Gale Digital Scholar Lab
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• Gale Digital Scholar Lab Brochure
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OPEN NEW RESEARCH PATHWAYS

Gale Digital Scholar Lab creates new possibilities by offering solutions to the most common challenges facing researchers in the digital humanities today.

Removing Barriers to Digital Scholarship

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 organising 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, analysing results, and gaining new insights.

Gale Digital Scholar Lab has been named a best product of 2022 for higher education in Tech & Learning’s Awards of Excellence program.



Bringing Innovation to Digital Humanities
For researchers, DH scholarship is fueling new ways of interrogating content, analysing 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 organisations, is designed to transform the way scholars and students access and analyse 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.
How it Works
Create Content Sets
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.
Analyze Content Sets
Users can analyze and interrogate the data with the text analysis and visualization tools built into Gale Digital Scholar Lab. Digital humanities analysis methods include: Named Entity Recognition, Topic Modelling, Parts of Speech, and more.
Manage and Share
Users’ content sets remained saved in 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.
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.
REVIEWS & TESTIMONIALS
“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 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 provide key insight to and from the scholarly community. Hear their thoughts on how Gale Digital Scholar Lab can fuel scholarly innovations.
What is Gale Digital Scholar Lab?
Hear from Wendy Kurtz, Digital Humanities Specialist, to get an overview of Gale 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 how Gale Digital Scholar Lab addresses challenges.
Transforming Scholarly Research
Hear from Sarah Ketchley, Digital Humanities Specialist, as she discusses how her scholarly research would have been transformed using Gale Digital Scholar Lab.
Which archives are available to use with Gale Digital Scholar Lab?

‣ 17th and 18th Century Burney Newspapers Collection
‣ 17th and 18th Century Nichols Newspapers Collection
‣ 19th Century UK Periodicals
‣ American Amateur Newspapers from the American Antiquarian Society ‣ American Fiction, 1774-1920
‣ American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society ‣ Archives Unbound
‣ Archives of Sexuality and Gender
‣ Associated Press Collections Online
‣ Brazilian and Portuguese History and Culture
‣ British Library Newspapers
‣ China and the Modern World
‣ Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture 1790-1920
‣ Daily Mail Historical Archive
‣ Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligence
‣ The Economist Historical Archive
‣ Eighteenth Century Collections Online
‣ Illustrated London News Historical Archive 1842-2003
‣ The Independent Digital Archive 1986-2016
‣ Indigenous Peoples: North America
‣ International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887-2013
‣ Liberty Magazine Historical Archive 1924-1950
‣ The Listener Historical Archive 1929-1991
‣ The Making of Modern Law
       • The Making of Modern Law: American Civil Liberties Union Papers 1912-1990
       • The Making of Modern Law: Foreign Primary Sources
       • The Making of Modern Law: Foreign, Comparative, and International Law 1600-1926
       • The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises 1800-1926
       • The Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources
       • The Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926
       • The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs 1832-1978
‣ The Making of the Modern World
‣ The Mirror Historial Archive, 1903-2000
‣ Nineteenth Century Collections Online
‣ Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
‣ Picture Post Historical Archive 1938-1957
‣ Political Extremism and Radicalism in the Twentieth Century
‣ Punch Historical Archive 1841-1992
‣ Religions of America
‣ Refugees, Relief and Resettlement
‣ Sabin Americana, 1500-1926
‣ Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive
‣ Smithsonian Collections Online
‣ Sunday Times Digital Archive
‣ The Telegraph Historical Archive
‣ The Times Digital Archive
‣ Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive
‣ U.S. Declassified Documents Online
‣ Women's Studies Archive
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