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Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Support

Access the Gale Digital Scholar Lab from the University Libraries website by clicking on "Databases A-Z" and then "Trials." This guide is used courtesy of Gale.

Selected FAQs - Gale Research Showcase

What is the Gale Research Showcase?

Gale Research Showcase is an open-access repository of student-written digital scholarship. All projects are submitted through Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Gale’s text and data mining platform, and reviewed to provide feedback on their methodology. Alongside amplifying great student work, the Showcase’s aim is to give researchers inspiration and guidance in expanding their horizons and developing their own digital scholarship projects.

How do I access the Gale Research Showcase?

Visit the Gale Research Showcase here https://www.gale.com/primary-sources/gale-research-showcase and then browse the projects by subject or by type of analysis.

What subjects does the Gale Research Showcase cover?

Projects are welcomed on any topic, discipline, or from any subject. The only requirement to submit to the showcase is that the project must be, at least partially, developed in Gale Digital Scholar Lab.

Who can submit projects to Gale Research Showcase?

Any undergraduate and postgraduate students studying at an institution that subscribes to Gale Digital Scholar Lab.

Will Gale publish every project received on the Gale Research Showcase?

With the Gale Research Showcase, Gale is committed to fostering a vibrant and inclusive platform that presents a wide array of student-created materials. Our goal is to publish as many projects as possible to reflect the diverse interests, perspectives, and academic endeavors of our student community. However, it is important to note that not all submissions will be published. Gale’s commitment to making the Gale Research Showcase useful to researchers means that projects should meet basic quality standards in order to contribute positively to the Showcase’s educational and scholarly objectives. In cases where a project does not meet these standards, it may not be published in the Showcase. All contributors are encouraged to review this FAQ and the Gale Digital Scholar Lab’s Learning Center to learn what comprises a successful project. Additionally, if a project includes narrative, conclusions, or a thesis that the editors of the Gale Research Showcase consider to be prejudiced or offensive, Gale reserves the right to not publish it on the Gale Research Showcase.

Are projects published in the Gale Research Showcase open access?

Yes. When you submit a project, you give Gale permission to publish it on the Showcase, which can be viewed by anyone. Details of the license under which Showcase projects are published is below. This license ensures that any third party seeking to quote, cite, copy, or otherwise use or refer to your work may do so, but must give the authors appropriate credit.

Projects in the Showcase are published under a Creative Commons license, CC BY-NCSA 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which includes the following terms that third parties seeking to use your project agree to:

  • Attribution — They must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses them or their use.
  • NonCommercial — They may not use the material for commercial purposes.
  • ShareAlike — If they remix, transform, or build upon the material, they must distribute their contributions under the same license as the original.
  • No additional restrictions — They may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

What if a project includes research material that might be considered offensive?

Gale databases contain visual and textual material representing various historical viewpoints related to race, gender, sexuality, terrorism, and other subjects, including terminology and concepts that may be considered offensive or problematic by modern standards. These materials are provided for academic research and teaching purposes. Gale's expert editorial staff includes this content at the recommendation of our source library partners and scholarly advisors and does not endorse any specific views contained within the content.

Gale archives contain primary sources created by groups and movements considered to be extreme, unorthodox, or outside of the mainstream politics of that period. Users may come across content that they find upsetting such as journals, newsletters, publications, propaganda, or cartoons intended to induce hatred or violence towards a particular group due to their race, sexuality, beliefs, or other characteristics.

The nature and value of Gale Primary Sources archives is that they present artifacts as they existed, without manipulation by our editors. Gale resources don't take a specific position on an issue or topic. We develop content with the guidance of scholars, subject matter specialists, and the academic community. Studying the historical context of a topic, including the potential prejudices or biases imposed by society or authors, allows students and researchers to engage in critical conversations, make important comparisons and connections, and enable greater understanding to inspire change and cross-cultural awareness.

Considering the potential sensitivity of the source material, projects in the Gale Research Showcase may therefore contain content that users find upsetting. However, if a project includes narrative, conclusions, or a thesis that the editors of the Gale Research Showcase consider to be prejudiced or offensive, Gale reserves the right to not publish it on the Gale Research Showcase.

My project is on the Gale Research Showcase. Can I publish it elsewhere (i.e., a journal or other website)?

Absolutely. Gale makes no intellectual property claim on the projects it publishes on Gale Research Showcase, which is an open repository for amplifying the research of early career researchers. This means that copyright ownership remains with you as the author(s), and you can repurpose the project as you wish. Gale does reserve the right to use images of the showcase and projects for the purposes of marketing Gale Research Showcase.

