[October 2024]

Parts of Speech and Sentiment Analysis tools have a new view that allows users to see how the words in their documents have been identified by the tools. This is done via marking up the OCR*. In Parts of Speech, the mark-up indicates how each word has been categorised (for example as a noun or adjective), and in the Sentiment Analysis tool, it shows the sentiment of scored words.

Click to expand examples.

This new view improves the transparency of these tools, making it easier for users to understand how they’re working. It’s also easier to move between distant and close reading, and understand the context in which the identified words appear within each document.

This mark-up view already existed for Named Entity Recognition, but was the only view of the document the user could access. We have added a link to the original scan of the document within the tool, bringing it in line with all the other tools and ensuring that the user can easily access all of the information and context they might need about a document when conducting their research.

Click to expand example.

*OCR = This acronym is used to refer to a machine-readable text version of a document. It stands for Optical Character Recognition, which is the process by which machine-readable text is obtained from a photograph of a document.

[October 2024]

Sentiment by Timeframe is the third visualization in the Sentiment Analysis tool, and offers the following options: Century, Decade, Year, Month. With this visualization, users can navigate from the century level down to the month level, going in and out of different time periods within a Content Set to explore the nuances of specific timeframes. This update was made in direct response to user requests for increased granularity within the Sentiment Analysis tool and allows users to do more with their data.

Please note, available Timeframes are based on the metadata available for the documents being analyzed – if none of your documents include a publication month, then the month option will not appear for that year.

[July 2024]

Homepage redevelopments were made, giving users a cleaner and more intuitive experience, highlighting key features and research routes the user can take. Updates included:

• Adding a Search Bar – often the first thing a user looks for, to immediately get started!
• Four large buttons indicating routes to get started: Build, Clean, Analyze, My Research
• Gale Research Showcase carousel – a rotating display, encouraging users to explore the Showcase for more examples and inspiration!
• Learning Center banner, flagging this key source of 24/7 support, including highlighting areas of particular use, and some of the questions it can answer.

[July 2024]

Sentiment Analysis tool migrated from using the 111 version of the AFINN lexicon, to the 165 version of the AFINN lexicon, which includes an additional 905 scored words/tokens.

Please note analysis runs made before the update are no longer directly replicable.

[July 2024]

The open-source algorithms that power the following tools were updated:

• Named Entity Recognition and Parts of Speech both use spaCy, an open-source natural language processing library. Both tools were updated to using version 3.7.4 of spaCy.
• Document Clustering uses scikit-learn, which is a machine learning library. The Document Clustering tool was updated to using version 1.4.0 of scikit-learn.

Thanks to the updates to these two Python-based software libraries, users will notice improved performance when using the tools.

[June 2024]

A number of accessibility and styling updates were made, including:

• Improving text colours and mark-up view for Named Entity Recognition
• Enabling the user to download either the top 100 or top 25 results for Ngrams
• Adding a Tooltip to better explain functionality for Sentiment Analysis.

The ability to zoom for the Sentiment Over Time visualization was also introduced, so the user can make the visualization larger and explore it in more detail.

Lastly, the Word Cloud visualization for Ngrams was overhauled by moving to Highcharts. This brought it in line with our other visualizations, reduced white space and improved the readability of the words themselves. The results of an analysis were unchanged.

[April 2024]

In April 2024 we launched Gale Research Showcase, a free, open repository of student-authored digital scholarship. Designed to advance early career research, it showcases high-quality, peer-reviewed essays that demonstrate best practices in digital scholarship.

Students can use Gale Research Showcase to get inspiration and guidance on using Digital Humanities techniques in their own projects – and to get published!

Publishing in Gale Research Showcase is a great opportunity for early-career researchers to experience the Peer Review process, and get free feedback, support and suggestions from Gale’s DH experts on their DH project.

Gale Research Showcase is a great tool for faculty, librarians and educators to use when developing a DH curriculum, providing a hub of research examples to enhance instruction and engage and motivate students.

View Showcase  Learn more – For Students  Learn more – For Educators

[March 2024]

Three Python Notebooks are now available in the Learning Center. They offer users a way to take their research further and analyse their data using annotated code blocks that can be run using an interactive coding platform like JupyterLab or Google CoLab.

The Python Notebooks offer flexible customisation options, such as the ability to process downloaded Datasets from within the Lab, or to run the user’s own datasets.

The three Python Notebooks are:

• Named Entity Recognition
• Geographical Information System (GIS)
• Sentiment Analysis

Click to expand.

[March 2024]

A full reorganisation of the existing material makes it easier to navigate, with a particular focus on quickly getting users to the information they need. This includes a section for ‘My Research’, to support the new dashboard, and a ‘Getting Started’ section that directs users to resources that can help them start analysing straight away.

[March 2024]

As part of the introduction of the Projects feature, Content Sets and Notebook have been moved to the new ‘My Research’ dashboard, where they sit alongside Projects. This groups together all the user’s personal materials into one hub, making it easy for researchers to organise and locate the materials that are central to their research, while moving seamlessly between the different aspects of creating a research project.

Click to expand.

