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Digital Humanities: Do it yourself: Digital Scholar Lab

What is Digital Scholar Lab?

The Digital Scholar Lab (DSL) is an online tool that gives users the ability to create custom content sets, analyze and interrogate the data with the text analysis and visualization tools from the platform. The users’ content sets remain saved in the Gale Digital Scholar Lab allowing them to manage their research for long term projects. The online tool runs from the users browser and no additional software is needed. 

In the Digital Scholar Lab (DSL) there are six analysis tools available: 1) Document Clustering, 2) Name Entry Recognition, 3) Ngrams, 4) Parts of Speech Tagger, 5) Sentiment Analysis, and 6) Topic Modeling. Learn more about how to select the right tool and more on the various analysis tools available in DSL.

Sentiment analysis graph example

Example of sentiment analysis across publication years. 

Topic modeling example

Example of topic modeling.

Text available from the Digital Scholar Lab (DSL) have gone through a process called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) which converts the document into readable, searchable text.

Access the Digital Scholar Lab (DSL)

Once you get to the DSL homepage you can log in/ create an account by signing in with Google or Microsoft.

Teaching and Learning Support via Gale Digital Scholar Lab

Training Support for Digital Scholar Lab (DSL)

Content and Collection for use in Digital Scholar Lab

Users can find University of Waterloo Library's access to a number of Gale's primary source collections by clicking on the Available Text links on the Digital Scholar Lab (DSL) Home Page or in the Learning Center.

Additionally, as a fairly new feature - users have the ability to upload plain text files by navigating to the Upload feature on the Build page of the Digital Scholar Lab. They can select one or more files from their computer to upload, apply metadata, manage, and add to a Content Set. 

Some current primary collections via Gale include: