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?
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?
I think it’s very interesting that it’s able to count the frequency of the words. It reminds me of when I went to a linguistics conference this spring break. They talked about developing a corpus and I wonder if they used this resource to do so. It does take a while for the program to finish analyzing though, which can be frustrating. I would like to explore all the various analysis tools that Gale offers. I think it would be fun helping someone else learn how to use Gale while I myself am still learning it.
Student researchers have to take several important steps: identifying a research question, building a relevant content set, cleaning the data, running different types of analyses, and then interpreting the results in a thoughtful way. The process requires critical thinking at every stage, which I appreciate. Overall, I’m interested in exploring the tool more and seeing how I could apply text analysis methods to topics I care about.