(21 Jan 2022) Gale, part of a Cengage Group, has expanded Gale Digital Scholar Lab with new and improved features that provide digital humanities (DH) researchers with a better user experience. With a new interface and redesigned analysis tools, Gale Digital Scholar Lab now provides a more consistent and streamlined experience for DH researchers that supports usability, accessibility, as well as replicable and extensible research. Developed based on user feedback, these updates assist researchers of all levels as they navigate text and data mining workflows and improve the experience of running analyses and investigating research outcomes.
“We are seeing an emphasis on bringing DH methods into the classroom as well as an increase in DH certificates and minors that focus on data analysis and storytelling using a variety of tools,” said Seth Cayley, vice president of global academic product at Gale. “Through a robust Learning Center that provides curriculum materials and sample projects, these new enhancements introduce a more unified research experience across Gale Digital Scholar Lab, increasing user confidence and faculty engagement that supports undergraduate and graduate research and teaching.”
Updates to Gale Digital Scholar Lab include:
- New User Interface: look and feel allows for a consistent experience with Gale Primary Sources and aligns with WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines.
- Expanded Search Capabilities: updated search options aligned with Gale Primary Sources, including an optical character recognition (OCR) confidence filter, which helps create more focused content sets for analysis.
- Enhanced Layouts for the Build, Clean, Analyze Workflow: provides more interactivity within visualizations, enabling enhanced exploration of a topic.
- Redesigned Analysis Tools:
- Analysis Dashboard: provides researchers with an at-a-glance view of their work. Users can see the most recent runs of each tool and begin new analysis jobs with less scrolling and clicking.
- Improved User Experience: saves time with a consistent and streamlined user experience across the entire tool ecosystem, including setting up and running new analyses within each tool.
- Inspect Panels: each tool allows users to move seamlessly from distant reading to close reading—from visualization of a content set to inspection at the individual document level, encouraging deeper interaction with texts.
- Updated Learning Center: updated content and multimedia, as well as redesigned sample projects to promote the development of digital literacy.
- Shibboleth authentication: allows users to login using their university credentials for a simplified experience.
Gale Digital Scholar Lab is a cloud-based research environment designed to transform the way scholars and students access and analyze Gale primary source materials—and their local collections—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 material with some of today’s most popular tools for digital humanities analysis and visualization, Gale Digital Scholar Lab provides a new lens to explore history and empowers researchers to deepen their understanding of the world and how it is represented in the written word.
The original press release can be found here.
