Product Team

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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Gale-SHAFR Fellows Explore New Digital History Methods

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│By Jess Ludwig, Director, Product Management│

On a recent humid summer morning in Arlington, Virginia, participants in the Gale-Society for the History of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) fellowship presented exciting research findings at SHAFR’s 2025 annual conference.

SHAFR was founded in 1967 and “is dedicated to the scholarly study of the history of American foreign relations.” In 2024, Gale and SHAFR partnered to create a fellowship; as part of the program, Gale made available Gale Primary Sources archives tailored to each fellow’s research agenda; access to the primary sources text and data mining platform Gale Digital Scholar Lab; and a stipend.

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A New Course in Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Introduction to Digital Humanities

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│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│

In today’s rapidly evolving academic landscape, digital tools are reshaping the way we study literature, history, and culture. As digital humanities (DH) becomes increasingly central to research and teaching, instructors—particularly graduate students and early-career faculty—often find themselves faced with the challenge of integrating digital methodologies into their courses. To address this need ‘Introduction to Digital Humanities‘ offers a structured, assignable course designed to equip students with essential digital research skills. It provides an accessible, hands-on approach to digital humanities, helping instructors save valuable time while fostering critical data literacy in students.

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Unlocking the Past: Advancing Discoverability of Gale Primary Sources

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Photographs. Amateur Theatricals, 1890

|By Magaly Taylor, Discovery and Usage Product Manager, Gale│

Archives provide valuable access to the past, enabling educators and researchers in the humanities and social sciences to incorporate historical collections into their work. Primary source archives products are invaluable for research and learning, encapsulating entire historical periods through diverse content like manuscripts, images, and publications.

This blog post explores the use of metadata to discover primary source content and Gale’s activities to enhance the discoverability of their eResources.

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Hacking History with Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist │

On 5th December 2024, the Gale Digital Scholar Lab team, in association with Loyola University Chicago, University Libraries, offered a hands-on workshop freely available to researchers, educators, librarians, and anyone interested in exploring innovative ways to improve their digital humanities (DH) research skills. “Hacking History” brought together a diverse community for a day of collaboration, conversation and collegiality – along with some friendly competition between teams to create digital projects over the course of the day. 

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Exploring Sentiment in Historical Texts With Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s New “Sentiment by Timeframe” Visualisation

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│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Sr. Digital Humanities Specialist│

Gale Digital Scholar Lab has introduced a new visualisation feature in the Sentiment Analysis tool: Sentiment by Timeframe. This enables researchers to bring additional depth to sentiment analysis for historical texts. This tool is part of an ongoing effort to expand the capabilities of the Lab’s six digital humanities tools and is designed to support researchers in analysing, interpreting, and visualising data across various historical documents.

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Ways To Improve Discoverability at Your Library

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| Magaly Taylor, Usage and Discovery Product Manager |

Discovery is a crucial aspect of working with eResources for content providers and libraries. It encompasses actions related to searching, retrieving, and accessing relevant content that end users may not be aware of. The term ‘Discoverability’ is key here. It refers to the extent to which eResources are searchable in a discovery system, and it directly influences the ease with which users can find the information they need, thereby enhancing their overall experience. In this post I will explore the complexities of discovery and how to enhance discoverability in libraries.

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A Classroom Compendium: Digital Humanities Resources for a New School Year

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│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Sr. Digital Humanities Specialist│

For the start of a new academic year, this month’s Notes from our DH Correspondent blog post is a useful resource indexing all the Notes posts to date. They are categorised below to support instructors to plan, build and deliver classroom DH curricula.  This is a great page to bookmark!

Each resource can be supplemented with detailed material in the Learning Center in Gale Digital Scholar Lab which provides step-by-step instructions in written and video formats, covering every aspect of working in the platform. 

Need additional support? Our DH team will be happy to answer your questions! Just email us at [email protected]

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Bridging the Gap: Gale Primary Sources and Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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│By Sarah L. Ketchley, Senior Digital Humanities Specialist│

This month’s blog post will discuss how to start the work of sourcing research documents in Gale Primary Sources (GPS) archives, before transitioning seamlessly to Gale Digital Scholar Lab to create content sets, clean OCR text data, and conduct analyses of this material to answer research questions. With this methodology, researchers are able to use the rich contextual detail and varied navigation options to begin compiling their corpus of text data outside of the Lab, which can be an attractive option if the user has an existing working knowledge of specific GPS archives, such as The Times Digital Archive, Women’s Studies Archive, or Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

There is a standardised user experience across GPS and the Lab, making the transition from one to the other familiar and streamlined. However, there are options to view documents in GPS that aren’t yet available in the Lab, which may make combining both access points useful so that no document slips through the cracks!

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Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers: A Retrospective

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│By Megan Sullivan, Senior Product Manager, Gale Primary Sources│

The COVID-19 pandemic and pivot to remote instruction shed light on a longstanding challenge in the humanities and related disciplines – how can instructors effectively incorporate digital primary sources into their pedagogy?

According to a 2021 study by ITHAKA S&R, two of the key obstacles to teaching with primary sources are: (1) discovery tools are not optimised to help instructors locate resources for classroom use and (2) students do not always have the required skills to find and evaluate relevant primary sources. These two problems were top of mind when designing the Gale Primary Sources Learning Centers which are now approaching the three-year anniversary of their initial release.

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