Gale Transforms Digital Humanities Research with Launch of New Digital Scholar Lab
Gale's Digital Scholar Lab Removes Barriers to Entry into Digital Scholarship, Streamlining Workflows, Driving Visualizations and Discoveries
FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich., Sept. 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Gale, a Cengage company, is changing the way scholars and students access and analyze raw text data. Gale's Digital Scholar Lab, a cloud-based research environment launched by the company today, allows students and researchers to apply natural language processing tools to raw text data (OCR) from Gale Primary Sources archives in a single research platform. This new research environment removes key barriers to entry into digital scholarship, enabling users at any level to perform textual analysis on large corpora of historical texts, streamlining the workflow process to help generate new research insights.
This new platform marks a major milestone in the innovative evolution of Gale's unrivaled primary source collections and the research possibilities that emerge from natural language processing. Read our blog on Gale's Digital Scholar Lab.
Gale's Digital Scholar Lab provides a critical infrastructure for digital humanities research and instruction as well as simplifies complex workflows by integrating the most commonly used open source tools. This combination of content and tools allows researchers to analyze texts in ways that are unattainable through traditional close reading, allowing configuration of tools and content sets to meet users' specific needs in a single research environment.
Gale's Digital Scholar Lab is built on user-based design principles that helps keep research activities organized and accessible. It combines analysis-ready raw text data with digital tools and algorithms to generate visualizations and discoveries that are the hallmark of data mining and digital scholarship. Importantly, the entirely new platform has been architected for interoperability to flexibly allow future sharing of analytical tools and to promote the global spread of digital scholarship.
Gale's Digital Scholar Lab supports a broad spectrum of users:
- Scholars: The Digital Scholar Lab gives access to large data sets that are easily mined and edited for use in custom applications and digital tools without costly and time-intensive data clean-up.
- Librarians: With Gale's Digital Scholar Lab, libraries can provide researchers of all levels the opportunity to engage with the humanities in entirely new ways without capital investment in costly computing environments, thus strengthening the library's relationships across campus and increasing the value of its collections.
- Students: As a teaching tool, the Digital Scholar Lab provides a familiar navigational interface style for students new to text data mining and introduces them to textual analysis in a streamlined manner.
As academic libraries continually shift to keep up with the changing needs of research and scholarship, many are looking at the digital humanities as an opportunity for closer collaboration with faculty and other campus stakeholders.
With the Digital Scholar Lab, Gale has created a research environment that helps bridge the gap that often exists between scholarly resources and faculty researchers/students. By shrinking the distance between available content and natural language processing tools, Gale's Digital Scholar Lab provides access to open source and proprietary tools that are frequently required to support libraries that are investing in becoming "Digital Humanities Centers."
With Gale's Digital Scholar Lab, users can:
- Search and create robust content/data sets from their library's Gale Primary Sources collections.
- Use analysis tools and visualize results.
- Organize research and manage long-term projects.
- Download and share visualizations, statistical data and textual data sets.
"Gale pioneered digital delivery of primary source archives making unique special library collections accessible to researchers globally," said Marc Cormier, Director of Product Management for the Humanities at Gale. "Today, we launch a new platform equal to the task of analyzing massive content collections such a Gale Primary Sources with the intent of promoting new discoveries and broadening access to the tools of digital humanities."
To request a trial, visit Gale's Digital Scholar Lab webpage.
About Cengage and Gale
Cengage is the education and technology company built for learners. The company serves the higher education, K-12, professional, library and workforce training markets worldwide. Gale, a Cengage company, 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 60 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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Kayla Siefker, Gale, a Cengage company
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SOURCE Gale, a Cengage company
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