YOUR GO-TO INTELLIGENCE RESOURCE FOR THE SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

Gale, a division of Cengage Group, has released seven significant feature enhancements to the Gale Digital Scholar Lab (the Lab), broadening the platform’s support for text and data mining (TDM) research among students, faculty, and librarians. Announced at the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference in Minneapolis on April 2, 2025, the updates reflect direct feedback from Lab users and are designed to facilitate deeper research customization, improve transparency, and support evolving approaches in the digital humanities.

The newly introduced capabilities aim to strengthen the Lab’s utility in academic environments where digital, data, and AI literacy are becoming increasingly central to curriculum design. According to Jessica Ludwig, Director of Product Management at Gale, the enhancements expand instructional opportunities and reflect the company's continued responsiveness to researcher and educator needs in adopting digital scholarship tools.

Among the key updates:

• Sentiment by Timeframe: A new visualization tool enables sentiment analysis by century, decade, year, or month, allowing researchers to explore temporal patterns in large text collections.
• Mark-Up View for Parts of Speech and Sentiment Analysis: This feature improves analytical transparency by displaying how terms are classified within documents, enhancing interpretability and supporting both close and distant reading methodologies.
• Parts of Speech Pie Chart: A new visualization mode for the Parts of Speech tool, pie charts provide an alternative representation of grammatical distributions, aiding researchers in understanding proportional relationships within texts.
• Personalized Lexicons: Users may now upload custom word lists for sentiment analysis, extending the Lab’s applicability to historical texts and non-English languages while supporting accented characters. This complements the existing AFINN lexicon and allows for more nuanced analyses.
• Ngrams Start Word Lists: This feature permits users to visualize term frequencies for a predefined list of keywords within their content sets.
• Ngrams Over Time (launching May 2025): A forthcoming capability will track the occurrence of Ngrams across historical periods within a dataset.
• Custom Color Palettes (launching May 2025): Users will be able to tailor the visual appearance of outputs to better align with presentation or publication needs.

Two Gale-ASECS Non-Residential Fellows highlighted the academic utility of these updates. Daniel Watkins emphasized how tools such as Ngram analysis inform data cleaning strategies and optimize outcomes in downstream tasks like topic modeling. Heather Heckman-McKenna, reflecting on undergraduate pedagogy, noted the value of Ngram and proximity search tools in cultivating analytical rigor among literature students, enabling them to explore texts beyond traditional close reading approaches.

Gale Digital Scholar Lab is a cloud-based environment that integrates Gale’s extensive primary source archives with digital humanities tools for analysis and visualization. It supports researchers in navigating challenges common to humanities and social science research by offering flexible, scalable, and pedagogically-supported solutions. The Lab also includes a dedicated Learning Center to assist users at varying levels of expertise in TDM practices.