Gale Digital Scholar Lab adds new personalisation and visualisation features to deliver greater research insights

Gale, part of Cengage Group, is enhancing Gale Digital Scholar Lab (the Lab) with seven major tool updates that expand text and data mining (TDM) research possibilities for students, faculty and librarians. Developed based on feedback from Lab users, these updates give researchers the ability to personalise their approach to TDM with more customisation, expanding the possibilities of research and creating new ways of exploring primary sources.

 Key updates include:

• Sentiment by Timeframe: a new visualisation for the Sentiment Analysis tool allows users to drill down and easily analyse data across different timeframes (century, decade, year, and month) within their content sets.

• Mark-Up View for Parts of Speech and Sentiment Analysis Tools: this new view improves tool transparency, allowing users to see how words are identified in their documents, providing important context for results. It also facilitates movement between distant and close reading.

• Parts of Speech Pie Chart: pie charts have been added as a second visualisation option to the Parts of Speech tool, allowing users to see their data in different ways and useful for understanding how individual categories combine into a whole (e.g., what percentage of a work is made up of nouns).

• Personalised Lexicons for Sentiment Analysis: users can now upload their own lexicons (a list of analysed words) into the tool, tailoring the analysis to their specific material and subject expertise. This addresses the limitations of the currently used AFINN lexicon and expands research exploration of historical documents and non-English TDM, including support for accented characters.

• Ngrams Start Word Lists: users can create an Ngram visualisation for a list of words they are interested in, returning frequencies for only those terms within the content set.

• Ngrams Over Time: provides the frequency and distribution of Ngrams in a content set over time (launching in May 2025).

• Colour Palettes: users can customize their visualisations for presentations and articles with greater control over their visual appearance (launching in May 2025).

Go here for more information.