New Tool Enhancements Offer Greater Personalization, Transparency and New Avenues for Digital Humanities Research as Colleges Increasingly Prioritize Essential Skills
MINNEAPOLIS, April 2, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference – Gale, part of Cengage Group, is enhancing Gale Digital Scholar Lab (the Lab) with seven major tool updates that expand text and data mining (TDM) research possibilities for students, faculty and librarians. Developed based on feedback from Lab users, these updates give researchers the ability to personalize their approach to TDM with more customization, expanding the possibilities of research and creating new ways of exploring primary sources.
These updates offer more ways for faculty to fit the Lab into courses and different teaching and learning scenarios.
“These enhancements offer more opportunities for faculty to fit the Lab into courses and different teaching and learning scenarios to support digital, data, and AI literacy acquisition,” said Jessica Ludwig, Director of Product Management at Gale. “Actively listening to our customers’ needs continues to drive our product development, allowing us to adeptly manage the complexities involved in implementing significant new features like these.”
Key updates include:
Sentiment by Timeframe: a new visualization for the Sentiment Analysis tool allows users to drill down and easily analyze data across different timeframes (century, decade, year, and month) within their content sets.
Mark-Up View for Parts of Speech and Sentiment Analysis Tools: this new view improves tool transparency, allowing users to see how words are identified in their documents, providing important context for results. It also facilitates movement between distant and close reading.
Parts of Speech Pie Chart: pie charts have been added as a second visualization option to the Parts of Speech tool, allowing users to see their data in different ways and useful for understanding how individual categories combine into a whole (e.g., what percentage of a work is made up of nouns).
Personalized Lexicons for Sentiment Analysis: users can now upload their own lexicons (a list of analyzed words) into the tool, tailoring the analysis to their specific material and subject expertise. This addresses the limitations of the currently used AFINN lexicon and expands research exploration of historical documents and non-English TDM, including support for accented characters.
Ngrams Start Word Lists: users can create an Ngram visualization for a list of words they are interested in, returning frequencies for only those terms within the content set.
Ngrams Over Time: provides the frequency and distribution of Ngrams in a content set over time (launching in May 2025)
Color Palettes: users can customize their visualizations for presentations and articles with greater control over their visual appearance (launching in May 2025).
For historians interested in exploring the possibilities of the digital humanities tools available in the Lab, Gale-ASECS non-residential fellow, Daniel Watkins, recommends: “The tools themselves don’t have to provide final conclusions—they can help researchers process information. For example, the Ngram analysis tool helped me determine additional stop words to add to cleaning protocols so that the topic modeling and document clustering analyses produced better results … I hadn’t considered this method for using digital humanities tools before.”
To faculty interested in sharing digital humanities research methods in an instructional environment, Gale-ASECS Non-Residential Fellow, Heather Heckman-McKenna recommends: “In teaching undergraduates, I imagine I would use proximity searches and Ngrams most frequently. Allowing students the freedom to make their own inquiries based on Ngram results could help students recognize that studying literature is far more than mere close reading. They could learn that they could approach literature with a more methodical, scientific mindset to uncover potentially brand new ways to think about texts.”
Gale Digital Scholar Lab is a cloud-based research environment designed to transform how 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 humanities and social sciences. 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, The 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. It also offers extensive pedagogical support in its digital Learning Center for those who are new to or developing their TDM skills.
Gale will showcase and demo the Lab’s new updates at the ACRL Conference, April 2-5, in Minneapolis at the Gale booth #708.
For more information or to request a trial, visit the Gale Digital Scholar Lab web page.
About Cengage Group and Gale
Cengage Group, an education technology company serving millions of learners in 165 countries, advances the way students learn through quality, digital experiences. The company currently serves the K-12, higher education, professional, library, English language teaching and workforce training markets worldwide. Gale, part of Cengage Group, provides libraries with original and curated content, as well as the modern research tools and technology that are crucial in connecting libraries to learning, and learners to libraries. For more than 65 years, Gale has partnered with libraries around the world to empower the discovery of knowledge and insights – where, when and how people need it. Gale has 500 employees globally with its main operations in Farmington Hills, Michigan. For more information, please visit www.gale.com.
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Media Contact:
Kayla Siefker, Gale, part of Cengage Group
248-378-3376
kayla.siefker@cengage.com
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SOURCE Gale, part of Cengage Group
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