Guides: Digital Scholarship/Digital Humanities: Tools and Resources

Free Resources and Tools

This is an index of resources and tools for digital scholarship projects.

Inclusion of tools on this list does not indicate the endorsement of the UNT Libraries. We can offer consultation on integrating these tools into the classroom or using them in your research, but we do not provide technical support or hosting for these tools.

Please contact the Digital Scholarship Committee at the UNT Libraries for more information.

Campus Resources

Software Carpentry
Software Carpentry is a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching students and professionals the basics of programming so they can excel in the workplace. They operate workshops at universities worldwide, including UNT.

Tutorials and Online Coursebooks

Digital Research Tools (DiRT) Directory
is a registry of digital humanities tools maintained by an international volunteer community of professors, students, and librarians. Use it for discovering and comparing tools for your DH project or scholarly workflow.
Intro to Digital Humanities (UCLA Center for Digital Humanities)
Based on the Introduction to Digital Humanities (DH101) course at UCLA, taught by Johanna Drucker (with David Kim) in 2011 and 2012, this online coursebook (and related collection of resources) is meant to provide introductory materials to digital approaches relevant to a wide range of disciplines. The lessons and tutorials assume no prior knowledge or experience and are meant to introduce fundamental skills and critical issues in digital humanities.
The Programming Historian
We publish novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching.

User Guides

Digital Scholarship 101: Six Tools to Get You Started
From Library of Congress Labs and prepared by Eileen Jakeway, this guide lists notable tools in Digital Scholarship. This resource also features short how-to instructions for using Zotero, Voyant Tools, Hypothes.is, Google My Maps, and TimelineJS.
Teaching with Discord: A Beginner’s Guide (Written by a Beginner)
Dr. Mark Bresnan of CSU details his experience incorporating Discord in his literature courses for Pedagogy & American Literary Studies.
Twine Cookbook User Guide
The Twine Cookbook is a resource guide providing documentation, examples, and tips for using Twine.

Cloud-Based Online Tools

DataBasic.io Suite

DataBasic
DataBasic is a suite of easy-to-use web tools for beginners that introduce concepts of working with data. These simple tools make it easy to work with data in fun ways, so you can learn how to find great stories to tell.

DH Box

DH Box (SUNY Graduate Center)
DHbox provides a digital humanities laboratory in the cloud through simple sign-in via a web browser. The DHbox platform comes pre-equipped with essential DH tools: IPython, RStudio, Omeka, and NLTK.

Scalar

Scalar
Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required.

Twine

Twine
Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. Twine has two versions: Twine 1 and Twine 2. The most recent version, Twine 2, is available for use online with a computer or mobile device or can be downloaded on Windows, macOS, or Linux.

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You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.

Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.

Collaboration and Social Communication

Discord

Discord
Discord is an online platform for communities, organizations, and groups. Most known for gaming and streams, Discord allows users to communicate via text and voice chat functions in public or invite-only servers. Access is free and available via browser, desktop app, and mobile app.

Computation and Programming

IP[y]: iPython Interactive Computing
IPython provides a rich architecture for interactive computing with:
* A powerful interactive shell
* A kernel for Jupyter
* Support for interactive data visualization and use of GUI toolkits
* Flexible, embeddable interpreters to load into your own projects
* Easy to use, high performance tools for parallel computing
RStudio
RStudio develops free and open tools for the R community and enterprise-ready professional products for teams to scale and share work.

Databases & Research Tools

The databases in the boxes below are accessible to UNT faculty, staff, and students through the Libraries website at the links below. You may be asked to log in with your EUID and password to access the contents of these databases.

Digital Collections and Libraries

PALMM Textual Collections
Publication of Archival, Library & Museum Materials (PALMM) is a cooperative initiative of the public universities of Florida to provide digital access to important source materials for research and scholarship. PALMM projects create high-quality virtual collections relevant to the students, research community and general citizenry of Florida. These collections touch on specific topics, such as aerial photography of Florida, modern Italian art, historical legal documents from Florida, digital oral history programs, among other unique collections.

Hathi Trust

Hathi Trust
Hathi Trust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to preserve and make accessible the cultural record. Hathi has digitized and made accessible millions of books and serials in the public domain. To access additional materials and resources: 1) Click 'login', 2) Select 'University of North Texas', 3) Select 'Continue' 4) Enter your EUID and password, 5) Select 'login'

HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC)

HathiTrust Research Center
The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) enables computational analysis of the HathiTrust corpus. It is a collaborative research center launched jointly by Indiana University and the University of Illinois, along with HathiTrust, to help meet the technical challenges researchers face when dealing with massive amounts of digital text. It develops cutting-edge software tools and cyberinfrastructure to enable advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge.
HTRC: Examples & Use Case
Examples of some of the research projects done through the HathiTrust Research Center
HTRC Extracted Features Use Cases & Examples
Examples of projects done using the HathiTrust Research Center's Extracted Features Dataset.

