Database Review
Overview
Hailed as a landmark achievement for digital humanities scholarship when it made its debut in 2013, Gale’s Artemis Primary Sources was a seamless union of Gale’s impressive index of primary source databases. Anyone with a card to a Gale-subscriber library could now type a keyword and compare what 19th-century American and British newspapers had to say about it without having to ask them each in turn. Not only that, the agglomerate of agglomerates now spanned 500 years, with 2,471 collections in four languages, and one more in a fifth (Hungarian). The sources coupled print matter with manuscripts, including letters and diaries, and continuing on to photographs. Finally, Artemis added a number of new analytical tools to help users navigate its flood of data, and modify research methods toward new interpretations. Terms frequency thus yields “term clusters,” a visualization of where and when certain terms appeared most, complementary to Google’s Ngram viewer.
Facts
Date Range: 1400-2008
Publisher: Gale Cengage
Publisher About Page: https://www.gale.com/about
Object Type: array
Exportable image: yes
Facsimile image: yes
Full text searchable: yes
Location of original materials: widely distributed, Gale aggregates discrete archives.
Titles list link: https://go-gale-com.mutex.gmu.edu/ps/publicationSearch?method=doSearch&inPS=true&userGroupName=viva_gmu&prodId=GDCS (A spreadsheet of all 2,472 titles accompanies the same page.)
History/Provenance
Original catalog: When Artemis began as the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) in the early 2000s, it took its title list directly from the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) of printed volumes. When it undertook the Nineteenth Century collections Online (NCCO), no such standardized bibliography existed. Artemis’s architects built their own catalog by dividing nineteenth-century print media thematically, expanding beyond books to include maps and photographs, into separate databases for women’s history, science, politics, and so forth. With Artemis in 1913, the thematic databases collapsed into one.
Original microfilm: some (the eighteenth-century collection alone includes 135,000 titles that Gale had microfilmed over forty years).
Original sources: Most of Artemis’s original materials reside in libraries and university archives. Gale itself owns very little if any of the material.
Reviews
In 2013, Dr. Robert Nicholson hailed Artemis as an important development on his Digital Victorianist blog, noting particularly its “seamlessness” and analytic tools. In an illuminating if blatantly biased 2017 review of Artemis by its own co-architect, Seth Cayley explains how Artemis has evolved toward “deeper interrogations” since the unveiling. Specifically, in 2014 it permitted users to access (with their libraries’ assistance) Gale’s “underlying XML and OCR data.” It was now possible to pose more precise, comparative questions, enabling one scholar to extract all of the poetry that found its way into eighteenth-century British newspapers.
See: https://www.digitalvictorianist.com/2013/06/first-look-gale-artemis/
Seth Cayley, “Digitization for the Masses: Taking Users Beyond Simple Searching in Nineteenth-Century Collections Online,” Journal of Victorian Culture, v. 22, n. 2 (2017), 248-55.
Access
WorldCat link: https://www.worldcat.org/title/gale-artemis-primary-sources/oclc/942286041&referer=brief_results
Access is available chiefly through libraries, with “custom trials” available to individuals as representatives of non-subscriber institutions.
Info from Publisher
Contact information for the company is available here: https://www.gale.com/contact
Other Info
None
Citing
MLA
For information on how to cite electronic sources, consult Diana Hacker, Research and Documentation Online, 5th edition.
