Technology

Making Digital Scholarship accessible for all – New Learning Center added to the Gale Digital Scholar Lab

by
Learning Center screenshot

| 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.

Read more

Discover the History of British Hong Kong Through Handwritten Documents – Now Available in “Easy Mode”!

by
HTR example

│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.

Read more

DH2019 – Lifting the lid on how we created the Gale Digital Scholar Lab

by
Busy crowd at the DH2019 Conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands

│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.

Read more

From Archives to Arguments – a Project Course at the University of Helsinki makes use of the Gale Digital Scholar Lab

by

│ 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. 

Read more

Exploring Gale Reference Complete from a student’s perspective

by

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.

Read more

Gale and Digital Humanities: A Potted History

by

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

Updates to Gale Resources

by

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.

Read more

Digital Humanities at the British Society for 18th Century Studies (BSECS) Conference

by

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.

Read more

Exciting Changes Coming to Gale Literature Resources

by

A new, mobile-responsive experience is available for your Gale literature resources! Users of Artemis Literary Sources, Something About the Author Online, Literature Criticism Online, and Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online will now see a “Try it Now” link at the top left corner of the product; clicking this link will immediately display the product in its new experience.

Read more

In Secret Kept, In Silence Sealed: revealing the hidden texts in Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library

by
EAPB Image2

As an archivist, I firmly believe that preservation and access are two sides of the same coin; one cannot happen without the other. This is particularly true during digitisation projects, and on collections such as Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library where a large body of material is being made widely accessible for the first time, we have worked closely with a conservator from the British Library to ensure material is protected during scanning.

Read more