Gale News and Teams

Collisions: Driving Through Digital Humanities in Search of Roadkill

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│By Gilberto Mazzoli, ESEH-Gale Fellow│

In 2024 I have been one of four recipients of the ESEH-Gale Fellowship in Digital Environmental Humanities. This fellowship has been a good opportunity to explore some aspects of my research in environmental history in a different way and helped to make my current research more visible.

This fellowship not only allowed me to access for seven months, numerous online Gale Primary Sources archives related to the environmental history of the United States and to experiment with tools contained in the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, but enabled me to develop a part of my research project related to the creation of digital interactive maps. This pushed me to learn new technical skills, like GIS, and to think differently about some aspects of my research in environmental history.

In this brief account I reflect on my first experience with digital humanities and on the challenges faced during my research.

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G is for Golden Age: Exploring a Golden Age of Children’s Literature with Gale’s Nineteenth Century Collections Online

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│By Elizabeth Gaglio, Academic Customer Success Specialist│

The nineteenth century is known as a “Golden Age” of children’s literature. Advancements in printing and new views on childhood transformed the genre that was overwhelmingly moral and didactic, finally allowing for tales of adventure, nonsense verse, and imaginative illustration.

Rather than reading just to learn proper behaviour and lessons, children got to find out what happened to Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole and follow the woodland adventures of “a silly old bear” and his friends. Reading for pleasure, curiosity, and wonder became a valued part of childhood in this golden age.

By looking at one popular style of book, the alphabet book, we can see echoes of trends found across children’s literature in the nineteenth century, laying the foundations of modern works. Didactic by nature, but with growing whimsy and creativity, these alphabet collections found in Gale’s Children’s Literature and Childhood archive (part of Nineteenth Century Collections Online) help us track the evolution of children’s literature.

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Italian Futurism and Gale Primary Sources

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│By Caley Collins, Gale Ambassador at University College London (UCL)│

Italian Futurism was an avant-garde movement founded in 1909 by F. T. Marinetti upon the publication of his tract The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism. The Futurists aimed to radically break from the past and create new types of literature, art, photography, and even music. They intended to glorify technology, aggression, and speed while destroying artistic and literary conventions.

The movement officially ended in 1944 with Marinetti’s death, however it is often considered to have had two phases. The first, more valiant phase is perceived as having ended in 1916 upon the deaths of several key members of the movement, including Umberto Boccioni, in WWI. In the subsequent years, Futurism moved in a different direction, allying itself with the Italian National Fascist Party and thus occasioning its own downfall. Using Gale Primary Sources, this post will explore the different facets of Futurism’s attempted creative emancipation from the past, alongside the movement’s legacy.

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Femininity and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century European Aesthetics

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│By Sofía Sanabria de Felipe, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford│

In March 2022, an exhibition entitled Fashioning Masculinities opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Its manifesto was to show a ‘history of changing ideas of masculinity’. The exhibition greeted visitors with a gallery of plaster-casts of statues in a Greco-Roman idiom. Amongst them stood Pietro Francavilla’s statue of Apollo, a Renaissance sculpture depicting the apparent timelessness of the nude masculine ideal of Western classical epistemology.

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From Salty Dreams to Solar Futures: Rethinking Desalination with Gale Primary Sources

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│By Elizabeth Hameeteman, Postdoctoral Researcher, Technische Universität Berlin │

When I began my Gale Fellowship, I was curious about how digital tools might support my historical research. As someone trained primarily in archival and text-based methods, I was eager to explore how computational approaches might offer new ways of seeing familiar materials – or even lead me to sources I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. What I didn’t expect was that it would shift the trajectory of my work entirely.

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In the Footsteps of My Avô: Exploring Angola’s Fight for Independence Through Family History

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|Rosa Ferreira, Digital Product Trainer|

Armando Dias De Castro, my avô – my Portuguese grandfather – was a man full of life. He was warm, funny, always ready with a story or a joke. He was also the kindest man you’d ever meet. But when it comes to his time in Angola, I’ve got nothing. No stories, no memories. If he ever spoke about it, I must have been too small to notice, or the words just never stuck.

My uncle, however, recalls many conversations. That makes me believe my avô must have shared his experiences, at least in fragments, though they slipped past me.

It is this gap – between the grandfather I knew and the silence that lingers – that has drawn me into the archives.

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Understanding Ngrams

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│By Becca Gillot, Gale Digital Scholar Lab Product Manager│

One of the easiest tools to understand and use in Gale Digital Scholar Lab is the Ngram tool. This blog post will explain the tool itself, how to use it to explore your content set, and some tips and tricks for getting the most out of your visualisations.

The Ngram Tool

The Ngram tool is one of the easiest to understand in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. The tool works its way through the cleaned OCR that you have created (by applying a cleaning configuration to your content set) and counts how many times an ‘Ngram’ appears, before displaying that data as either a word cloud or a bar graph.

The Ngram tool is great for getting a high-level overview of your content set, so you can see at a glance the themes, key concepts, and ideas contained in the documents you are exploring. This type of distant reading is particularly great for large content sets that can be unwieldy to explore using close reading, or for content sets you’re not familiar with, but can also be used to analyse specific texts, such as an individual monograph. Even if you know your material really well, the Ngram tool can be a great way of presenting that knowledge as an accessible snapshot that others can quickly understand.

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Glam Rock to Georgian Riots: Bowie’s Last Notebook

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│By Eleanor Leese, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

If, like me, you frequently find yourself wondering what David Bowie would be up to if his time with us mortals hadn’t been so tragically short – last week we got some answers. The BBC reported that David Bowie spent his last months deep in research about eighteenth-century Britain.

The appeal of the eighteenth century is something we know a little about here at Gale Primary Sources, as publishers of Eighteenth Century Collections Online, the largest collection of digital primary sources emerging from that century which is shortly to receive a large additional module in the form of ECCO, Part III. So, of course, the first thing that I did after learning about Bowie’s interest in our favourite historical era was to set about looking for the sources he had been reading. I wanted to see if I could find what had captured his imagination and ECCO did not disappoint.

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Exploring the history of Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service through Gale Primary Sources

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│By Darren Brain, Gale Marketing Manager, Australia & New Zealand│

On the 15th May 1928, Reverend John Flynn founded the Australian Inland Mission (AIM) – Aerial Medical Service in Cloncurry, Queensland. Initially a one-year experiment with a young Australian airline called Qantas providing air services. This service later evolved nationally into the Australian Aerial Medical Service (AAMS), which was renamed the Flying Doctor Service in 1942, and became the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) in 1955 after receiving a Royal Charter.  

With Gale’s recent release of Global Development and Humanitarian Aid: The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1919-1997, I discovered some interesting documents about the history of RFDS and decided to dig deeper into Gale Primary Sources to learn more about the remarkable story of one of the world’s earliest flying doctors, the fascinating stories of the RFDS, and the growth of the critical service they have been providing against the harsh and unforgiving Australian Outback for nearly a century.

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Uncovering India with Gale Primary Sources

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│By Mickey Mehta Arorra, Digital Product Trainer│

India’s history unfolds across centuries of transformation – colonial rule, the struggle for independence, post-colonial reconstruction, and global diplomacy. Much of this complex narrative has long remained buried in distant or hard-to-reach archives. Now, Gale Primary Sources brings these rich and rare documents into the digital realm, making them accessible to students, educators, and researchers across India.

With collections such as Decolonization: Politics and Independence in Former Colonial and Commonwealth Territories, The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treaties, 1800-1926, and Women’s Studies Archive, learners can dive deep into archival material that brings India’s layered past to life in vivid detail.

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