Dissertations (and Dissertation Festival)

This workshop will use primary source material from the University’s Social Work archive to interrogate the use of language, its impact and its legacy. Participants will also explore the relationship between language and the purpose of research, the importance of terminology and use the source material to investigate what the vocabulary can reveal about mid-20th century attitudes to mental health and social housing.

As part of Dissertation Week at the Library, join Ali Nazari-Nouri, Training and Consulting Partner at ProQuest, to learn about the wide variety of primary and secondary sources that are available at the University of Edinburgh and how you could utilise these resources to explore and collate the necessary information for your dissertation. ProQuest provide the University Library with access to over 30 databases (both for primary sources, newspaper archives and secondary sources) covering a wide and varied range of subject areas. Looking to start your dissertation research? ProQuest is a good place to start.

The University of Edinburgh has access to a fantastic collection of primary source archives from Gale, covering centuries of content. Including, historical newspapers from the British Library, as well as The Times, The Economist and The Daily Mail, literature drama and plays from the 18th and 19th centuries and thematic collections such as the Archives of Sexuality and Gender.

In this session we will introduce a number of these archives as well the Gale Primary Sources platform, where these archives are cross-searchable. The Gale Primary Sources platform greatly enhances the research experience for students and researchers by broadening their discovery of primary source documents through the use of multiple search options and powerful research tools, such as Topic Finder and Term Frequency.

Critical engagement with primary sources is an essential component of a successful dissertation in the humanities and social sciences. As a student at Edinburgh you have access to films, diaries, theatre records, historical newspapers and government files from archives around the world through Adam Matthew Digital collections, covering periods from the Middle Ages to the 21st century.
In this Dissertation Week session Dr Laura Blomvall will talk you through Edinburgh’s collections, from Shakespeare’s Globe Archive to Service Newspapers of World War Two, from Foreign Office Files for China to Literary Print Culture, from Mass Observation Online to Eighteenth-Century Journals. She will give you tips on how to navigate archival material online and how to use primary sources to enrich, enliven and expand your dissertation.