Gale Digital Scholar Lab adds 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.

“We recognise the value of project-based learning, especially in the field of digital humanities. Groups offers an approachable way to facilitate collaboration on projects,” said Seth Cayley, vice president of global academic product 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 consists 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 visualisations among group members.
• Interact with other group member’s 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 analyse 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 visualisation, The Lab provides a new lens to explore 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, 28-30 January in New Orleans at Gale booth #513.

For more information or to request a trial, visit the Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Groups web page.