Ever wanted to see how often the word “kraken” appeared in print in the nineteenth century? Determined to find the frequency of sea serpent features – whether fins, fangs, gills, or scales most fearsomely catch the eye? Or to turn the mood of a century of monster sighting reports into sentimental statistics?
One of UK Libraries’ new electronic resources, Gale Digital Scholar Lab (GDSL), puts text analysis tools at your fingertips – along with instructional videos, teaching resources, and practice data sets to help you hone your skills.
Text analysis, sometimes referred to as text mining, is a research method in digital humanities that uses computational tools to interrogate hundreds or even thousands of documents to uncover trends, patterns, and insights that would be impossible to discover – because far too time-consuming – using traditional methods.
GDSL integrates a vast collection of primary sources with popular digital humanities tools to make natural language processing for historical texts more accessible, more efficient, and more impactful.
Want to take your text analysis to the next level? Stop by The Stacks: Digital Scholarship Center or schedule a consultation with our digital humanities and data librarians. Specialists in a wide variety of digital scholarship tools, methods, and resources, they can offer assistance at every stage in your research journey.
GDSL provides video tutorials and written step-by-step instructions for each of the three essential steps in conducting text analysis: building, cleaning, and analyzing.
Build. The GDSL is integrated with Gale Primary Sources, an enormous digital archive of historical documents, including:
Users can draw on this enormous archive to build their “content set” – the collection of documents to be analyzed – or upload their own. Practice datasets, ranging from archival material on Indigenous leaders and the Stonewall Riots to declassified Watergate documents, are also available.
Clean. Cleaning is a critical part of the preparation for any text analysis, rendering documents “machine readable.” GDSL creates multiple cleaning configurations, allowing users to tailor how a content set is cleaned depending on the analysis they wish to perform.
Analyze. If you could read a year’s worth of newspapers in an afternoon, of course you’d do it yourself. Luckily for you, GDSL provides access to some of digital humanities’ most popular analysis tools, which will not only zip through those papers but find patterns in them too:
You are now a Digital Scholar: congratulations! Stay tuned for a full slate of in-person and virtual workshops, tutorials, and other events taking place in The Stacks this Fall.
Every month, UK Libraries adds new electronic resources to its collection of over 700 databases. Learn about several of our newest additions below:
Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) eGuidelines+: A collection of evidence-based perioperative guidelines for the perioperative RN. Each guideline contains recommendations to guide the development of policies, procedures, and criteria for measuring individual competency in a variety of practice settings.
Bloomsbury Drama Online: UK Libraries provides access to five collections from Bloomsbury Drama Online: Asian Theater Collection, National Theatre Collections 2 and 3, Royal Shakespeare Company Live Collection 3, and Shakespeare's Globe on Screen 3.
Elgar Advanced Introductions to Law - Academic: Elgar provides introductions to major fields in law, expertly written by leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas.
Johns Hopkins ABX: The Johns Hopkins ABX Guide is a comprehensive web and mobile resource that delivers up-to-date, authoritative information on infectious diseases, drugs, and pathogens written by the experts at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Mometrix: Mometrix eLibrary is a test preparation tool, offering study materials for over 1,500 different exams.
scite.ai: With scite, researchers can discover and evaluate research articles by directly seeing what subsequent publications say about their findings through citation statements – the in-text references from papers where citations happen. Users must sign up with their uky.edu email address. Find more information on the sign-up process.
TeachingBooks: TeachingBooks is a comprehensive database of digital and printable resources, featuring ready-made lesson plans, standards-based activities, video book trailers, professional book readings, and graphic organizers for both children's and young adult books.
Several new archival collections have been added to AM Explorer:
