THINKING ABOUT ENTERING? HERE IS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW!

Whether you are well-versed in digital humanities or a complete novice, Gale Digital Scholar Lab lowers the barriers to text and data mining and can be used with many Gale Primary Sources, such as The Times Digital Archive 1785-2019, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Archives of Sexuality and Gender.* 

This is your chance to win one of three prizes and develop in-demand digital literacy skills and analytical experience that will get your work noticed at the same time. Your essay should focus on your methodology in the Lab, so aim to write something that can be read by non-subject experts who want to understand how you explored your subject. 

 

The important info: 

  • Word count: Craft an engaging essay of 1,500 to 2,000 words. 

  • Deadline: Submit your essay and a cover letter, signed by a member of your faculty to confirm your student status, by December 15, 2023.  

  • Language: Essays should be written in English. 

  • Submit your essay and cover letter using this entry form.

 

Questions? Email [email protected]. And remember, your essay must use Gale Digital Scholar Lab, so dive into this cutting-edge resource and flex its potential. Good luck!

*Please note: Access to specific Gale Primary Sources with the Lab will vary depending on what collections are available at your institution. 

GUIDANCE FOR ENTRANTS: Tips on Writing a Great Essay

  • If you don’t know where to find Gale Digital Scholar Lab or the Gale Primary Sources collections at your university, ask your library. They will often be in a database list on the library website. 

  • Entries are encouraged on a variety of topics, subjects, or themes. Gale Digital Scholar Lab enables students at subscribing institutions to analyze as many of their Gale Primary Sources digital archives as they wish, and to upload their own text data for analysis.  

  • In their essay submissions, entrants are strongly encouraged to include visualizations or data downloaded from Gale Digital Scholar Lab, or screenshots of tool or cleaning configurations, to illustrate their methodology. 

  • Essays should be as thorough as possible in describing the research methodology. Entrants should consider submitting the exact steps, tool settings, and configurations that were used to create an analysis. Including the search history used to create a content set, or a link to a downloaded version of the content set, will allow reviewers to properly judge the methodology used.  

  • Entrants should also consider including the raw analysis data download in an appendix to enable replication and review of their process.  

  • References should appear as endnotes with continuous numbering in Chicago style, 17th edition, e.g.:  

    • Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006. 

  • You can cite Gale documents using the "cite" function in the Document Viewer, e.g.:  

  • Guidance on citing Gale Digital Scholar Lab is here.  

Terms and Conditions

  • The competition is open to any current undergraduate student or masters student from a relevant discipline (primarily arts, humanities, and social sciences, but students from other disciplines may enter). 

  • Entrants must be a qualifying student in the 2023/2024 academic year and must prove their status by attaching a cover letter to their entry, signed by a member of their faculty.  

  • The competition requires an essay of 1,500–2,000 words that focuses on student's use of Gale Digital Scholar Lab and requires the student’s institution to have a current subscription to Gale Digital Scholar Lab.  

  • Students may enter more than one essay into the competition.  

  • An entry that is deemed to plagiarize existing research, or which alters visualizations or analysis to produce favorable conclusions not suggested by the data analysis, will be disqualified.  

  • By agreeing to these terms and conditions, entrants agree not to submit any material that contains offensive or inappropriate content. Any submission judged to be containing inappropriate content will be disqualified.  

  • Entries must be written in English but can contain references to non-English sources or content. 

  • Entries will be judged and winners chosen by the Gale Digital Scholar Lab product management team. All decisions are final.  

  • Prizes are $200 for first place, $150 for second place, and $100 for third place. Prizes will be distributed in the form of a prepaid electronic gift card, emailed to the winners. 

  • In addition to awarding prizes, Gale reserves the right to highly commend entries on the basis of their characteristics (highly commended for sentiment analysis use, highly commended history essay, etc.). Highly commended essays will not receive a cash prize but will be published on the Gale Digital Scholar Lab Showcase.  

  • Entrants retain intellectual property rights to their work. Entering this competition does not restrict an entrant publishing their essay in another forum such as an academic journal or blog. By entering this competition, entrants assign the intellectual property rights to their entry to Gale for the express purpose of publishing their entry on the Gale Digital Scholar Lab Showcase. This showcase is open access and Gale reserves the right to quote any entry for the purpose of advertising, including on social media.

  • Personal data is collected under the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR) and will only be used to: 

  • Inform prize winners and honorees. 

  • Identify authorship of essays on the Gale Digital Scholar Lab Showcase.

  • By agreeing to these terms and conditions, entrants consent to their personal data being shared outside the UK for the purpose of entry judging.  

  • The competition is run under English law but is open to any qualifying student from any Gale Digital Scholar Lab-subscribing institution globally.  

  • The competition complies with the requirements of the British Code of Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (“CAP Code”), which is accessible here: https://www.asa.org.uk/codes-and-rulings/advertising-codes/non-broadcast-code.html  

  • Closing date for this competition is at 11:59 PM ET on December 15, 2023.