Digital Literacy

Top 10 Tips for Teaching with Primary Sources

by
Portrait of the author as a young lecturer teaching eighteenth-century literary culture to students at the Tate through the work of William Hogarth.

│By Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford│

Academics know that there is nothing more joyful or frustrating than working with primary sources. Imparting the ability to locate, appreciate, understand, and interrogate primary materials onto students is central to our roles as educators. But achieving this in the classroom isn’t always easy – especially when you’re also trying to teach through a pandemic! Drawing on my own experience of teaching in higher education, this blog post offers ten top tips on how to teach with primary sources.

Read more

Practical Pedagogy with Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Part II: Approaches to Project-Based Teaching and Learning

by
Header image - Notes from a DH Correspondent

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

One of the most significant shifts that has been taking place in humanities research in recent years is the movement towards team-based projects and public scholarship, in contrast to more traditional models of individual scholarship that favour print publication. The teams that form to engage in digital scholarship are often interdisciplinary, reflecting the diverse skillsets needed to create and publish digital research. A digital scholarship team may comprise disciplinary scholars, computer programmers, data scientists, specialists in informatics and design, and could be made up of faculty, staff, students, and consultants. Similarly, the digital humanities classroom offers students the opportunity to learn the skills required to successfully participate in team-based projects. This blog post suggests ways to incorporate project-based activities in the class using Gale Digital Scholar Lab.

Read more

Moving from Undergraduate to Postgraduate Study: Using Digital Archives More Proficiently

by
From Undergraduate to postgraduate

│By Mo Clarke, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

Moving from undergraduate to postgraduate study can be challenging. Students are expected to undertake more original research at postgraduate level, contributing to ideas within their field rather than simply explaining them. For history students like myself, engaging with primary sources is particularly important.

Read more

Practical Pedagogy with Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Part I: Developing Your Syllabus and Learning Objectives

by
Notes from our DH Correspondent

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

There are many advantages to incorporating work with digital tools in the humanities classroom. As students graduate and transition to the workplace, demonstrable digital literacy is often a pre-requisite for employment, so students are keen to learn such skills, and to articulate what they have learned in a way that makes sense in professional settings.

The next two posts in this ‘Notes from our DH Correspondent’ series will highlight how classroom use of Gale Digital Scholar Lab provides an accessible entry point for faculty who want to teach Digital Humanities (DH) methodologies using text-based humanities data and offer a learning experience that is both relevant and enriching for students. Part I will provide suggestions and examples for drafting a syllabus and for identifying appropriate learning objectives in the DH classroom. Part II will cover ways to present the platform to students new to the field of DH or to working with historical primary source archives, along with suggestions for incorporating project-based learning, developing granular rubrics and options for assessing student work.

Read more

How Gale’s Archives Supported My Thesis on the Politics of Contraception in South Africa, 1970s–80s

by
Contraception plus archive article images

│By Nonkoliso Andiswa Tshiki, Gale Ambassador at the University of Johannesburg│

Having to complete my Honours research paper in the era of Covid-19 left myself and many other students feeling stranded so far as to how to obtain valuable and relevant academic resources. Access to digitised resources quickly became vital to one’s success in academia and I am happy that I came across Gale Primary Sources when I did because they contributed greatly to the completion of my thesis. This blog will show how I utilised Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender, and Women’s Studies Archive collections to explore my thesis topic – the Media and Technologies of Contraception in South Africa between the 1970s and 1980s.

Read more

A Sense of Déjà vu? Iteration in Digital Humanities Project Building using Gale Digital Scholar Lab

by
Notes from our DH correspondent design

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

This post explores the iterative process of digital humanities project work in Gale Digital Scholar Lab, which provides a user-friendly interface for text mining historical primary source documents from Gale Primary Sources and plaintext material uploaded by researchers. The post discusses how each stage of the curation and cleaning process (Build, Clean, Analyse) is impacted by the need for a flexible and regenerative mindset and workflow that is less linear in nature, more cyclical and iterative.

Read more

The COVID Impact: New Modes of Presenting Your PhD Research During a Pandemic

by
Man in over-ear headphones on laptop

|By Meg Ison, Gale Ambassador at the University of Portsmouth|

In this blog post I will discuss the impact of the pandemic on the PhD experience, and focus on how and why online conferences and blog posts have become new and extremely effective ways for PhD students to disseminate their research.

Read more

The Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers – A Student’s Perspective

by
Gale Learning Center

│By Ellie Brosnan, Gale Ambassador at Durham University│

Primary sources are central to a range of academic disciplines but particularly History where the need to engage independently and deeply with archival material grows as students progress through their course. I remember well the way we were introduced to History and the concept of primary sources at school, making our own mocked-up documents. Emulating figures from the past, we wrote on tea-stained paper, imagining how past individuals might have felt about the events of their time. This was great fun but, as one progresses through the education system and moves on to analysing real historical documents, our engagement with History must become increasingly sophisticated and, by university-level, the quantity and complexity of the primary sources with which we must engage can become overwhelming. Plus, the breadth of questions we must ask – who wrote the source and why – on top of the broader context in which it was created, is a lot to recognise, understand and consider. This is where Gale’s Learning Centers come in! Released in October 2021, they help students get to grips with a primary source archive. Currently included in twelve of the Gale Primary Sources archives, they will later be available in all Gale archives.

Read more