Digital Humanities LibGuide: Tools

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is the largest freely-available corpus of English, and the only large and balanced corpus of American English. The corpus was created by Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, and it is used by tens of thousands of users every month (linguists, teachers, translators, and other researchers). The corpus contains more than 450 million words of text and is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts. It includes 20 million words each year from 1990-2012 and the corpus is also updated regularly. Because of its design, it is perhaps the only corpus of English that is suitable for looking at current, ongoing changes in the language.

The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) is the largest structured corpus of historical English. The corpus was created by Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, with generous funding from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities. COHA allows you to quickly and easily search more than 400 million words of text of American English from 1810 to 2009. You can see how words, phrases and grammatical constructions have increased or decreased in frequency, how words have changed meaning over time, and how stylistic changes have taken place in the language.

DebateGraph is an award-winning, cloud-based service that offers individuals and communities a powerful way to learn about and deliberate and decide on complex issues. DebateGraph helps communities of any size to externalize, visualize, question, and evaluate all of the considerations that any member thinks may be relevant to the topic at hand – and by facilitating intelligent, constructive dialogue within the community around those issues.

DH Press is a project of the Digital Innovation Lab at the UNC-Chapel Hill College of Arts and Sciences. This WordPress plugin enables administrative users to mashup and visualize a variety of digitized humanities-related material, including historical maps, images, manuscripts, and multimedia content. DH Press can be used to create a range of digital projects, from virtual walking tours and interactive exhibits, to classroom teaching tools and community repositories.

The DPLA is a platform that enables new and transformative uses of our digitized cultural heritage. The DPLA's application programming interface (API) and open data can be used by software developers, researchers, and others to create novel environments for learning, tools for discovery, and engaging apps.

GeoNames is a global geographical database that may be used to identify, tag and disambiguate all references to location. The GeoNames geographical database is available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains over 10 million geographical names and consists of over 8 million unique features whereof 2.8 million populated places and 5.5 million alternate names. All features are categorized into one out of nine feature classes and further subcategorized into one out of 645 feature codes.

The Google Ngram Viewer is a phrase-usage graphing tool which charts the yearly count of selected n-grams (letter combinations), words, or phrases, as found in over 8 million of the 20 million books digitized by Google. The words or phrases are matched by case-sensitive spelling, comparing exact uppercase letters, and plotted on the graph if found in 40 or more books. The Google Ngram Viewer allows users to investigate the usage of phrases across time.

Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required.

StatSilk produces visualization and mapping software. Freely downloadable products include StatPlanet (mapping software), StatTrends (data visualization software), and StatWorld (software for exploring world stats through visualizations from various international organizations such as UNDP, UNESCO, UNICEF, WHO and the World Bank).

Create interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables from virtually any data and embed them on your website or blog.

Launched in 2008, Text2MindMap is one of the most popular mind mapping tools on the web. Mindmaps can be saved, downloaded as PDFs or PNG images, and shared.

Timetoast allows users to create interactive timelines, which they can share anywhere on the web.

The Victorian Literary Studies Archive is a hyper-concordance that scans and displays lines based on a command entered by a user. The program not only identifies the concordance lines but the words occurring to the left and the right of the word or phrase searched. It also reports the number of text lines, the total word count and the number of occurrences of the word/phrase searched. Hundreds of public-domain works are available for Victorian, British & Irish, and American authors.

Voyant is a web-based text analysis application. Voyant (Voyeur) is part of Hermeneuti.ca, a collaborative project to develop and theorize text analysis tools and text analysis rhetoric. Users can upload texts in a variety of formats and perform lexical analysis including the study of frequency and distribution data, export data into other tools, and embed live tools into remote web sites.

Word Counter is a free tool that allows users to quickly analyze a piece of text. Word Counter measures not only the number of words in a text but also sentence length, keyword density, estimated reading level, and estimated reading time. Users can find out this information by simply pasting any amount of text into a text box. Word Counter would be useful tool for writers looking to avoid repetition or for instructors interested in the reading level of a specific text.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

The DiRT Directory is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. DiRT makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

Drupal for Humanists by Quinn Dombrowski is intended for scholars, librarians, museum and archive professionals, and others with a humanistic background who want to build robust digital projects using the open source content management system Drupal. Forthcoming from Texas A&M Press, it will be one of the first books in the new Programming for Humanists series, which provides an introduction to technologies applicable to digital humanities scholarship, without assuming the reader has prior technical background.

Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.

This is an open-source “spin-off” from the SIMILE project at MIT. Offered are free, open-source web widgets, mostly for data visualizations. They are maintained and improved over time by a community of open-source developers.

Textus is an open source platform developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation for working with collections of text. It enables students, researchers and teachers to share and collaborate around texts using a simple and intuitive interface.

TAPoR is a gateway to tools for sophisticated analysis and retrieval, along with representative texts for experimentation. TAPoR allows users to: manage electronic texts; experiment with online text; learn about digital textuality.

The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.

Dublin Core is a basic metadata standard supported by international standards bodies. Dublin Core Metadata can be used for multiple purposes, from simple resource description for the purposes of discovery, to combining metadata vocabularies of different metadata standards, to providing interoperability for metadata vocabularies in the cloud and Semantic web applications.

The EAD Document Type Definition (DTD) is a standard for encoding archival finding aids using Extensible Markup Language (XML). The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress (LC) in partnership with the Society of American Archivists.

The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium. The standard is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress, and is being developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation.

Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) is a schema for a bibliographic element set that may be used for a variety of purposes, and particularly for library applications. The standard is maintained by the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress with input from users.

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Since 1994, the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation. In addition to the Guidelines themselves, the Consortium provides a variety of supporting resources, including resources and training events for learning TEI, information on projects using the TEI, TEI-related publications, and software developed for or adapted to the TEI.