Tag: British history
Digital Humanities: Bomb Sight Project
The Bomb Sight project is mapping the London WW2 bomb census between 7/10/1940 and 06/06/1941. The project has scanned original 1940s bomb census maps, geo-referenced the maps and digitally captured the geographical locations of all the falling bombs recorded on the original map.
Use the interactive web-mapping application to explore and search for different bomb locations across London. Click on individual bombs and find out information relating to the neighbouring area by reviewing contextual images and memories from the Blitz. (from the project description page)
Resource Trial: The Times of India (1838-2001)
The Library has arranged a trial of The Times of India (1838-2001), an English daily newspaper that was founded in 1838 to serve British residents of West India. As described in the promotional materials, the resource “serves researchers interested in studying colonialism and post-colonialism, British and world history, class and gender issues, international relations, comparative religion, international economics, terrorism, and more.”
Like other full text newspapers we purchase through ProQuest, this resource is searchable by keyword, article types, dates and date ranges, and author. It provides access to all of the newspaper’s contents: articles, photos, advertisements, marriage announcements, cartoons, obituaries, etc.
While the trial is active, you can also access The Times of India through our subscription to Historical Newspapers (ProQuest). At the top of the search screen click on the “Searching: 7 databases” link and select the newspaper from the list that appears in the pop-up window.
The trial runs through March 26, 2013. Your comments on the resource are welcome. You can leave them here or send them to me at jdorner@library.berkeley.edu.
Primary Sources: The Sunday Times Digital Archive
The Library recently acquired access to the full text digitized content of the Sunday Times Digital Archive, 1822-2006.
The Sunday Times is a distinct newspaper with no editorial connection to The Times (London). Accessible on the same platform as The Times Digital Archive, this resource has the same basic and advanced search features (see the previous blog post). If you prefer to search both newspapers simultaneously, use the link to the Gale News Vault on the basic search screen. This gives you access to both publications, plus additional newspaper content subscribed to by The Library.
Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive
The Times Digital Archive was recently upgraded to include content from 1986-2006, and now includes every complete page of every issue of The Times (London) from 1785 to 2006.
Search tips:
- Use Advanced Search to search for keywords in the title, author, or entire story.
- Advanced Search allows you to limit your search to a broad (News, Business) or narrow (Display Advertising, Deaths) category of story.
- “Fuzzy search” in Advanced Search allows you to locate a word or words within works despite imperfect matches in spelling between the searched term and document content (and possible OCR errors). The Low setting will slightly expand your search results to include very near matches on your term(s) and the High setting will expand your results to include very broad matches on your term(s).
- Use quotation marks to search for phrases.
- Use an asterisk (*) to search for variations of a word: A search on carib* finds Carib, Caribs, Carribbean, caribe, caribou.
- Use an exclamation point (!) to substitute for a letter in a word: A search on colo!r finds color and colour.
- The Browse by Date option lets you find an individual issue of the newspaper and view the articles page by page.
An impressive feature of this resource is the ability to move easily from the article view to a page view with an accompanying list of articles on that page, to a browsable list of pages in the issue. Marking the items will allow you to save the citations for download, printing or emailing. Printing or downloading the articles should be done from the article view screen.
Primary Sources: NCCO – British Politics and Society
The British Politics and Society archive, part of the newly acquired Nineteenth Century Collections Online, consists of primary sources related to the political climate in Great Britain during the nineteenth century, including papers of British statesmen, Home Office records, ordnance surveys, and working class autobiographies. This is a rich resource for scholars exploring such topics as British domestic and foreign policy, trade unions, Chartism, utopian socialism, public protest, radical movements, the cartographic record, political reform, education, family relationships, religion, leisure and many others.
Each of the collections in the archive is browsable. Basic and advanced searching of the collections is also possible, although the results will vary from collection to collection depending on how much machine-readable content is included. The full text of handwritten documents is not searchable.
Search tip: In advanced search, you have the option to “Allow variations.” This is a good option to choose, since it will look for British and American spelling variations (harbor/harbour) and also may compensate for some Optical Character Recognition (OCR) errors that inevitably occur during the scanning process.