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?

I found Gale Digital Scholar Lab to be a fun tool to play around with and well-organized according to the steps one would take (Build –> Clean –> Analyze). This would make it simple to take someone through the steps.

The example plain text file was Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or the Whale, which is a book I read in high school and still think about almost daily. (“And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.”) Comparing my reactions to this book to this program’s sentiment analysis was something I was interested in. It is possible this program requires more tailoring on my end to create more provocative and curated results, but with default settings, the book scored neutral. I feel like this is a result I feel somewhat disappointed about and somewhat relieved about. This is a book that is complicated in its writing and meaning, and I hardly feel like I’ve grasped the full body of work. I know that my computer and this program are doing a lot of work to analyze this book as much as they can. Knowing that I’ve, selfishly, gained emotions and attachment to this book that this program cannot detect makes me happy.

However, I do sense that gaining a better sense of what one can use this program for and curating a topic for analysis would be more conducive to producing useful results. I’m interested in learning more about which documents and data cleaning techniques are best for this program.