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Removing Barriers to Digital Scholarship

"An excellent resource for institutions seeking to expand their research and data-analysis offerings in the humanities." —Gricel Dominguez, reviewing in Library Journal

Emerging from the field of humanities computing with its origins in the late 1940s, digital humanities (DH) is, in many ways, still a growing discipline. With that growth comes a mix of exciting opportunities for researchers and libraries, as well as a host of challenges still to overcome.

When performing analyses, finding, cleaning, and organizing data, natural language processing (NLP) for historical texts is often a daunting task, especially when looking to generate meaningful results. Gale Digital Scholar Lab removes these barriers and streamlines the workflow process, allowing researchers to spend more time identifying previously undiscovered data, testing theories, analyzing results, and gaining new insights. 

Bringing Innovation to Digital Humanities

For researchers, DH scholarship is fueling new ways of interrogating content, analyzing insights, and outputting discoveries, and is fundamentally shifting how scholars partner together to make new types of research possible. Collaboration is a key driver of change as people with diverse backgrounds and skills come together to address common barriers related to applying new computing tools to content that may not always be prepped and accessible.

Advanced Humanities Computing Capabilities for Every User

As expert content curators and skilled technologists, librarians are natural collaborators throughout this process. Libraries around the world are embracing the opportunity to help faculty and students navigate groundbreaking research methodologies and achieve new outcomes by pairing computational analysis tools with high-quality content. While funding for humanities resources is increasingly limited, DH initiatives typically garner more support than traditional programs, positioning libraries well to actively engage at every step of the process.

A New Lens for Historical Texts

Together with libraries, Gale is poised to help colleges and universities launch, enhance, or accelerate their digital scholarship programs, strengthening connections with faculty and students. Gale Digital Scholar Lab, developed with participation from beta testers across a wide range of institutions and organizations, is designed to transform the way scholars and students access and analyze Gale primary source materials by offering solutions to some of the most common challenges facing researchers in the digital humanities today. By integrating an unmatched depth and breadth of digital primary source matter with the most popular DH tools, Gale Digital Scholar Lab provides a new lens to explore history and empowers researchers to generate world-altering conclusions and outcomes. Through advanced humanities computing tools that make natural language processing (NLP) for historical texts accessible, more efficient, and impactful, the footprint of digital humanities can be expanded to more classrooms around the globe.

Digital Scholarship with Prestige

The DH team at Gale couldn't be more proud that Gale Digital Scholar Lab has received the following recognition: 

  • Two-time winner for Best Product, Higher Education from the Tech & Learning Best of 2022 and Best of 2023 Awards of Excellence
  • Three-time winner for Back To School, Higher Education from Tech & Learning Best Tools for Back To School for the third consecutive year in 2024
  • Winner for best research & reference tools solution from the 2023 EdTech Cool Tool Awards
  • A finalist for Best Higher Education Humanities Instructional Solution from the 2023 SIIA CODiE Awards
  • Honorable Mention from the 2023 Modern Library Awards
  • A finalist for Best Learning Analytics/Data Mining Tool from the 2023 Tech Edvocate Awards
  • Platinum winner for best Digital Library Tool from the Campus Technology 2023 New Product Awards

Watch Video and Download Case Studies from Our Fellows

In this series of case studies from Gale research fellows, learn how they used digital humanities tools to push past barriers, save countless hours, and find trends in the data—regardless of skill level with DH tools.

Webinar: How Your Library can Advance Digital Humanities Across Campus

Key findings from a global study about the prominent role of academic libraries in advancing digital humanities on campus.

The Gale Digital Humanities Hub

Discover content and resources for teaching and research.

How the Lab Works

Creating a Content Set

The Gale Digital Scholar Lab gives users the ability to create custom content sets containing as many as 10,000 documents. Users can search across their library’s Gale Primary Sources holdings and seamlessly select documents to be added to their custom content set.

Analyzing Content Sets

Users can analyze and interrogate the data with the text analysis and visualization tools built into the Gale Digital Scholar Lab. Digital humanities analysis methods include: Named Entity Recognition, Topic Modelling, Parts of Speech, and more.

Managing and Sharing

Users’ content sets remained saved in the Gale Digital Scholar Lab allowing them to manage their research for long term projects. Users can publish their outputs with confidence retaining all intellectual property rights and are free to share analysis outputs.

Gale Digital Scholar Lab Updates

We are constantly working to develop and improve Gale Digital Scholar Lab, based on feedback from users, to best meet the needs of researchers, students, librarians and educators. 

Gale strives to uphold values of openness and transparency that are core to the Digital Humanities, so we are happy to provide a list of the updates made to Gale Digital Scholar Lab below. Those at the top are most recent.

  • Marked-Up OCR

    [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.

    Screenshot of marked-up OCR in the Sentiment Analysis tool Screenshot of marked-up OCR in the Parts of Speech tool (adjectives indicated)

    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.

    Screenshot of the Open Document feature highlighted in Named Entity Recognition

    *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.
  • Sentiment by Timeframe Visualization

    [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.
  • Homepage Development

    [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.
  • Sentiment Analysis AFINN Lexicon Update

    [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.
  • Tool Algorithm Updates

    [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.
  • Visualization Updates

    [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.
  • Gale Research Showcase

    [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
  • Group Notebook feature

    [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
  • Group Workspace feature

    [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

The Learning Center: Moving Toward Digital Scholarship for All

The Learning Center gives users the tools and support they need to understand and employ the vast amount of information and skill sets available through the Lab. It includes videos with live walkthroughs conducted by our digital humanities specialists, sample projects, glossaries, FAQs, and much more. Our Beyond the Lab instructional materials equips users with project-based narratives that model the core critical-thinking skills necessary for ideating around research questions and phenomena and interpreting data and findings.

