Gale, part of Cengage Group, introduces advanced visualization and analysis tools for its Digital Scholar Lab. 

Gale, a division of Cengage Group, a provider of educational technology, has unveiled a new suite of capabilities for its cloud-based Gale Digital Scholar Lab platform. Students, instructors, and librarians utilize the platform to do text and data mining (TDM) on digital collections of primary sources.

The announcements were made at the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference in Minneapolis. Among the primary changes are enhanced Ngram tracking, a new Sentiment by Timeframe function, and improvements to parts-of-speech tools. Based on user feedback, the modifications aim to provide researchers greater control over how content sets are arranged and analyzed.

Gale's Director of Product Management, Jessica Ludwig, stated, “These improvements give instructors more chances to incorporate the Lab into classes and various teaching and learning contexts to promote the development of digital, data, and AI literacy.”

The Sentiment Analysis program now allows users to upload their lexicons, which Gale claims increases flexibility and facilitates work with non-English and historical texts. New pie chart visualizations, a Markup View to enhance linguistic tagging transparency, and enhanced color palette customization for visual outputs are some of the other modifications.

The resources are positioned to help teachers incorporate data-driven methods into their teaching of literature and the humanities. According to Heather Heckman-McKenna, he imagines using proximity searches and Ngrams most often when instructing students. Students may learn that studying literature is much more than just close reading if they are allowed to conduct their research using Ngram results.