Gale Digital Scholar Lab Expands to Help Students Present and Share Digital Humanities Research

New Enhancements Inspire Experimentation and Give Early Career Researchers a Dedicated Space to Share Research Outcomes and Learn from Others

FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich. – April 24, 2024 –  Gale, part of Cengage Group, has expanded the Gale Digital Scholar Lab (the Lab) platform with enhanced support for conducting and presenting digital humanities research—from idea to publication. The new “Projects” feature within Gale Digital Scholar Lab offers a guided framework to help students compile their research into a final report, and Gale Research Showcase gives early career researchers an opportunity to share their projects with a worldwide audience of Lab users and others as a first step in academic publishing. These new capabilities support and increase the impact of digital humanities in the classroom, expanding pathways to interdisciplinary knowledge, skills and careers. Read The Gale Review blog about these new enhancements. 

“We added and refined the new Gale Digital Scholar Lab upgrades in consultation with librarians, instructors and graduate students to support all stages of research, including final publication,” said Seth Cayley, vice president of global academic product at Gale. “After more than a year of hard work, we are thrilled to release these updates to help students and early career researchers get their ideas out into the world.”

The Lab’s new enhancements include:

• Gale Research Showcase: an open access repository of student-written digital scholarship created in the Lab, using Gale Primary Sources. It gives students a dedicated, peer-reviewed space on gale.com to publish and share their digital humanities research and learn from others around the globe who use the Lab.

• Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Projects: this new major addition allows users to take draft materials from their Notebook and elsewhere in the Lab and thoughtfully compile them together into a formal report. Working in tandem with existing Lab features such as the Notebook, Projects allows the researcher to undertake their entire research workflow without needing to leave the platform. Features in Projects include:

• My Research dashboard: helps students streamline and organize their research workflow. The dashboard is a central hub for research activities, including information-gathering in Content Sets, documentation in Notebook, and reporting in Projects.
• New Projects space: a framework that helps students transform their insights into a structured report for presenting in the classroom, at conferences and in journal publications. It also provides instructors with a digital humanities essay framework for course assignments or capstone. Students can:

• Import information directly from their Content Sets and Notebook into multiple different final reports, while retaining their original draft notes.
• Build a presentation-ready report with “Add Header” or “Add Section” commands.
• Collaborate on reports with other researchers.
• Preview their final report to ensure a polished product and prevent accidental submission.
• Submit their work to the Gale Research Showcase, a peer-reviewed online destination for digital humanities research and projects.

• Updated Learning Center: supports new enhancements for presenting research outcomes. These include three programs written in Python that expand on the product’s Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Sentiment Analysis tools. Users with no knowledge of coding languages can use these pre-written programs to enhance their data analysis and presentation options. For example, researchers can run a script that instantly maps a list of place names revealed through the Lab’s NER tool to their geographic locations.

“By submitting work to the Gale Research Showcase, students have a rare opportunity to experience the peer-review process and publish their research for a global audience,” said Cayley. “As it grows, the Showcase will provide inspiration and guidance to researchers looking to expand their horizons and develop their own digital scholarship projects.”

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 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, 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. 

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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