A blog from Gale International
|By Sara Pellijeff, Gale Field Sales Executive – Nordics and Baltics|
On July 11, 1897, the hydrogen balloon Örnen (“The Eagle”) took off from Svalbard (a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole) with three Swedish expedition members on board – Salomon August Andrée, Knut Frænkel, and Nils Strindberg. The plan was to float over what was, at the end of the nineteenth century, the world’s last mysterious destination: the North Pole.
│By Jagyoseni Mandal, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford│
The global pandemic that hit us last year and continues to affect numerous aspects of life has made research particularly difficult. I can say this from personal experience, as I have had to study for more than a term at my home in India, where I am stuck because of COVID, rather than studying at my university in Oxford. This situation risked affecting both my mental health and my studies; I felt I was running out of both time and resources for my research. But discovering the Gale Digital Scholar Lab has been a revelation, opening up a whole new area of potential research to me, and it is accessible entirely remotely. In this post I am going to share how the Gale Digital Scholar Lab made Digital Humanities accessible to me; how the various tools in helped me in my research and led me to discover more topics around my area of interest.
The town of Wangaratta in the north of Victoria, Australia, has a population of approximately 19,000, but little does that population realise that one amongst their number is a man who, but for an accident of history, could today be the King of England. This matter was originally researched by the British historian, Dr. Michael Jones, in 2003, and it can be updated with the help of Gale Primary Sources.
By Anna Sikora, Gale Ambassador at NUI Galway
I hate it when parents do homework for their kids, but the last one tempted me enough to get involved! To deter my 15-year-old from using the plethora of lazily compiled websites cluttered with poorly researched material, I got her onto Gale Primary Sources. Her presentation, according to her history teacher, was beyond impressive. Plus, he could not believe how easily one can now access such primary source materials, and how uniquely valuable they are. The topic was simple: to research the family pet. We have a little Yorkie, so here goes the shortened version of my child’s homework… Today, Yorkies are tiny posh dogs which celebrities like to parade in their bags, grannies hold on their laps, and small kids pet in the park (to the horror of the owners), all forgetting that a terrier is the ultimate working dog: a snappy little ratter originally bred to catch rodents.
By Daniel Mercieca, Gale Ambassador at Durham University
“She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.” [i]
The well-trodden Dorsetshire heathlands, bustling rustic communities and evanescent ghosts from Thomas Hardy’s folkloric world, Wessex, continue to impress memories of English rural heritage. Hardy’s sensitive capturing of ‘mere impressions of the moment’ in prose and poetry; the cascade of raindrops on a gate, hazy warmth of a barn dance or ghostly silhouette of a horse rider in sea mist, reinvigorates our appreciation of ordinary experience [ii]. This year marks the 90th anniversary of Hardy’s final collection of verse, Winter Words in Various Moods and Meters (1928), whose sombre cadences echo amongst later generations of modern poets and can be found in The Times Historical Archive. The continual resurgence of Hardy’s works in dramatic and televisual adaptations, modern poetry and National Trust Heritage fosters a Wessex mythology which remains vibrant today.