This wee I tried out Gale Digital Scholar Lab and its textual analysis features. I enjoy textual analysis a lot, so this was an interesting training for me. In my CSC-151 class, we were focusing on textual analysis and wrote our own programs to do sentiment analysis (a feature on the Gale Lab site as well). It was cool to see the programs run on this site and know what it’s doing at a coding-level.
After a brief introduction to Gale Digital Scholar Lab, I feel pretty confident helping someone else with it. Nothing was confusing or difficult and all of the methods of analysis made sense to me. I enjoyed the sentiment analysis tool the best and the visualization it produced. I would be curious to use some of the tools on my own writing and see if it can give me any insights into things I could change about it.