Research Guides: Digital History: Find Digital Tools

All About Digital History / Digital Humanities Tools

DH Box DH Box is a tool to help integrate digital humanities into the curriculum. From their homepage: "Setting up an environment for digital humanities computational work can be time-consuming and difficult. DH Box addresses this problem by streamlining installation processes and providing a digital humanities laboratory in the cloud through simple sign-in via a web browser."
Digital Mappa "A freely available online environment for creating projects out of digital images and texts. ...If you can point, click, drag, copy, paste and type, you basically have the technological ability to produce your own sophisticated digital scholarship, editions and projects." (National Endowment for the Humanities, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, et al.)
Annotation Studio A suite of collaborative web-based annotation tools developed at MIT. -- Engage students in the process of interpreting literary texts and other humanities media documents by searching curated multimedia collections for relevant materials, posting comments, tagging, remixing, and sharing with other users. -- Organize and annotate large collections of texts. -- Create digital archives of significant texts, and then invite visitors to annotate and tag these texts. -- Read more about the pedagogical uses, case studies, and assessment of Annotation Studio.
Gephi - Open Graph Visualization Platform
"Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs." Tutorial: "GEPHI – Introduction to Network Analysis and Visualization," from Martin Grandjean
Google Fusion Tables Fusion allows you to easily merge your data with other data found on the web, and provides new ways to visualize and share your data. (Google)
The History Engine From the site: "The History Engine project is first and foremost an undergraduate teaching resource that gives students the opportunity to engage in the process of academic research and share their completed work with their fellow students and researchers from around the country. In this section of the Engine, instructors will find all tools necessary to register to use the site, plan a syllabus, and guide students through the project."
HistoryPin "Pin" photos to a public world map and add details about the time and content of the photos. Browse and search other people's photos by date, place, or keywords. View historical photos, then switch to Google Street View to see how local geography has changed over time. (We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google)
Image Plot ImagePlot is a free software tool that visualizes collections of images and video to help you explore patterns in existing metadata (i.e., dates, names, etc.), added annotations and keywords, or visual features (i.e., brightness, saturation, hue, shapes, etc.). (Software Studies Initiative)
Manicule
"A standalone React/Redux web application for for presenting unique printed books and manuscripts in digital facsimile." Allows scholars and students to create accessible, dynamic web editions of manuscripts and other rare books. View a demo at https://digitalbookhistory.com/manicule/ or read an article about it at https://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/2019/10/02/manicule/
NodeXL Network Graphs Free Excel template for visualizing social network data Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and more.
Omeka.net A hosted web service that allows anyone to create websites for displaying collections and building digital exhibits. Omeka can be a great tool for building and sharing an online collection of primary sources or collaborating in digital scholarship.
OpenRefine A tool for cleaning, preparing, transforming, and extending data; useful in digital humanities.
Palladio Helpful Article: Getting Started with Palladio From Palladio website: "Palladio is a demonstration application to allow scholars to easily upload data for use with an intertwined set of visualizations for analysis of complex, multi-dimensional data. ...Palladio is our first step toward opening data visualization to any researcher by making it possible to upload data and visualize within the browser without any barriers. There is no need to create an account and we do not store the data. On the visualization side, we have emphasized tools for filtering. There is a timeline filter that allows for filtering on discontinuous time periods. There is a facet filter based on Moritz Stefaner's Elastic Lists that is particularly useful when exploring multidimensional data sets." (Humanities+Design Lab, Stanford Univ.)
Recogito "Semantic Annotation without the pointy brackets." Software platform to facilitate annotation of text and images, using both automatic annotation and manual annotation by users. Facilitates sharing and downloading of data in various formats. Available as both a free GitHub download and an online hosted version.
ViewShare This tool from the Library of Congress is free to people associated with libraries, museums, universities, and so forth (must request an account). Upload data to create interactive maps, charts, and timelines that can then be shared or embedded in an existing site. Various features and options are provided, including the ability to make data public or private. (Library of Congress)
VisualEyes From site: "VisualEyes is web-based authoring tool developed at the University of Virginia to weave images, maps, charts, video and data into highly interactive and compelling dynamic visualizations." Scroll down below the sample projects for the links to VisEdit, the web-based project editor, as well as documentation and videos on how to create projects with these tools. (Univ. of Virginia)
Exhibit, Timeline, Citeline, and TokenX (with reviews)
This page from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln reviews several tools (3 of 4 come from MIT's SIMILE Project). They can be used to create digital timelines, sort data into interactive displays, perform text analysis, and more. These tools require some technical knowledge of HTML, XML, etc.