Data Management

Constellate

Constellate
Constellate is a new text and data analytics service and pedagogy platform from ITHAKA (JSTOR) and Portico for learning and performing text analysis, building datasets, and sharing analytics course materials.

DMPTool

DMPTool
The DMPTool provides detailed guidance and links to general and institutional resources and walks a researcher through the process of generating a comprehensive plan tailored to specific DMP requirements.

See our Data Management Guide for more information on using DMPTool or for a data management consultation.

GitHub

GitHub
GitHub is a collaboration, code review, and code management for open source and private projects. Public projects are always free.

Open Refine

Open Refine
Open Refine is a tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data.

Exhibits and Content Managment

ArcGIS StoryMaps

ArcGIS StoryMaps
Create inspiring, immersive stories by combining text, interactive maps, and other multimedia content. Publish and share your story with your organization or everyone around the world.

Omeka

Omeka.net
Omeka.net is web-publishing platform that allows anyone with an account to create or collaborate on a website to display collections and build digital exhibitions.
Up and Running with Omeka (Tutorial by Miriam Posner)
Creating an Omeka Exhibiti (tutorial by Miriam Posner)

Timeline JS

Timeline JS
TimelineJS is an open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines. Beginners can create a timeline using nothing more than a Google spreadsheet. Experts can use their JSON skills to create custom installations, while keeping TimelineJS's core functionality.
Teaching with Digital Timelines (Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching)

Journals

Humanities

Digital humanities quarterly: DHQ
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Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ), an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities. Published by the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Formerly Literary & linguistic computing (LLC). DSH is an international, peer reviewed journal which publishes original contributions on all aspects of digital scholarship in the Humanities including, but not limited to, the field of what is currently called the Digital Humanities.
EBR: Electronic Book Review
ebr is an online, open access, peer-reviewed journal of critical writing produced and published by the emergent digital literary network.
Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship
Unbound publishes work that explores the interstices of digital scholarship, broadly conceived, with an emphasis on digital cultural studies; critical digital humanities; libraries, archives, and museums; the interpretive social sciences; and socially engaged computational or quantitative methods.

Technology

Digital Studies / Le champ numérique
Digital Studies / Le champ numérique is a refereed academic journal that serves as an Open Access area for formal scholarly activity and as a resource for researchers in the Digital Humanities. It is published for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations under the direction of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN) by the Open Library of the Humanities.
Hybrid Pedagogy
Hybrid Pedagogy is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that combines the strands of critical pedagogy and digital pedagogy to arrive at the best social and civil uses for technology and new media in education.
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy
Kairos is a refereed open-access online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. Since its first issue in January of 1996, the mission of Kairos has been to publish scholarship that examines digital and multimodal composing practices, promoting work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media.

Platforms and Software

Gelphi

Gephi
Gephi is more advanced than the “paste and play” tools above (Juxta Commons and Voyant), but it is less-advanced than MALLET (below). This is a visualization tool designed to reveal networks based on connections (“edges”) between points of reference (“nodes”).

MALLET

MALLET (MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit)
MALLET (Machine Learning for Language Toolkit) is an advanced tool that allows one to apply various machine learning applications to text(s). Although this is an advanced tool designed for ingesting and crunching large amounts of data, it is open-source and amply documented if you, gentle reader, want to dive in and start exploring.

Textual Analysis

Collaborative Annotation

Voyant Tools
Voyant Tools is a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts. One simply copies or uploads plain text to the interface and is then presented with a configurable “skin” with an handful of word-frequency-based analyses all rolled up together.
Voyant Tools Help Guide
This guide for Voyant Tools includes information for users on how to utilize this web-based software to analyze text.
Hypothes.is
A free web-based annotation tool for collaborative annotation of texts, websites, news articles, or other digital content.

Retrieval & Visualization

Juxta Commons
Juxta Commons is a web-based platform for this text analysis tool that is also available as a stand-alone tool, Juxta. This is collation software that visualizes the differences between versions of texts.
TAPoR Tools
TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) offers a suite of different tools for text analysis. When a user visits a page for any one of the tools they get a bit of data about the tool, including “ease of use” and “type of analysis.”

University Libraries

Digital Scholarship/Digital Humanities

Datasets for Digital Research

Digital Scholarship Library Guides

Books in UNT Libraries

Scholarly Communication Librarian

Free Resources and Tools

Cloud-Based Online Tools

Collaboration and Social Communication

Computation and Programming

Databases & Research Tools

Data Management

Exhibits and Content Managment

Journals

Platforms and Software

Textual Analysis

Further Reading

Digital Scholarship/Digital Humanities

Free Resources and Tools

Cloud-Based Online Tools

Collaboration and Social Communication

Computation and Programming

Databases & Research Tools

Data Management

Exhibits and Content Managment

Journals

Platforms and Software

Textual Analysis

Further Reading

Additional Links