- How would you feel about helping someone else learn how to use Gale Digital Scholar Lab? What did you find most interesting? What did you find most frustrating? What questions do you still have, and what parts of the tool do you want to explore more deeply?
The process of learning to use Gale DSL felt a little frustrating because the website’s design didn’t entirely feel intuitive, sometimes I had to spend a while looking for a button that felt misplaced. Now that I have a grasp on how it works, I feel like I could teach someone else how to use the tool without too much trouble, but it’s certainly not my favorite tool. I experimented with Ngrams and Topic Modeling based on the sample data set I had and they feel like they have some real potential, but I’d be interested to see how the other tools play out in practice.
- Look through the Gale Research Showcase and examine some of the student research projects. What are some of the steps that the student researchers have to take? Does seeing other student’s work change your view of the tool or of text analysis, and does it change your confidence in your ability to use the tool?
It was really interesting to see dataset cleaning in practice in these projects, it had felt somewhat nebulous previously what the specific usage looked like but it feels like I have a more solid grasp on that part of textual analysis now. It does make it feel a little more approachable, and I’m also a big fan of the Sea Serpents project.