Gale has shipped dozens of text and data mining drives to customers all over the world, but unless there are resources to mount this content in a way that is usable, its value remains largely unrecognized.

Gale has made it easy to transform users’ content to meet their research objectives without all the distracting data that may muddy the results.

The Lab grabs the best of the field’s data analysis tools and makes it easy and accessible for users to perform analyses that can yield meaningful results.

The Lab’s on-screen instructional materials provide users with the instruction as they work through the research process.

Users can browse the available archives provided by their institution in partnership with Gale.

My Content Sets is a space where users can easily organize and manage their research

Sample projects provide users with several completed projects models that are situated within the context of a narrative format.

Which archives are available to use with Gale Digital Scholar Lab?

Reviews & Testimonials

"Gale Digital Scholar Lab provides our community with the unique opportunity to engage with primary sources in ways they may never have considered before, without needing prior knowledge in coding or having to clean data beforehand. While the Lab has great potential for research, we also see it as a great investment for education, as the Lab enables us to provide hands-on experience with text-mining models that students can use for their studies and in their life after university.” 

— Katrina McAlpine, Associate Director, Publishing and Data Services, University of Sydney, Australia

"When we began considering the acquisition of Gale Digital Scholar Lab, our university was in the middle of forming a minor in Digital Studies. To support it, we had to give students access to online collections that could serve as a digital sandbox: something they could experiment with, research in, and manipulate digitally. The Lab gave us that, in addition to a suite of tools that are readily accessible in an environment with fewer barriers to use.”

— Hillary Richardson, Coordinator of Undergraduate Research & Information Literacy Librarian, Mississippi University for Women

"Gale Digital Scholar Lab saves a lot of time. If you use it in a traditional way, it can be time consuming, but if you utilize the Lab’s tools, it is much more convenient.”

— Wei Wang, Subject Librarian, School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University

  • Read More

    The University of North Carolina at Greensboro is pleased to be leading a collaborative multi-state project funded by IMLS entitled the Carolina Digital Library Network (CDLN). In this project, we are evaluating several shared digital library infrastructures, starting with the remarkable new Gale Digital Scholar Lab. The Lab offers an amazing array of textual pattern analysis tools for scholarly explorations into historical documents. Our project will feature a series of competitions over the next two years by researchers at each of our collaborating universities; cash incentives will be awarded for the winning research projects. Our faculty members are intrigued with the possibilities of digital humanities toolkits such as the Lab, not only for their own established research agendas, but also because of the next-generation scholarship training that the project will offer to their graduate students. What we like most about the Lab is that it integrates advanced textual pattern analysis tools into a simple-to-use interface that can be learned quickly by scholars from virtually any discipline.” 

    — Martin Halbert, Professor at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro

    “This innovative and fascinating platform is useful both for seasoned digital humanities researchers and others interested in experimenting in this emerging field. Librarians eager to steer patrons toward library collections will appreciate the opportunities for collaboration this tool provides. Finally, humanities professors will find it helpful for introducing students to textual analysis and digital literacy. Recommended particularly for large research institutions, especially those already invested in Gale Primary Sources.”
    —Brian T. Sullivan, Library Journal



    "The Digital Scholar Lab operates in a Cloud-based research environment, which provides libraries with valuable savings, but, maybe more importantly, the Digital Scholar Lab will encourage students and scholars to use library resources to complete projects. It is hard not to be excited about the possibilities opened up by digital humanities generally and by the Digital Scholar Lab in particular. The appeal to graduate students and scholars is obvious, but the Digital Scholar Lab also has the potential to make in-depth research accessible to undergraduates. Highly recommended for academic libraries."
    —ARBA Staff Reviewer

    "Digitization of archives and technology-based text analysis have changed the field of humanities research. Gale's Digital Scholar Lab works with a library's subscription to Gale Primary Sources, connecting students and scholars with easy-to-use tools to explore many angles of analysis. For libraries with a collection of Gale Primary Sources that support students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences."
    — Susan Maguire

Explore Primary Sources through a New Lens

Explore Gale Primary Sources archives through the lens of the Gale Digital Scholar Lab and unleash sample findings that could be further explored by researchers.

The Making of Modern World Part IV

Women's Studies Archive: Voice & Vision

Answers from Gale's Expert Scholars

Wendy Kurtz, Ph.D., Hispanic Languages and Literatures, and Sarah Ketchley, Ph.D., Egyptology, serve as in-house scholars and advisors to Gale and its library partners. As Digital Humanities Specialists at Gale, they leverage their expertise and innovation in digital humanities research and teaching, and provide key insight to and from the scholarly community. Hear their thoughts on how Gale’s Digital Scholar Lab can fuel innovations in scholarship at your university.

Transforming Scholarly Research

Hear from Sarah Ketchley, Digital Humanities Specialist, as she discusses how her scholarly research would have been transformed using the Digital Scholar Lab.

What is Gale's Digital Scholar Lab?

Hear from Wendy Kurtz, Digital Humanities Specialist, to get an overview of the Digital Scholar Lab, why we created it, and what makes it unique. 

The Importance of Digital Scholarship

Hear from Sarah Ketchley and Wendy Kurtz, Digital Humanities Specialists, as they discuss the importance of digital scholarship for primary source research. 

Challenges with Digital Scholarship

Hear from Wendy Kurtz and Sarah Ketchley, Digital Humanities Specialists, on the Digital Scholar Lab addressing digital scholarship challenges.

 

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