becca gillott

Understanding Ngrams

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│By Becca Gillot, Gale Digital Scholar Lab Product Manager│

One of the easiest tools to understand and use in Gale Digital Scholar Lab is the Ngram tool. This blog post will explain the tool itself, how to use it to explore your content set, and some tips and tricks for getting the most out of your visualisations.

The Ngram Tool

The Ngram tool is one of the easiest to understand in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. The tool works its way through the cleaned OCR that you have created (by applying a cleaning configuration to your content set) and counts how many times an ‘Ngram’ appears, before displaying that data as either a word cloud or a bar graph.

The Ngram tool is great for getting a high-level overview of your content set, so you can see at a glance the themes, key concepts, and ideas contained in the documents you are exploring. This type of distant reading is particularly great for large content sets that can be unwieldy to explore using close reading, or for content sets you’re not familiar with, but can also be used to analyse specific texts, such as an individual monograph. Even if you know your material really well, the Ngram tool can be a great way of presenting that knowledge as an accessible snapshot that others can quickly understand.

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Delivering Impact – Launching Gale Research Showcase and Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Projects

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│By Becca Gillott and Chris Houghton, Gale Digital Scholar Lab team│

From newspaper columns to academic reports, “The Humanities in Crisis” is a common refrain. It is a widely held fear that, in societies increasingly focused on the risks and benefits of technology in the fourth industrial revolution, studying what it means to be human is seen as increasingly irrelevant.

Irrespective of these fears, the evidence indicates that the teaching of humanities is increasingly under strain in higher education. Where we are in the UK, every summer sees the closure of yet another set of humanities departments. Higher Education assessment criteria like the UK’s Research Excellence Framework and Teaching Excellence Framework have a growing focus on measuring not just the quality, but the impact of disciplines.

This focus on impact has led to interesting developments in higher education institutions as humanities departments find new ways of working and collaborating within and without the institution.

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