I see how the Gale Digital Scholar Lab can be very useful when dealing with either a large text or when managing multiple texts. Seeing K-means analysis being used in this context was interesting, because it’s being applied to documents instead of points with quantitative values assigned to them. It was like seeing an intersection of data analysis and humanities, which is part of what digital humanities is about.
Highlight to GDSL: I like the little light bulb icons next to the options in the ‘Analyze’ menu. It was an easily accessible way to get to the information about each tool and it made it easier to understand which tool might be the best fit for the action I want to do. It’s also nifty that there are clear videos to show how to use the tool.
Drawback to GDSL: How a text was uploaded to the site would influence whether a txt file is available for uploading to the Gale Digital Scholar Lab. This seems like a limiting factor of this application, to me. Formats that include images and not just text can’t be analysed in the same way.
Helping someone use the Gale Digital Scholar Lab would definitely be trial-and-error on both of our parts because there seems to be a lot more that can be done with the application than what I’m currently aware of. However, I think it would be cool to be working with someone who has a project that allows them to use this tool, because I would like to see it at work on a bigger number of documents.