Digital humanities have opened new doors for scholars to study trends and patterns in large amounts of data. However, these studies often require coding skills and technical knowledge, which can be intimidating for humanities scholars. The Gale Digital Scholar Lab is designed to tackle such barriers by its intuitive platform that allows anyone to perform text mining regardless of their technical expertise. It can be used with the original Gale Primary Sources or self-uploaded documents.
The library is providing trial access to the Lab for users to explore its features and evaluate its potential for their research and teaching needs.
This trial access will be available until 31 August 2024. We encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity and provide us with your feedback by filling out the Electronic Resources Evaluation Form.
The Lab is a cloud-based research environment that allows students and scholars to apply natural language processing tools to raw OCR text data.
In one single interface, the users can:
- Build content sets that are relevant to one’s research needs, from Gale Primary Sources that the Library has acquired, or by uploading your own text files;
- Clean the texts for analysis, using options like stop word lists and text correction, and;
- Analyze data with 6 tools including Ngrams, Named Entity Recognition Topic Modeling, Parts of Speech, Sentiment Analysis and Document Clustering.
We invite you to watch this recording of our Research Data Tool Series workshop where Masaki Morisawa, senior product manager from Gale Asia, provided a step-by-step walkthrough of the Digital Scholar Lab.
In this video, you'll learn:
- What are Gale Primary Sources
- What is Gale Digital Scholar Lab
- Gale Digital Scholar Lab Workflow and Tools
- Live Demo
- What Gale Primary Sources are available to HKBU
(see here for the latest available collection)
Alternatively, you may explore the tools at your own pace and according to your own interests at the learning center, where you will find:
- Instructions on Build, Clean, Analyze and Organize
- Sample Projects
- Curriculum Materials
- Datasets
This use case for Modern Chinese History traced Sun Yat-sen's image throughout his career from the initiation of revolutionary activities against the Manchus and the founding of the Republic of China to his death.
Data analytic tools used include:
- Document Clustering
- Named Entity Recognition
- Sentiment Analysis
This use case for Religious Studies and Linguistics made use of a content set of 18 sermons and public speeches delivered by Martin Luther King to study the core tenets of nonviolent resistance he advocated through metaphor analysis. It also examined the social functions of religion both in social movements and in the contemporary world.
Data analytic tools used include:
- Ngrams
- Topic Modeling
Learn more by watching the presentations of 5 distinct projects that utilize Gale’s Eighteenth-century Collections Online and Digital Scholar Lab to further scholarly research of the period.
Also included in the playlist are two use cases demonstrating how to utilize Digital Scholar Lab to explore the archive “Making of the Modern World” and “Women's Studies Archive”.
- IRIMS
- Open Access
- eJournals@HKBU
- Copyright
- Research Impact
- Software Facilities and Guides
- Workshops
- Training Videos