Gale Primary Sources. Seth collaborates with our US product teams to direct Gale’s international archive programme.
In January, I had the pleasure of attending the annual British Society for 18th Century Studies (BSECS) Conference. This is one of the liveliest academic conferences that I attend, and always features a diverse array of sessions. Amongst my personal highlights from this year’s conference were a thought-provoking panel on Black Georgians, and a plenary lecture on the culture of letter-writing between women.
By: Dr. Dallas Liddle, Associate Professor and Chair of English, Augsburg College
Marshall McLuhan is supposed to have said that “the content of a new medium is always an old medium.” He intended the observation as wry cultural criticism, but as a literary historian I am grateful every day that so many new research media are now brimming with the contents of great past media: newsstands, theatres, libraries, music halls, stereopticons, and magic lantern shows. Lately I have started to hope that the benefits of these research tools may go far beyond the convenience of having so many original texts, images, and artifacts instantly available. New methods of “data-mining” using database archives, if we do them creatively and well, may help researchers better understand how the old media forms themselves worked and developed.
The hope grows from recent experience. I started “data mining” the Gale Times Digital Archive not long ago, after struggling for nearly twenty years with questions about Victorian newspapers that traditional archival research had been unable to answer.
With The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855-2000 launching March 2016, we will be bringing you a series of essays from scholars featuring research case studies, enlightening biographies of key Telegraph figures, and more.
Dr James Nye is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary British History at King’s College London. His research focuses on the corrupt, scandalous reputation – deserved, or perhaps not – of the company promoter in the first few decades of the 20th century. In this, newspaper records are, of course, invaluable; specifically, the use of multiple newspapers, as ‘each journalist might record something different – a composite picture is reasonably likely to be much better than one that relies solely on The Times, however much it might be regarded as the principal paper of record’[1] .