study tips Archives - The Gale Review

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

April 4, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

│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!

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

March 21, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

│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.

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

March 7, 2023 by Gale Review Team

│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.

Keeping Your Love of Literature Alive While Studying at University

February 28, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

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.

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

February 7, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

│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.

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

February 2, 2023January 17, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

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.

Researching the History of Emotions with Gale Primary Sources

February 2, 2023January 10, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

Charles le Brun, The Expressions Trait é des Passions, 1732

|By Rose O’Connor, Gale Ambassador at Maynooth University|

It might take readers by surprise that the History of Emotions is now described as a cutting-edge field of history. When I first discovered it, I asked the same question you may be asking now; do emotions have a history? Yet this research area has been garnering momentum in the last two decades, with scholars from all aspects of academia – from cognitive psychologists to anthropologists – contributing. And no one yet knows how the History of Emotions will develop. Consequently, there is so much room for investigation and innovation. Let’s look at some of the tools we can use in Gale Primary Sources to help us investigate this exciting aspect of history and how it can bolster your own research.

Knowing Your Learning Style Can Supercharge Your Studies

February 2, 2023January 3, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

│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.

Working with Datasets, A Primer

October 25, 2022 by Gale Review Team

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

This month’s blog post will discuss datasets – what they are, and how they might be used by a researcher or student who plans to use digital tools to generate answers to questions they have about their data. The timing of this post coincides with the release of Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s newest feature: downloadable datasets, pre-curated for use in the classroom or by individual users. We’ll look at some of the options for working with these datasets, and end with some suggestions for sourcing open plain text data for curation and analysis.

More Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers Added

September 6, 2022 by Gale Review Team

Learning Center visible on screen of student user

│By Emma Harris and Lindsay Whitaker-Guest, Associate Editors, Gale Primary Sources│

After the successful launch of the first Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers in Autumn 2021, Gale has released Learning Centers into a larger selection of our archives in August, with more to come in November 2022. The Learning Centers are comprehensive guides for both students and instructors to enhance their approach to researching primary sources and for developing the critical thinking skills needed for their analysis. The Learning Centers are also particularly helpful for those using primary source archives independently for the first time.