PRAAT Free software for analyzing speech in phonetics.
Sonic Visualiser "Application for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files. The aim of Sonic Visualiser is to be the first program you reach for when want to study a musical recording rather than simply listen to it. We hope Sonic Visualiser will be of particular interest to musicologists, archivists, signal-processing researchers and anyone else looking for a friendly way to take a look at what lies inside the audio file." (Center for Digital Music, Queen Mary, Univ. of London)

BatchGeo
Google Earth
Create highly customized and interactive maps. Requires download/installation of Google Earth.
Google Maps
Create customized, interactive maps. Work online.
ZeeMaps
Cartodb
From About Us page: "CartoDB is a cloud-based mapping, analysis and visualization engine that lets users build spatial applications for both mobile and the web."
Mapbox
From About Us page: "Mapbox is a developer-focused mapping platform. We power thousands of applications and websites, with customizable and scalable maps, analysis, and data."
MapScholar "MapScholar is a free, online platform for geospatial visualization. It enables humanities and social science scholars to create digital “atlases” featuring high-resolution images of historic maps. This web application runs in any internet browser and requires no special software (other than a free Google Earth plug-in). MapScholar’s user-friendly interface manages geospatial data to make it easy to create and publish simple map collections quickly. MapScholar also supports more sophisticated projects, from data-driven research to the creation of curated exhibitions of cartographic collections. Its suite of tools for image processing, text and graphic annotation, and georeferencing help put maps in context." (Univ. of Virginia)
AWMC Map Tiles (Ancient World Mapping Center) Offers the first (and at the time of this writing, only) geographically accurate base map of the ancient world, suitable for use in nearly any web mapping application or GIS software suite
Palladio
A platform to import, visualize, and map data; designed with Humanities scholars in mind. (Humanities+Design Lab, Stanford Univ.)
Neatline
"Neatline allows scholars, students, and curators to tell stories with maps and timelines. As a suite of add-on tools for Omeka, it opens new possibilities for hand-crafted, interactive spatial and temporal interpretation." (Univ. of Virginia)

AntConc "A freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis." (Laurence Anthony)
Google Books Ngram Viewer
Google Ngram Viewer allows you to perform textual analysis of content in Google Books from 1800-2000. Find trends in the use of a word or idea over time. Get more info from Google. See tips from Harvard on scholarly use of this data. (Google)
Voyant Tools "A web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts." Upload plain text, HTML, XML, Word documents, RTF, or PDF.
OCR4all
The OCR4all tool converts historical printings into computer-readable texts. This reliable, user-friendly, and open-source tool was developed by scientists at the University of Würzburg. Read press release here.
The Distant Reader "The Distant Reader empowers you to use & understand large amounts of textual information both quickly & easily. Technically speaking, the Distant Reader is a system which locally harvests/caches content you specify. It then transforms the content into plain text, performs sets of natural language processing & text mining against the text, saves the results in a number of formats, reduces the whole to a cross-platform database file, queries the database thus summarizing the collection, zips the results of the entire process into a single file, and makes the file available to you for further investigation--'reading.'"

Chronos Timeline
From HyperStudio: Digital Humanities at MIT
ChronoZoom Timeline
Educational tool for teachers and students who want to put historical events in perspective from the Big Bang to Today. Log in to author your own "small" or "big" history timeline. More details - Example timeline for WWI
Sutori "Create free interactive timelines."
myHistro
Free multimedia tool for creating timelines, complete with text, video, and picture mashup. See this tutorial for how to create a map and timeline mashup with myHistro.
Neatline
TimeMapper "Elegant timelines and maps created in seconds." Free tool.

Annotran (GitHub code)
"The tool is based on the Hypothesis annotation framework and allows users to write and view translations of any web pages. Although the tool is designed to be integrated with the Open Library of Humanities platform, it can actually be run on any web page, by any publisher." Learn more and watch a demonstration video. (Open Library of Humanities)

DH Toychest: Digital Humanities Resources for Project Building
"Online or downloadable tools that are free, free to students, or have generous trial periods without tight usage constraints, watermarks, or other spoilers. Bias toward tools that can be run online or installed on a personal computer without needing an institutional server."

Digital Tools - Free Online Course for Historians "Historians are increasingly required to understand and make use of complex digital tools in order to analyse and present their research in new and exciting ways. These modules and case studies are intended as introductions to various common tools and techniques. Topics covered include visualisation, linked data, and cloud computing, with more extensive training provided for semantic markup and text mining." (University of London's Institute of Historical Research)
Which Digital Tool Should I Use?
By Hannah Aizenman on GC Digital Fellow, October 25, 2017. Walks through examples of selecting a tool for a project according to objectives and constraints.