External Resources
This is a collection of free, third-party, open-source software available for download or through a free user account:
This is a collection of free, user-friendly tools to perform textual analysis. One of the most interesting methodologies in DH, textual analysis allows scholars to reimagine how they engage textual data through computational methods such as word frequency, collocation, keywords-in-context, corpus analysis, topic modeling, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and many more.
Social media is an exciting area of study for many researchers because it allows us to analyze the ways we communicate online. In an era of fake news, trolling, doxxing, internet conspiracies, internet activism, and memes, analyzing social media has become crucial for understanding human culture and communication. We have collected some free, easy-to-use tools for conducting social-media analysis (may require additional resources such as API keys).
Space and place are crucial components of human experience and have become increasingly prominent in many humanities and social-science disciplines such that scholars now discuss the “spatial turn.” Mapping locations mentioned in novels, historical events, or heritage sites allows researchers to represent visually the topography of such studies, and we have included a collection of free, easy-to-use resources for creating geospatial maps.
Networks exist all around us. Whether we study ecosystems, social media, fictional character relationships, historical events, or kinship structures, networks can model these relationships. Here is a collection of free, easy-to-use tools for visualizing and analyzing such network “graphs,” the visual representations of connectivity.
Working with data is one of the most fundamental aspects of DH. Whether cleaning your data so it can be analyzed effectively, visualizing your data as charts or maps; or managing, storing, or publishing datasets, we've provided some options for your next research project.
The resources listed above provide out-of-the-box tools for beginning a project, but many DH scholars turn to computer languages that allow much more flexibility, control, and complexity when building a research project. Python and R, and their development environments, contain many libraries and packages to do any of the methods listed above...and more. Both are open-source, freely available with vigorous online resources and communities developing new material all the time.
In addition to the resources listed above, we also provide links to some other essential resources for DH, including tutorials and other resources. While not comprehensive, this collection of materials will help you get started.
The Digital Humanities Literacy Guidebook
Hathi Trust Research Center Analytics
Gale Digital Scholar Lab (Available through Library Databases)