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

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Gale Egyptology sentiment analysis

│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!

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

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Guide to ECCO with GPS

│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.

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Birds of a Feather, Work Together – Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Groups

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Notes from our DH correspondent

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

December 2022 saw the release of the new ‘Groups’ feature in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. This blog post will consider the nature and benefits of teamwork in Digital Humanities (DH) and highlight Group workflows in the Lab that support effective collaborative practices.

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Keeping Your Love of Literature Alive While Studying at University

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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.

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How to Make Use of British Security Service Documents

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│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. 

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

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Creative writing header image

│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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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Knowing Your Learning Style Can Supercharge Your Studies

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Writing on glass drawing board

│By Grace Pashley, Gale Ambassador at the University of Birmingham│

Learning styles are something every teacher introduced to us at one point or another – a buzz word in revision sessions, and an excuse to take a quiz during lesson time! But what are learning styles and how can we benefit from knowing our own? There are three different types of learning styles: visual, auditory and kinaesthetic (or tactile, movement-orientated) learning. Knowing which group you fit within, and tailoring your studies to best cater for your strengths and weaknesses, can massively impact your overall educational experience.

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Student Career Advice: After University, What’s Next?

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Woman working at laptop surrounded by books

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

Within every new cohort of students hurtling towards graduation, there will be many pondering the dreaded question: after university, what’s next? Chances are, if you’re reading this, you don’t have an answer to that question yet yourself. Career advice has long been a feature of the modern university experience, outlining the ways your degree can help you build a career. But Gale Primary Sources can help, too! Using The Times Digital Archive, undergraduates and postgraduates have access to decades of career advice geared towards finding the right job for each student. While the articles I examine below date from late the 1990s to the 2000s, many of the challenges facing graduates have stayed the same and much of the advice on overcoming them has stood the test of time.

One of the problems facing most students is that they don’t know how to discover what jobs are out there, particularly within the areas in which they’re interested or experienced. As a student, I had been using archives and archival services for years, but it never occurred to me that I could make a career out of it – or that it’s not just researchers driving digitisation projects, there are many other roles involved too, all of which are potential career pathways. It was actually reading through archives like The Times Digital Archive that helped me see this as a viable career option, and I am now studying Information Management and Preservation.

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