Digital Humanities : Methods and Tools

After you gather your data, you may need to organize or clean your data to work with it over the course of your project. Below are some tools that will help you prepare your data for use. 

• DMP Tool - Helps you to create a Data Management Plan. This plan may be required by funders as a part of the grant application process. It is also a good idea to create a DMP to help you think about long term management and preservation of your data at the start of your project. You can request a review of your plan from Research Data Services consultants through the tool. 
• The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap -  A module intended to help you and your team plan for sustaining your web-based, user-facing, digital humanities project over time. 
• OpenRefine - a powerful free, open source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data.
• Tropy - a tool that helps you organize and more easily find your research photos and archival sources. 
• From the Page - a document transcription tool that allows you to crowdsource or work with project collaborators. 
• ELAN - an annotation tool for audio and video recordings. 
• Knowledge Commons (KCWorks) - open access repository for humanities open scholarship and teaching materials. 

Text analysis refers to a process of conducting analysis on a body, or corpus, of natural language text, in order to detect patterns, create visualizations, categorize or annotate the text, or otherwise "mine" it for relevant, novel, or interesting information and interpretation. Below are some tools to explore this method.

• Voyant - an open-source web-based text analysis environment for digital texts. 
• TAPoR3 - Version 3 of the Text Analysis Portal for Research. A portal with curated lists of commonly used text analysis tools. 
• Python - a programming language commonly used by digital humanists for text analysis. Useful python based text analysis software include: The Natural Language Toolkit, Mallet, and Beautiful Soup. See the Libraries' Python programming workshop series to get started with python. 
• Gale Digital Scholar Lab - an online tool for collecting data sets comprised of content from the UW-Madison Libraries’ subscriptions to Gale Primary Sources databases. Those data sets can then be analyzed using text analysis and visualization tools built into the Digital Scholar Lab.
• TDM Studio - an online text and data mining tool for research, teaching and learning. Tools include a no code dashboard and a workbench with access to virtual Jupyter notebooks.
• HathiTrust Research Center - offers services that support use of the HathiTrust corpus as a dataset for analysis via text and data mining research.

Digital Humanities publishing tools allow researchers to create, explore, and share a variety of digital publications, exhibitions, and scholarly objects. 

• Knowledge Commons (Sites) - allows you to build a Wordpress site for your project that is shared and made discoverable alongside other projects. 
• Scalar - a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to enable users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required.
• Omeka - an open-source web publishing platforms for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits. 
• Mukurtu - an open source platform aiming to empower communities to manage, share, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways
• Digital Mappa - An open-source digital humanities platform for open-access workspaces, projects and publications. Directed by Martin Foys.
• WordPress - open source blogging platform 
• Reclaim Hosting - a domain and web hosting platform designed for educators, students, and institutions. 
• Audacity - free software for recording and editing audio available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. 

Please also see the project specific resources from DesignLab. For oral history projects, please see the services offered by the Oral History Program. 

Visualization tools can be used to arrange and explore patterns in data through the use of timelines, networks, graphs, charts, or data dashboards. 

• Gephi - an open-source tool for network visualization and analysis. 
• Timeline JS - an open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines.
• Palladio - a web-based platform for the visualization of complex, multi-dimensional historical data.
• Tableau - a tool for creating dashboards and visualizations. Students can access a a free version of its software. 
• Data Illustrator - a tool that allows you to create infographics and data visualizations without programming. 
• Data Visualization Catalogue - a project developed by Severino Ribecca to create a non-code-based library of information visualization types. 

Digital mapping tools allow humanists to create multimedia maps that can showcase layered and complex narratives. Tools in this area include Historypin, StoryMapJS, ArcGIS, and Carto. Please see the Mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) research guide for more information.