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Tools

Software and hardware available in the Scholarly Commons and around the web to do Digital Humanities research and analysis.

Software in the Scholarly Commons

  • ATLAS.ti
    A qualitative data analysis packaged that allows for mixed-method research, ATLAS.ti allows you to “code” various kinds of documents and run text matching and word counts over your corpus.
  • NVivo 10
    NVivo is a software program used for qualitative and mixed-methods research. Specifically, it is used for the analysis of unstructured text, audio, video, and image data, including (but not limited to) interviews, focus groups, surveys, social media, and journal articles.
  • RStudio
    An open source, statistical data analysis and graphics platform, R is both a software environment as well as a programming language. R allows you to analyze data and plot them in charts and graphs. There are many plugins available that lend themselves to various statistical processes, graphical visualization tools, and even a qualitative data analysis plugin with a GUI (RQDA).
  • ABBYY FineReader
    ABBYY FineReader is an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program that makes images machine readable. You could “read” a PDF of old newspaper clippings in order to convert them into a text file for machine processing. The Scholarly Commons also has multiple scanners if you need to make a printed book machine readable.

Full list of Software Available in the Scholarly Commons

Hardware in the Scholarly Commons

Digital Scanners

The Scholarly Commons has three high-end scanners for use in digitizing analog items. All of these scanners can work in tandem with ABBYY Fine Reader (see above) to scan directly into this program and streamline the machine reading process. See our Digitization Page for more information on our scanners.

Mac Computerscomputer in the Scholarly Commons

The Scholarly Commons has 2 Mac computers, each with a wireless keyboard and mouse.

Dual Monitor PCs

The Scholarly Commons has 8 dual monitor PCs that can assist you with your research and/or projects.

Morae Observer

This workstation is synced with the Usability Lab for optimal convenience and research capability.

Other Accessories

The Scholarly Commons has many assorted accessories to help with research and projects.  Some include USB Headsets, microphones and stand for voice recordings, and thumb drives.

Full list of Hardware Available in the Scholarly Commons

Software Available Online

Note: some of these tools require an additional fee, but many are free to use.

Directories of Software Tools

  • DiRT Directory
    The DiRT Directory collects information on a variety of digital research tools and resources. This is a great place to get started if you aren’t sure what tool you need for your project.
  • TAPoR
    TAPoR, housed at the University of Alberta, is an index of tools that can be used for text and network analysis, data visualization, and other common DH methods.

Other Tools

  • ACTION Toolbox
    The Audio-visual Cinematic Toolbox for Interaction, Organization, and Navigation, is a computational set of tools used for automated cinema analysis.
  • AntConc
    AntConc is a free corpus analysis software for concordancing (listing occurrences of a word alphabetically based on surrounding words).
  • Gephi 
    Gephi is an open graph visualization platform supporting exploration of all kinds of networks and complex systems.
  • GloVe
    GloVe is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm for obtaining vector representations of words. Pre-trained algorithms are available for download.
  • Google Ngram Viewer
    Searches the entire corpus of Google Books to show frequency of phrases throughout history.

  • MALLET 
    MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit is a popular downloadable, Java-based tool for statistical natural language processing, such as topic modeling, cluster analysis, information extraction, and other machine learning applications.
  • Mathematica 
    Mathematica is a proprietary tool developed by Wolfram Research for technical computing. It is a very resourceful tool for creating networks and visualizing your digital humanities research.
  • ORA 
    ORA is a meta-network and analysis tool developed by the Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) at Carnegie Mellon University.
  • RAWGraphs 
    RAWGraphs is an open-source, web-based data visualization platform where users can create graphs and other visualizations. The RAWGraphs Gallery is used to showcase work.
  • SageMath 
    Meant as an open-source alternative to Mathematica, SageMath builds on other open-source packages like SciPy, matplotlib, and R to create a technical computing application.
  • Voyant 
    Voyant is a free, web-based text analysis application that provides visualization tools like word clouds, graphical frequency counts, and data on recurring phrases.
  • World Maps 
    World Maps is an initiative of Harvard University that makes available a repository of digitized world maps from throughout history. The site offers functionality to create your own maps using the historical ones, and is useful for GIS and spatial humanities projects.