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Digital Humanities

Tools

Below is a sampling of tools that can be used for various types of digital humanities projects.

  • These include tools such as text analysis, image editing, visualization, exhibits, and social and network analysis tools.
  • These are all currently available for free and some are open access. 

Open Data for Research

The Alexander Archives Institute - "The Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI) is a non-profit entity working to improve research and teaching through innovative uses of the Web."

The Levantine Ceramics Project - "LCP is an open, interactive website focused on ceramics produced in the Levant from the Neolithic era (c. 5500 B.C.E.) through the Ottoman period (c. 1920 C.E.). Here you can submit and find information—whether long published or newly discovered—about ceramic wares, shapes, specific vessels, scientific analyses, kiln sites, and chronology. The LCP makes it simple to access, share, use, and refine data, to link scholars and to foster collaborative research."

Image & AR/VR

AFrame.io - "A-Frame is a web framework for building virtual reality (VR) experiences and is based on top of HTML, making it simple to get started."

Blender -  "Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline."

GIMP - "GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, and Windows."

SketchUp - "SketchUp is a 3D modeling computer program for a wide range of drawing applications such as architectural, interior design, landscape architecture, civil and mechanical engineering, film and video game design." 

Unity -  Unity is a powerful cross-platform 3D engine and a user friendly development environment.

Visualization & Storytelling

D3 Javascript - "D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS."

Data Illustrator - An online tool used to create infographics and data visualizations without programming.

Gapminder -  Gapminder promotes a fact-based worldview everyone can understand by providing reliable, real-world data turned into interactive visualizations

Gephi - "Gephi is an open-source software for network visualization and analysis. It helps data analysts to intuitively reveal patterns and trends, highlight outliers and tells stories with their data. It uses a 3D render engine to display large graphs in real-time and to speed up the exploration."

Knight Lab -  Northwestern University's Knight Lab offers a suite of open-source tools for media makers. Tools include TimelineJS, StoryMapJS, and StorylineJS, JuxtaposeJS, SceneJS, and SoundciteJS.  

Tableau Public  - "Tableau Public is a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data visualizations to the web."

Text Analysis

JSTOR for Text Mining - "JSTOR accommodates text analysis and digital humanities research by providing datasets for the journals, books, research reports, and pamphlets in the digital library.

Mozdeh -  "A free Windows program for keyword, issue, time series, sentiment, gender and content analysis of (mainly) social media texts."

Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) - "NLTK is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data."

Voyant - "Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment. It is a scholarly project that is designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practices for digital humanities students and scholars as well as for the general public."

Exhibit Builders and Content Management Systems

Drupal - Drupal is an open source content management system.

Omeka - "Omeka provides open-source web publishing platforms for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits."

Scalar - "Scalar is a free, open source publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online."

Wordpress - WordPress is a free and open source content management system which  can be used to create websites, blogs, and apps.