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Refugee Nurses and the Second World War

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Nursing Times cover images
In this blog post, Dr Jane Brooks discusses the value of the Historic Nursing Journals – one of the collections included in Women’s Studies Archive: Female Forerunners Worldwide. The Historic Nursing Journals collection was sourced from the Royal College of Nursing (UK). Dr Brooks also explains how she is using the fascinating primary sources in this archive in her own research.

|Dr Jane Brooks, Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester (UK)|

The digitisation of Historic Nursing Journals by Gale has created a dynamic and valuable resource for historians of nursing in the UK and beyond. I have been working in the field of nursing history for over twenty years. In 2010, I began researching nursing in the Second World War. I predominantly work with personal testimony such as oral history, letters and diaries. However, as well as these source materials usually located in public archives, I have used multiple types of entries in nursing journals, most frequently Nursing Times. I live in Yorkshire, the Royal College of Nursing headquarters library is in London and the archives are in Edinburgh, so every time I wanted to conduct any research using Nursing Times I had to travel to review the hard copies. If I needed to check a reference, I again had to make a journey or request one of the very busy archive staff check for me.

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Launch of British Library Newspapers, Part VI: Ireland 1783-1950

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Irish newspapers

|By Rachel Holt, Gale Primary Sources Acquisitions Editor|

It is with great excitement that Gale announces the launch of the sixth instalment of the British Library Newspapers series. This latest module entitled Ireland 1783-1950 will add an additional 80 titles to the series and, as the name suggests, these were all published in Ireland in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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A Global Community: Learning and Networking Opportunities for Digital Humanists

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Notes from a DH Correspondent

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

If you speak with many Digital Humanists and discuss their route into the field, a large number will reference the training opportunities afforded by annual conferences, institutes, and workshops. These events provide a forum to develop new skills, with opportunities for hands-on practice. At the same time, attendees can learn about current project work, digital tools and methodologies and, importantly, these events provide an opportunity to mingle with peers. Digital Humanities conferences are somewhat unique in that they attract audiences from many academic disciplines, who all share the common interest of incorporating methods of digital scholarship into their research or pedagogical workflow. The Digital Humanities team at Gale is no exception, with many of us attending conferences, since our goal is to continue the ongoing development of Gale Digital Scholar Lab to ensure that it’s a relevant, functional and user-friendly platform. Many of the conferences have continued in an online format over the past couple of years, with a gradual shift back to in-person or hybrid gatherings.

As well as highlighting some of the main conferences and publications to be aware of as a Digital Humanist, this post will provide a range of resources for training, also sharing other useful networks like the Digital Humanities Slack channel. It’s not exhaustive but will provide a good starting point for those who wish to start their DH journey, brush up on existing skills, or learn about current research.

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More Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers Added

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Learning Center visible on screen of student user

│By Emma Harris and Lindsay Whitaker-Guest, Associate Editors, Gale Primary Sources│

After the successful launch of the first Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers in Autumn 2021, Gale has released Learning Centers into a larger selection of our archives in August, with more to come in November 2022. The Learning Centers are comprehensive guides for both students and instructors to enhance their approach to researching primary sources and for developing the critical thinking skills needed for their analysis. The Learning Centers are also particularly helpful for those using primary source archives independently for the first time.

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The Value of Cross-Disciplinary Partnerships in the Digital Humanities Classroom

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Notes from our DH correspondent

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

As university classes get underway for the 2022-2023 academic year, this blog post considers some of the ways that instructors hoping to incorporate digital skills in their classroom can partner with others at their institution, within disciplines and the library, as they develop their class syllabi. The disciplinary educator does not need to work alone when developing a curriculum which includes digital humanities (DH) topics and methodologies – cross-disciplinary partnerships are an excellent way to provide breadth and depth in a syllabus. I’ll describe some of the skills that are often relevant in the DH classroom and consider where natural disciplinary overlaps lie with examples from my classes at the University of Washington.

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Introducing the Gale Digital Humanities User Engagement Program

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|By Rebecca Bowden, Gale Digital Scholar Lab Product Manager|

On June 27, 2022, Gale launched its first Digital Humanities User Engagement Program, inviting eight Gale Primary Sources and Gale Digital Scholar Lab users to collaborate closely with the Digital Humanities Production team at Gale. The members of the User Engagement Program will provide feedback throughout the product development process, keeping the voice of the researcher at the center of the product experience.

Below, the Digital Humanities Product Managers who developed the program – Rebecca Bowden and Megan Sullivan – explain more!

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How State Papers Online Can Support an Undergraduate History Dissertation

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Person viewing State Papers Online with a laptop
State Papers Online is migrating to a much improved platform. In light of this, Ellie Brosnan, a third-year undergraduate student at Durham University with an interest in medieval history and particularly political developments throughout Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, has taken a look at what this archive has to offer students writing a dissertation in medieval and early modern history! To do so, Ellie used the new, updated version of State Papers Online.

Users will be able to preview the beta version of State Papers Online on the new platform from August 1, 2022. For more information about the beta experience, check out this blog post by Gale Primary Sources Product Manager Megan Sullivan.

│By Ellie Brosnan, Gale Ambassador at Durham University│

State Papers Online is a digitised collection containing British government papers from throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It offers access to a range of different materials, from official documentation and legislation to more informal correspondence between key political actors of this period. This resource is split into three main collections that all host different materials related to the issue of early modern British government. The focus of this blog post is exploring how State Papers Online can be utilised for an undergraduate dissertation investigating the changes to early modern politics over the course of these centuries.

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Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Identifying Themes and Topics in Archives Using Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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Notes from our DH Correspondent

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

Getting to grips with the scope and content of a digital primary source archive held by an institution’s library can be daunting, particularly if the archive consists of thousands of documents in a variety of formats. For an individual researcher, the task of sifting through vast quantities of data in the quest for material that is relevant for a particular research topic is something that can take years to accomplish. This blog post will explore some of the ways a researcher can use Gale Digital Scholar Lab in conjunction with Gale Primary Sources as a platform for exploratory analysis to gain insights into the topics and themes represented in a chosen archive.

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How Important Was the Role of Women During WWII to the Victory of the Allied Powers?

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Female Russian fighters
Symbat Omasheva, blog post authorIn Spring 2022, Gale ran a competition with Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools, Kazakhstan, which gave students at schools within the group the chance to research and write about a topic of interest – with the two top entries published on The Gale Review! Below is the runner up entry, a superb piece by Year 11 student Symbat Omasheva.

Nazarbayex Intellectual Schools logoThe schools within the Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools group have access to the Gale Reference Complete: Schools Edition – Ultimate package.

|By Symbat Omasheva, Year 11 student at Nazarbayev Intellectual School in Nur-Sultan|

The Second World War, which took place from September 1, 1939, to September 2, 1945, showed that women are capable of doing what was previously considered “men’s work” and making a significant contribution to the war effort. However, ideas about the gender distribution of responsibilities and the use of physical force differed greatly between the opposing sides in the war; the Allies actively promoted women’s contribution to the outcome of the war, while the Axis powers discouraged women from working on the military front.

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Researching the Impact of the New Silk Road on Kazakhstan

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Illustration of what is believed to be the Polo family crossing the desert with a camel caravan from a 1375 atlas

|By Maryam Kurumbayeva, 11th Grade, Nazarbayev Intellectual School in Pavlodar| The Silk Road was a great trade network that once connected Eurаsia and North Аfrica. The name is a reference to Chinese silk, transported via this route, which was extremely valuable and expensive. This trading road played a vital role not only in the economic … Read more