You don’t have to learn an entirely new programming language to do cutting edge digital humanities work. There are many sophisticated, useful off the shelf tools that you can use for your research. Many of them are as simple as using a web browser and can produce thoughtful, well-designed, and interactive research outputs. If your research requires some coding know-how, read our post on tutorials and resources for acquiring programming skills.
As always, be sure to read the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy for any tool you use. Seek to understand how your data will be stored, shared, or if your final output is made public. Part of good data management is understanding how your tools handle your data and making responsible choices about what tools you select.
Finding Community: On the UW-Madison campus you can tap into the digital humanities community through the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, by reaching out to your subject librarian, or contacting us here at RDS. These resources can serve as a hub for finding collaborators, tools, and examples of digital humanities projects underway here on campus.
Content Management Systems: Tools for gathering all your project resources and presenting them on the web. Below are a couple of open source examples that are designed for projects that showcase cultural materials.
- Omeka: An open source digital curation platform developed at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media at George Mason University, Omeka is the standard CMS for digital collections and online digital exhibits.
- To save time and space, you can also check out DH Box which combines Omeka with IPython, RStudio, and the NLTK in a cloud based computing environment through a simple sign in portal.
- Murkutu: An open source platform built with indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage resources.
- Collection Builder: An open source digital collection and exhibit platform that takes your metadata and translates it into other formats like maps, timelines, search portals, tag clouds and more.
Resource curation: If you have a collection of resources – images, text documents, PDFs – these tools can help you manage them, or even better, enrich them with your own metadata, notes, and annotations.
- Digital Mappa | an open-source DH platform: Designed and developed here at UW-Madison, DM lets you and your collaborators use simple tools to highlight, annotate, and link collections of digital texts and local, online and IIIF images. Learn more in our blog post on DM.
- Tropy: Also developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media, Tropy helps you curate, annotate, and manage images for your research projects. Learn more from the RDS blog post covering Tropy.
- Recogito: Recogito’s website describes it as “semantic annotation without the pointy brackets” which allows you to ”identify and mark named entities. Use your data in other tools or connect to other data on the Web. Without the need to learn code.” It even allows you to deploy highly sophisticated tools like Named Entity Recognition (based on Stanford’s Java NER tool) without having to learn the code. Learn more in the RDS blog post on Recogito.
Data Visualization:
- Tableau: Tableau is one of the most widely used and versatile visualization tools available and with a UW-Madison NetID you have access to Tableau Public, which will give you all the tools to create interactive data visualizations and dashboards for your research. Keep in mind that visualizations created in Tableau Public will be visible on the web.
- Palladio: Allows you to analyze and visualize historical data and relationships through time. It’s easy to upload your data and prepare it for visualization.
- Data Visualization Catalog: A library of data visualization formats fitted to certain types of data types and formats developed by Severino Ribecca.
- Excel: The ubiquitous spreadsheet tool offers a robust set of visualization tools that are shareable and easy to learn.
GIS Tools:
- Harvard’s WorldMap: an online and open source tool for creating interactive maps that are ideal for collaboration and sharing. In WorldMap you can create multiple layers, link media content, and export your data in multiple formats.
- Google’s MyMaps: A versatile browser tool and mobile app through which you can create customizable and shareable maps. Because it’s a Google product, you have access to the vast Google Maps and Earth resources allowing you to create maps on a truly global scale.
- MapScholar: From the MapScholar website: “web application runs in any internet browser and requires no special software. 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.”
Digital Humanities Projects: Here are a few example digital humanities projects to give you a sense of what is possible!
- Lantern: Media History Digital Library: Lantern is the search portal for the Media History Digital Library project. The project provides access to “classic media periodicals that belong in the public domain”.
- Virtual Mappa: One of Digital Mappa’s flagship projects, Virtual Mappa is an open access and fully annotated collection of 12 medieval maps. You can interact with the maps, use them in your research, and if you are interested, request access to become a collaborator.
- Northwestern University Knight Lab: An interdisciplinary collaboration space that has produced a collection of hugely useful tools to enhance storytelling, create timelines, and map your ideas.
- Stanford Spatial History Project: The SSHP is a collaboration space for researchers in multiple fields. Browsing their site, you’ll see right away that they have produced a wide array of projects and publications that all involve the application of text analysis and mapping techniques.
- Derrida’s Margins and The Shakespeare and Company Project: From The Center for Digital Humanities @ Princeton, these projects are great examples of data curation, innovative design, and the use of archival materials for digital humanities projects.
Further Reading:
- Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research edited by Constance Crompton, Richard J. Lane, and Ray Siemens: From the publisher’s webpage: “This is a first-stop book for people interested in getting to grips with digital humanities whether as a student or a professor. … Doing Digital Humanities looks at the practicalities of how digital research and creation can enhance both learning and research and offers an approachable way into this complex, yet essential topic.”
- Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein: A long running digital humanities series that offers state-of-the-field discussions of issues and methods in DH. It also happens to be available on the exciting Manifold digital publishing platform.
- New Digital Worlds: Post Colonial Theory, Praxis and Pedagogy by Roopika Risam: From the publisher’s webpage: “The emergence of digital humanities has been heralded for its commitment to openness, access, and the democratizing of knowledge, but it raises a number of questions about omissions with respect to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation. Postcolonial digital humanities is one approach to uncovering and remedying inequalities in digital knowledge production, which is implicated in an information-age politics of knowledge.”