Gale Primary Sources: China and The Modern World

Gale is a US-based publisher specializing in library publishing, especially known for its Gale Primary Sources databases of digitized historical documents, many of which are available to NTU faculty and students. This session will focus on the China and the Modern World database series, which contains rare English-language documents from the late Qing to early Republican period of China. A Gale Senior Product Manager will give an overview of each content set in the database series and what types of research they may be valuable for, then demonstrate how to effectively navigate the database utilizing its various functions. Contents of the databases include early English-language periodicals published by missionaries and other bodies in China; the internal papers and records of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, a foreign-run bureaucracy that was deeply involved in China’s modernization; and Britain’s India and Burma Office intelligence records on China and its frontier regions of China bordering British India. He will also demonstrate the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, an intuitive text mining platform that allows researchers to run sophisticated analyses using the historical text from Gale Primary Sources as a corpus, enabling them to gain macro level insights into the material which may elude the naked eye. He will also briefly introduce other related Gale Primary Sources available to NTU as well as future directions of their publishing program.