A blog from Gale International
│By Damian Almeida, Training and Digital Communications Executive, Gale│
In the midst of World War II, there are many stories of bravery, loss, and unexpected kindness. One such story that often goes untold is that of the 700 orphaned Polish children who found refuge in New Zealand. This is the story of their journey, the circumstances that led to their displacement, and how New Zealand became a sanctuary for these young survivors.
│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│
This month’s blog post will discuss how to start the work of sourcing research documents in Gale Primary Sources (GPS) archives, before transitioning seamlessly to Gale Digital Scholar Lab to create content sets, clean OCR text data, and conduct analyses of this material to answer research questions. With this methodology, researchers are able to use the rich contextual detail and varied navigation options to begin compiling their corpus of text data outside of the Lab, which can be an attractive option if the user has an existing working knowledge of specific GPS archives, such as The Times Digital Archive, Women’s Studies Archive, or Nineteenth Century Collections Online.
There is a standardised user experience across GPS and the Lab, making the transition from one to the other familiar and streamlined. However, there are options to view documents in GPS that aren’t yet available in the Lab, which may make combining both access points useful so that no document slips through the cracks!
│By Masaki Morisawa, Senior Product Manager│
In the February 1991 issue of the National Geographic there is an aerial photo of a strange architectural structure in Hong Kong. What at first glance seems like a giant post-apocalyptic fortress, on closer examination reveals itself to be a jumble of many small buildings crammed so close together that they seem to form a single mass.
This was Kowloon Walled City, an infamous slum district within colonial Hong Kong for nearly a century until it was torn down 30 years ago in 1994. Its haunting visual appearance, and the extreme density and anarchy of life within its compound continues to capture many people’s imagination today, as evidenced most recently in the huge success of an action movie set in the now legendary location.
│By Nicolas Turner, Gale Ambassador at Leiden University│
The release this year of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer biopic has focused attention on the ‘Red Scare’ of the early 1950s in the United States, a period of history filled with all the ingredients of a thriller: double agents, secret recordings, and dramatic revelations. As Nolan’s film reminds us, however, there was also a very real human cost to the persecutions, with – in the words of the historian Ellen Schrecker – an impact on “the lives of thousands of people”.1
I have always been fascinated by this McCarthyite moment, in which the tide of history seemed to suddenly go out, leaving people stranded with beliefs that had previously been acceptable but were now framed as treasonous or worse. I was therefore thrilled to discover in Gale’s Political Extremism and Radicalism archive a treasure trove of documents that offered direct access to the experiences of those living through that dramatic moment – including, most tantalisingly of all, J. Robert Oppenheimer himself.
│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!
│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.
|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.
│By Georgia Winrow, Gale Ambassador at Lancaster University│
Whilst we may think of how diseases such as the bubonic plague, typhoid or tuberculosis were discussed when studying medicine in early modern Europe, we often do not consider how significantly understandings of sexual and reproductive health developed during this period. The specialism of women’s health in particular was firmly established in these years, with the publication of manuals and treaties to direct physicians and midwives in their practice. Indeed, whilst the early modern period saw practitioners drawing upon the work of ancient authorities, it was also a period of innovation, particularly within science and medicine.
Gale’s Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century collection is truly interdisciplinary and includes materials that would support academic fields as varied as Sociology, Law and Theology. For scholars investigating the History of Medicine, the most significant materials within this collection which can be used to explore the emergence of a comprehensive, gendered understanding of early modern medicine are arguably the medical enquiries, manuals and pamphlets.
│By Chloe Hooper , Gale Ambassador at the University of Glasgow│
Within every new cohort of students hurtling towards graduation, there will be many pondering the dreaded question: after university, what’s next? Chances are, if you’re reading this, you don’t have an answer to that question yet yourself. Career advice has long been a feature of the modern university experience, outlining the ways your degree can help you build a career. But Gale Primary Sources can help, too! Using The Times Digital Archive, undergraduates and postgraduates have access to decades of career advice geared towards finding the right job for each student. While the articles I examine below date from late the 1990s to the 2000s, many of the challenges facing graduates have stayed the same and much of the advice on overcoming them has stood the test of time.
One of the problems facing most students is that they don’t know how to discover what jobs are out there, particularly within the areas in which they’re interested or experienced. As a student, I had been using archives and archival services for years, but it never occurred to me that I could make a career out of it – or that it’s not just researchers driving digitisation projects, there are many other roles involved too, all of which are potential career pathways. It was actually reading through archives like The Times Digital Archive that helped me see this as a viable career option, and I am now studying Information Management and Preservation.
│By Emily Priest, Digital Marketing MA student at the University of Portsmouth│
Deadlines. They are hard enough to deal with – the stress, the never ending reading lists, the work that keeps piling up, the ominously unfinished dissertation – but what happens when you add a pandemic into the mix? Panic and pandemonium. It was a seemingly impossible challenge yet, somehow, I managed to embrace the unique insanity of it all and make it out in one piece.
When lockdown hit in March 2020, lectures were cancelled and the library shut, but university work was still expected on time and many students were thrown into a panic. I was one of those students and although I didn’t have a final year dissertation to hand in, I still had valuable assignments that would make or break my final MA grade. How was I going to cope? At this time, little was on Moodle (the online learning platform used at Portsmouth) in terms of teaching materials so, like a lot of students, I felt more than a little stranded.
But I was determined not to let the situation beat me.