DH Tools and Software
DH-Tool Comparisons
"Finding the Right Platform: A Crosswalk of Academy-Owned and Open-Source Digital Publishing Platforms"
This 34-page, hyperlinked crosswalk prompts librarians, publishers, and authors/researchers to make a decision to further pursue one platform over another by asking them what kind of project they want to publish and what features they want. At a glance, the crosswalk compares the following platforms:
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- Fulcrum
- Humanities Commons
- Janeway
- Manifold
- Mukurtu
- Omeka
- Open Journal Systems (OJS)
- Pressbooks
- PubPub
- Scalar
while also providing a comparison for features such as Hosting & Cost, Ingestion Options, Editorial Workflows, Interactivity, Archive & Preservation, Export Options, Discoverability, and Accessibility. Each platform also has its own one-pager that provides a more detailed description of the individual project and what it excels at.
Corpora is "a dataset studio for the Digital Humanities"—it allows scholars with little to no programming experience to create a data schema for their digital projects (referred to as a "corpus"). Once a schema is established, data can immediately be created according to that schema via dynamically generated web forms, giving the corpus a backend that can be populated collaboratively. In addition, Corpora has a "baked-in" API (also dynamically generated) that allows independent website frontends (or any computational tool) to browse, search, and explore the data in the corpus.
Corpora is architected in such a way as to allow for plugins to be developed that drastically broaden its capacity. Examples include the ability to OCR documents en-masse with Tesseract or Google Cloud Vision, the ability to perform natural language processing tasks, etc. Plugins also serve as a way to containerize custom content types and code to support specific projects.
Corpora was developed by Dr. Bryan Tarpley, Associate Research Scientist for Critical Infrastructure Studies at CoDHR. To work with Corpora, please contact us at codhr@tamu.edu.
Source Code: https://gitlab.dh.tamu.edu/bptarpley/corpora
Documentation: https://corpora-docs.dh.tamu.edu
No-Code Data-Visualization Tools
ArcGIS StoryMaps
ArcGIS StoryMaps is a tool that transforms Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based maps into digital stories. Users can also add text, photos, and videos to their existing ArcGIS web maps and web scenes to create an interactive narrative.
See the versatility of StoryMaps in the ArcGIS Community Gallery.
Lexos
Lexos is a web-based tool designed for transforming, analyzing, and visualizing texts. Lexos is designed for use primarily with small to medium-sized text collections, and especially for use with ancient languages and languages that do not employ the Latin alphabet. Lexos was created as an entry-level platform for Humanities scholars and students new to computational techniques while providing tools and techniques sophisticated enough for advanced research.
Voyant Tools
Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment designed to make it easy for a user to work on their own text or corpus. Once a text or collection of texts is uploaded, Voyant's collection of tools can be used for a variety of frequency analysis visualizations.
No-Code Web-Publishing Platforms
Omeka
Omeka is a series of web-publishing platforms for digital collections and media-rich online exhibits. Omeka provides users with three solutions to build their digital projects:
1. Omeka Classic: The Omeka Classsic software provides a free and open source answer to the need for a web publishing platform that centers the importance of standards-based metadata and allows content experts to showcase their unique knowledge about their collections. There are nearly 100 plugins that have been created and are maintained in order to expand Omeka Classic's functionality.
See the versatility of Omeka Classic in the Omeka Classic Site Showcase.
2. Omeka.net: Omeka.net provides a cost-effective solution for Omeka users, both organizations and individuals, who do not have the ability or resources to download and run Omeka Classic on their own servers. Users select a paid plan depending on their needs.
See the variety of sites Omeka.net hosts in the Omeka.net Site Showcase.
3. Omeka S: Omeka S satisfies the needs of larger institutional users who require a web publishing platform that offers a single point of administration for installation, software upgrades, and the extension of functionality and look and feel for all of the sites developed in the installation. Omeka S provides administrators with control over their networks: Omeka S uses JSON-LD as its native data format; every Omeka S Resource (item, item set, media) has a URI, and the core software includes Resource Description Framework (RDF) vocabularies, which maximizes its data interoperability with other data publishers; users can import any LOD vocabulary of their choice and develop a data model that matches the needs of their content.
Documentation: https://omeka.org/s/docs/developer/
WordPress
WordPress is a personal web-publishing platform that hosts over 43% of all sites across the web. It prides itself on being an "out of the box" system (i.e., it's accessible to users with limited tech experience) while still remaining customizable to more tech-savvy users. WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL, and licensed under the GPLv2.
