Gale Digital Scholar Lab Launches New Collaboration Feature

Gale, part of Cengage Group is bringing real-time team collaboration to the Gale Digital Scholar Lab (The Lab) platform to support project-based learning. The company has launched a new collaboration feature called Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Groups (Groups).

Developed based on feedback from Lab users, this new functionality enables researchers, instructors and students at the same institution to collaborate on digital humanities projects within the platform and explore Gale Primary Sources in new and exciting ways. This strengthens The Lab’s use in a classroom environment and helps students develop workplace skills they can use well beyond college.

Goal-Orientated Collaboration

“We recognize the value of project-based learning, especially in the field of digital humanities. Groups offer an approachable way to facilitate collaboration on projects,” said Seth Cayley, vice president of global academic products at Gale.

“Digital humanities instructors and students will be able to work together efficiently to create the visuals, data and content sets they need to take a project from start to finish. Not to mention, they will be learning important workplace skills like collaboration and project management by using the new features.”

Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Groups Consist of Two Features

• Workspaces: a virtual shared workspace that expands The Lab’s use in a classroom environment, enabling students to work on projects together that better support the collaborative nature of digital humanities. Students can:
  • ​​​​​​​​​​​​Create a group and add or remove collaborators from projects as needed.
  • View the project resources each group member has created within the workspace.
  • Work collaboratively when creating new content sets with multiple users able to add or remove content both synchronously and asynchronously.
  • Share and view visualizations among group members.
  • Interact with other group members’ content sets, clean configurations and analyses to enable true group collaboration.
• Notebook: supports and encourages good research methodology and enables users to interact with each other within the platform. Users can:
  • Create notes on the status of content sets, visualizations and clean configurations without leaving the workflow.
  • Include images and links to notes to support users’ analyses.
  • View notes from the entire group together in the Notebook.
  • Filter and search notes in the Notebook to find and view specific information, including the note’s author and date

Gale Digital Scholar Lab is a cloud-based research environment designed to transform how scholars and students access and analyze Gale primary source materials—and their local collections—by offering solutions to some of the most common challenges facing researchers in the digital humanities today.

By integrating an unmatched depth and breadth of digital primary source material with some of today’s most popular tools for digital humanities analysis and visualization, The Lab provides a new lens to explore the history and empowers researchers to deepen their understanding of the world and how it is represented in the written word.

Gale will showcase Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Groups at the LibLearnX Conference, January 28-30 in New Orleans at Gale booth #513.

Cengage Group, an education technology company serving millions of learners in 165 countries, advances the way students learn through quality, digital experiences. The company currently serves the K-12, higher education, professional, library, English language teaching and workforce training markets worldwide.

Gale, part of Cengage Group, provides libraries with original and curated content, as well as the modern research tools and technology that are crucial in connecting libraries to learning, and learners to libraries.

For more than 65 years, Gale has partnered with libraries around the world to empower the discovery of knowledge and insights – where, when and how people need it. Gale has 500 employees globally with its main operations in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Featured image: Carlos Barquero Perez, iStock.