A blog from Gale International
│By Megan Sullivan, Gale Primary Sources Product Manager│
We are thrilled to announce that on Friday, December 18, 2020, Gale will release an enhanced user experience for Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). On this date, we will retire the current version of ECCO, and your library’s ECCO links will seamlessly redirect to the new experience.
│By Emily Priest, Digital Marketing MA student at the University of Portsmouth│
Today, digital marketing is unavoidable. Even if you don’t know what digital marketing is, you will almost certainly have experienced it at least once in the last twenty-four hours. Like digital technology, it is a part of almost every aspect of our lives. But this all-pervasive force wasn’t always in our workplace, screens, or pockets. Arguably, it is only thirty years ago that the term “digital marketing” was even coined and half that since it became mainstream.
Whilst digital marketing is the present and the future, let’s have a little look at its history.
│By Emily Priest, Digital Marketing Masters student at the University of Portsmouth│
At first glance, data visualisation and Digital Humanities can seem complex and technical, but both offer significant possibilities to students, researchers and business professionals (the latter is also significant to students, as many are interested in increasing their future employability!) Whilst you may not feel particularly familiar with these terms, the data revolution is already here! So, buckle up and join me as we take a ride through the history and current applications of data visualisation and Digital Humanities!
Simplistically, data visualisation is the use of graphics and images to present data sets. Common examples include pie charts, word clouds and line graphs. Over the years, these visualisation techniques have become increasingly common – and increasingly complex. Whilst they have contributed to the emerging discipline of Digital Humanities, the term Digital Humanities refers to more than simply visualising data. Keeping Humanities at its heart, Digital Humanities leverages data visualisation to expand and deepen the traditional analysis that takes place within these disciplines.
| By Lindsey Gervais, Digital Pedagogy Specialist and Margaret Waligora, Product Manager |
In this blog post we’re delighted to share some exciting new developments made to the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, including the much-anticipated release of the Learning Center! This release represents our efforts to put learning and teaching digital methods at the forefront of the platform – providing students, instructors and researchers with the instructional scaffolds needed to navigate and learn through Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s workflow. Users can now access the assistance or instructional supplements they need wherever they are in the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, allowing them to situate learning within the context of the overall research process. We’re delighted to release this suite of instructional materials, developed in collaboration with our in-house scholars and experts within the digital humanities field.
│By Pauli Kettunen, Gale Ambassador at the University of Helsinki│
One of the best aspects of Gale Primary Sources is the ability to search all the text in the archives. This is made possible by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). With this technology, any text visible in the scans (effectively photos of the primary sources) is transformed into script which can be read by a search engine, allowing the user to find relevant content much more easily. Until recently OCR has only been an option with printed texts, which has left handwritten records far less accessible in text-based searches. This can be a serious hindrance in trying to find relevant sources, as I will showcase. In addition, deciphering handwriting which dates back over a hundred years is often a significant hurdle for anyone without much experience in palaeography; even if you find the documents relevant to your project, comprehending them is another matter.
In other words, the experience of many students deciphering historical handwritten documents today feels like playing a video game in “hard mode”, something that you cannot do unless you are prepared for a lot of frustration! Fortunately, as OCR technology has developed, Gale now provides an “easy mode” for handwritten primary sources! Like a supportive character in a video game, the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) will help you on your quest to discover the secrets of fascinating old documents.
│By Chris Houghton, Head of Digital Scholarship, Gale International│
It was a real honour for Gale to expand our partnership with ADHO (the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations) and serve as Gold Sponsor for their DH2019 conference. This incredible event brought together 735 participants from Europe, 203 from North America, 72 from Asia, 38 from Africa, 11 from Oceania, and 7 from South America. In total, 1066 scholars working in, or with an interest in Digital Humanities, attended, coming together earlier this month in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
│ By Rebekka Väisänen, Gale Ambassador at the University of Helsinki │
The English Philology corridor at the University of Helsinki has an area which we call the Aquarium, a glass-walled space that is often used for smaller faculty events, informal gatherings, and course “end offs” (the last meeting at the end of a course). On the 17th of April, I arrived there to see the poster presentations for the “Archives to Arguments” course, a module in which students use the Gale British Library Newspapers and other archives to do linguistic research into democratization.
By Tania Chakraborti, Gale Ambassador at Durham University
Writing a humanities essay at university can be a daunting experience; when it comes to primary sources there can either be too few available or, confusingly, too many to choose from! How do you go about sifting through so much material and where do you start? That is where Gale Reference Complete comes in; with over 13 million pages of historical primary sources ranging from the medieval times to present day (as well as reference and periodical content) Gale’s multi-discipline and easy-access resources make sifting through the wealth of information a rapid and enjoyable process. There are several resources encompassed within Gale Reference Complete which support a range of disciplines: Academic OneFile and General OneFile provide periodical resources; InfoTrac Newsstand provides access to more than 2,300 major world newspapers; GVRL is an eBook platform, Archives Unbound is a vast collection of niche primary source archives, and finally Gale Literary Sources is perfect for finding those well-needed critics for your English Literature or Modern Languages essay.
In 2014, Gale became the first humanities primary source publisher to give customers access to the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text that underpins all our resources, both through Text and Data Mining (TDM) drives and through single-document OCR download on the Gale Primary Sources platform. In the intervening four years, Gale has worked closely with … Read more
At Gale, we truly value your feedback, and are always looking to improve our resources in a way that saves time and increases productivity. In response to suggestions and continuous user testing, we are excited to announce that a number of enhancements have been made, providing increased functionality, easier access to our most-used tools, and more.