See the versatility of WordPress in the WordPress Website Showcase.
Documentation: https://wordpress.org/documentation/
Coding Software, Platforms, and Apps
Oxygen XML Editor
Oxygen XML Editor provides a comprehensive suite of XML authoring and development tools designed to accommodate a large number of users ranging from beginners to XML experts.
Faculty, staff, and students from Texas A&M can use the following license key, available here, to access the latest version of Oxygen for free. Paste all 9 lines, between the start and end markers, in the license registration dialog box within Oxygen by going to Menu > Help > Register.
GitHub is a cloud-based code hosting platform for version control, software development, and collaboration.
Documentation: https://docs.github.com/en
Jekyll is a "static site generator", a software that helps users generate plain HTML files for their website. In contrast to dynamic websites, static websites do not use a database to store information; rather, all information to be displayed on each webpage is already contained in an HTML file for that webpage. As a result, static websites are simple to preserve and are more sustainable.
Jekyll also has built-in support for GitHub Pages. Learn more at "About GitHub Pages and Jekyll".
Documentation: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/
DH Pedagogy
"Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students", Second Edition
Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom, written by Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross, is the go-to guide to using digital tools and resources in the Humanities classroom. In response to the rapidly changing nature of the field, this second edition has been updated throughout and now features:
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- A brand-new Preface accounting for new developments in the broader field of DH pedagogy
- New chapters on 'Collaborating' and on 'Teaching in a Digital Classroom'
- New sections on collaborating with other teachers; teaching students with learning differences; explaining the benefits of digital pedagogy to your students; and advising graduate students about the technologies they need to master
- New 'advanced activities' and 'advanced assignment' sections (including bots, vlogging, crowd-sourcing, digital storytelling, web scraping, critical making, automatic text generation, and digital media art)
- Expanded chapter bibliographies and over two dozen tables offering practical advice on choosing software programs
Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom also offers a Digital Companion that has been designed to answer commonly asked questions quickly and clearly.
DH Course Randomizer
The Digital Companion site to Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom offers a DH Course Randomizer for users to easily generate a multimodal DH course plan and view how it scores for synchronicity, active learning, and teacher effort.
#DLFteach Toolkits
#DLFteach Toolkits are openly available, peer-reviewed lesson plans and concrete instructional strategies developed by the DLF Digital Library Pedagogy Group (#DLFteach).
All lessons include learning goals, preparation, and a session outline. Additional materials—including slides, handouts, assessments, and datasets—are hosted in the DLF Open Science Framework (OSF) repository as well as linked from each lesson.
Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments
Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, hosted by the Modern Language Association and Humanities Commons, is a curated collection of reusable and re-mixable resources for teaching and research. Organized by keyword, the annotated artifacts can be saved in collections for future reference or sharing. Each keyword includes a curatorial statement and ten artifacts that exemplify that keyword.
For an introduction to the collection, see Curating Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities.
Index for Curating Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities
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- Why "Digital Pedagogy"?
- Why a Digital Format?
- What's in This Collection?
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- Openness
- Collaboration
- Play
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- Practice
- Student Agency
- Identity
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- BUT . . . FERPA!
- BUT . . . I don’t have time!
- BUT . . . where do I start?
- BUT . . . how do I scaffold?
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- BUT . . . what about grading?
- BUT . . . what if my students are resistant?
- BUT . . . does digital pedagogy count?
- BUT . . . this all sounds daunting!
History of the Development of Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities
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- Digital Pedagogy within Digital Humanities
- Digital Pedagogy beyond Digital Humanities
- Digital Pedagogy Struggling to Find Its Voice within Digital Humanities
- Scholarly Infrastructure for Digital Pedagogy
- Pedagogical Materials as Scholarship
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- Keywords
- Tagging
- Editing in Public via GitHub
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- Working with Open Peer Review
- Shifting the Concept of “Published”
- The Shifting Role of “Publisher”
The Programming Historian publishes novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching. They are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive community of editors, writers, and readers.
Users can search lessons by phases of the research process (e.g., acquire, transform, analyze, present, and sustain) or by general topic.
The Programming Historian offers lessons for the following topics:
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- APIs
- Python
- Data Management
- Data Manipulation
- Distant Reading
- Set Up
- Linked Open Data
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- Mapping
- Network Analysis
- Web Scraping
- Digital Publishing
- R
- Machine Learning
- Creative Coding