[March 2024]

The new Projects feature allows users to take copy materials from their Notebook, and elsewhere in the Lab, and thoughtfully compile them together, along with newly written text, into a formal report. This can then be submitted to Gale Research Showcase (see update above), or downloaded for use elsewhere, such as submitting an assignment or creating a research paper.

The Projects feature is found within the ‘My Research’ dashboard (see update above). Working in tandem with existing Lab features such as the Notebook, Projects allows the researcher to undertake their entire research workflow within the platform.

Both Personal and Group Workspaces support the Projects feature, meaning groups of researchers can work on a project simultaneously within a Group Workspace. Multiple Projects can also be created within the same workspace.

Click to expand.

[October 2023]

When accessing resources through an institution, users are first required to authenticate, to confirm they’re at the institution. With Gale Digital Scholar Lab, they then also need to login to their personal account, to see their own Content Sets, cleaning configurations and analyses.

Users can authenticate in different ways – automatically via IP address/ EZProxy, or via Shibboleth, which requires them to input their university credentials.

This update introduces a new authentication page for the Lab that allows users to select how they want to authenticate – allowing them to bypass automatic IP address/ EZProxy authentication for this product only. This will enable institutions to use IP address/ EZProxy authentication for other Gale products, while allowing Lab users to access the university credentials login option.

Please note, this new page will display only for institutions that have both Shibboleth and IP authentication enabled.

Further information in this FAQ.

Click to expand.

[August 2023]

Highcharts underpins visualizations in multiple Gale products, including the analyses in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. This update brings the most up-to-date version of Highcharts to the platform, providing new features to enhance the visualizations and fixing a variety of bugs. Alongside the update, we adjusted the colours of the visualizations to be fully accessible against both white and black backgrounds.

Click to expand.

[May 2023]

New Upload Format

Users can now upload documents via .csv file, through which the text and metadata for multiple documents can be uploaded in one go. This functionality works alongside the existing .txt file upload option.

Workflow changes

When a user uploads a document, they are now rerouted to the ‘Manage All Uploads’ page, where they can add metadata and fully interact with their new documents. This creates more transparency and makes it easier to manage uploaded documents.

Click to expand.

New Metadata columns

Two new metadata columns have been added to the ‘Manage All Uploads’ page:

• Content Set (indicates all the Content Sets a document is included in)
• Date Uploaded

Users can hide columns as needed. Each column also has its own filter.

[May 2023]

Datasets are small collections of carefully chosen documents that focus on a specific topic and allow users to quickly jump into using the tools within Gale Digital Scholar Lab, right from the get go. They can be easily added to the user’s My Content Sets dashboard using the ‘Get a copy’ button.

The four new datasets are called:

• Indigenous Leaders 1
• The Campaign Against the Contagious Diseases Act
• The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
• The Battle of Cable Street

They were created in direct response to user feedback, which indicated that additional example materials were in demand. Instructors requested more example datasets for teaching, and newer researchers suggested additional datasets would help them to better conceptualise how they might apply the Lab to their own research.

These new datasets were curated by our Senior Digital Humanities Specialist, with topics suggested by the Gale Digital Humanities User Engagement Group. All datasets are available in both the Personal and Group workspaces, enabling them to be used in both solo and collaborative research.

Datasets differ from Sample Projects. Sample Projects are full projects that guide the user from content curation to analysis; datasets are smaller collections that have not been processed or cleaned, and do not include example analyses.

Click to expand.

Please note, four further datasets have been released since this update:

• Indigenous Leaders Part 2
• Sea Serpents
• Sarah and Angelina Grimke
• Female Stunt Reporters

[December 2022]

Released at the same time as Group Workspaces, the Group Notebook is a collaborative note-taking tool which allows students and researchers to communicate, ideate, and iterate on their projects together, helping to develop good research methodologies, as well as project management and report writing skills.

Significantly it allows students to create collaborative notes on content sets, clean configurations, and visualizations – from directly within those features, thus not disrupting their workflow. Users can also add images and links to their notes. The feature also records information such as the author of each note and date it was added, allowing group member contributions to be tracked.

The Group Notebook can also be used by educators to provide students with support materials, resources, and feedback to guide project-based learning.

Later updates included:

• A Sort feature, making it easier to navigate the Notebook.
• Additional Export options, allowing users to download notes as a CSV, Word or PDF file.
• Pan-Zoom functionality for images in the Notebook, allowing users to interact with notes more effectively.

Download Factsheet

[December 2022]

Released at the same time as Group Notebooks, the Group Workspace feature was introduced to allow users to view other group members’ content, build content sets collaboratively, and share visualizations between group members.

This functionality helps students and researchers develop project management and collaboration skills. It also allows educators to oversee their class’s work by joining each group, meaning they can offer support when needed and keep projects on track.

Collaboration is a huge part of digital humanities work, and this update was in direct response to extensive user requests.

Later updates included:

• The ability to select avatars for each collaborator, and for the group itself.
• Replicating the Merge, Move and Duplicate Content Set functions in the Group Workspace, aligning it with the functionality of the Personal Workspace.

Collaborators must all be at the same institution, due to rights limitations.

Download Factsheet