FAQs - Projects

How do I submit a project to the Gale Research Showcase?

Projects are submitted via Gale Digital Scholar Lab. Once a project has been created in the Lab, a user or group of users can submit the project for review and consideration for inclusion in the Showcase.

What comprises a project in Gale Digital Scholar Lab?

Projects in the Gale Research Showcase are write-ups of individual or group research conducted in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. The Lab enables the application of natural language–processing tools to Gale’s wide range of primary source archives or their own uploaded data. In the “My Research” tab in Gale Digital Scholar Lab, users collect all aspects of their research project into a Project. This might include (but isn’t limited to) information about how they build their content sets within the Content Sets area, cleaning configurations, analytical and visualization outputs from the Lab tools, and associated notes from the Notebook.

What should a project include?

A project is the write up of a research project or investigation of a research question, using Gale Digital Scholar Lab. If you are developing a project for an assignment, your instructor or lecturer will be able to provide more context about style, format, and content.

Is there a word limit for projects?

No – a good project should clearly present and explain the research methodology employed in the project. You may have a word limit as part of your module or course assignment, but Gale does not stipulate a word limit. However, a project that does not fully explain and contextualize its methodology may require revision to be included in the Gale Research Showcase.

FAQs - Review Process

What characteristics will reviewers evaluate a project against for inclusion in the Showcase?

Gale Digital Scholar Lab encourages researchers to think critically about their data, methodologies, and tools. Critical reflection is an excellent focus for any research project that features digital archives and tools. Reviewers for the Showcase will be looking for certain elements to understand your research. You do not have to include all of these (again, meeting your course requirements takes priority!), but a successful project might include:

  • An introduction that presents your argument, thesis, or research question(s).
  • Where applicable, an outline of the roles and responsibilities of the research team.
  • A clear explanation of the research methodology, including reasons for making certain choices. The Lab workflow provides a high-level framework for presenting a project, which you can use to guide your write up, Build > Clean > Analyze. Questions you might consider addressing at each stage include:
    • Build – Which texts did you choose to analyze? How were they chosen? What search methodology did you use? How did you refine the results list? Were there texts you could have chosen, but discarded? Did you upload external content and why? What did you learn from examining the optical character recognition (OCR) text for your documents?
    • Clean – Did you apply the Cleaning tool when analyzing your texts? How did you configure it? What made you choose those cleaning options, and could you have chosen other ones? How did cleaning your texts change or improve your analysis?
    • Analyze – Which tools did you choose to apply to your data and why did you choose them? What choices did you make when configuring the tools and why? How did the OCR quality of the documents affect your analytical tool configurations? What does the analysis tell you about your research question? Did the visualizations provide insight into your subject? Did you use the analytical data you generated in tools outside the Lab?
  • Visualizations, analytical data, content set data, with accompanying narrative.
  • Reflections on your methodology – Did your project answer your research question? What would you change if you were to run your project again?
  • Conclusion – What have you learned about your topic or question from running this project?
  • Next Steps
  • Citations
  • Bibliography

This isn’t an exhaustive list; digital scholarship emphasizes creativity, including in output, and Gale welcomes a variety of projects for submission.

What can I expect from the review process?

To make this as useful a process for students as possible, Gale has developed a simple review process for projects submitted in Gale Digital Scholar Lab. This process will give student researchers experience of the review process that underpins most academic publishing and help them improve their work.

Feedback will focus on the project methodology and be given with the aim of helping students improve their research in Gale Digital Scholar Lab.

What is the review process?

  1. A project is submitted through the Project workflow in Gale Digital Scholar Lab.
  2. The Gale Digital Scholar Lab team review the project and identify a suitable peer reviewer.
  3. The project is sent to the peer reviewer. Identifying personal details are removed from the project to ensure fairness.
  4. To maximize reviewer time, projects will be sent in June and December each year for review.
  5. The peer reviewer sends their feedback to Gale.
  6. The Gale Digital Scholar Lab team collate the peer reviewer’s comments and their own feedback and forward it to the email address of the submitter(s).
  7. The researcher(s) edit their project in the Lab to reflect the feedback.
  8. The project is resubmitted using the same process, ticking the box to indicate that “this project is being resubmitted following review.”
  9. The resubmitted project will be considered for inclusion in the Showcase.
  10. The researcher(s) will be alerted when the project has been published or rejected.

Gale only commits to one round of review and revision before a decision is made whether to include the project in the Showcase.

Additional Questions?

Please email Gale at galedslab@cengage.com