History: Digital humanities: Tools

Tools

DH projects can manifest in many forms and there are many tools that are utilized for DH work. This page is dedicated to common tools that are often used in DH, though it is not exhaustive. Many librarians at Newman use these tools and we can help experiment, consult with, and train others in these tools. It is important to note that not all of these tools are open-source but Virginia Tech may have support or a subscription to a tool. Contact Corinne Guimont (gcorinne@vt.edu) for more details on these tools. Open-source or free tools are marked with two asterisks (**),  tools that have free trials are marked with one asterisk (*), and subscription tools are unmarked.

3-D Modeling

Blender (2002, developed by the Blender Foundation): free and open source 3D creation suite**

Creator (2007, developed by Presagis): industry standard for 3D simulation models*

Maya (developed by Autodesk): 3D animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software provides an integrated, powerful toolset.

MudBox (developed by Autodesk): digital painting and sculpting software

SketchUp (developed by Trimble Inc.): 3D modeling computer program for a wide range of drawing applications*

Audiovisual

Adobe Creative Cloud (2011, developed by Adobe Systems): subscription software used for graphic design, video editing, web development, and photography

Audacity (2000, developed by Audacity): free, open source, cross-platform audio software**

Camtasia (2002, developed by TechSmith): screen recorder and video editing software

DaVinci Resolve (2004, developed by Blackmagic Design): video editing software

GIMP (1996, developed by the GIMP Development Team): an open-source cross-platform image editor**

Inkscape (2003, developed by Inkscape’s Contributors): an open-source vector graphics editor

Processing (2001, developed by Casey Reas and Ben Fry): open-source software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code within the context of the visual arts**

PureData (1996, developed by Miller Puckette): open-source visual programming language for multimedia**

Data

Cytoscape (2002, Institute for Systems Biology): open source software platform for visualizing complex networks and integrating these with any type of attribute data**

D3 (2011, developed by Mike Bostock): a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data**

GapMinder (2007): non-profit venture registered in Stockholm, Sweden, that promotes sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels

Gephi (2008, developed by Mathieu Bastian and others): open-source network analysis and visualization software package**

OpenRefine (2010, developed by Freebase and Google): open source desktop application for data cleanup and transformation to other formats**

Tableau (2003): a software company that produces interactive data visualization products

Tabula (developed by Manuel Aristarán, Mike Tigas and Jeremy B. Merrill): open-source tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files**

Textexture (2012, developed by Nodus Labs): visualize any text as a network*

Walrus (2001, developed by Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis): interactively visualizing large directed graphs in three-dimensional space**

Maps

ArcGIS at VT (1999, developed by Esri):  Virginia Tech's subscription to the ArcGIS software, a geographic information system for working with maps and geographic information

OpenStreetMap (2004, developed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation): a map of the world, created by by a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, cafés, railway stations, and much more, all over the world**

StoryMap JS (developed by the Northwestern University Knight Lab): free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events

TimeLine JS (developed by the Northwestern University Knight Lab): open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines

Preservation

Archive-It (2006, developed by the Internet Archive): a subscription web archiving service created for larger organizations

Heritrix (2004, developed by the Internet Archive): a web crawler designed for web archiving**

Wayback Machine (2001, developed by the Internet Archive): a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet**

Webrecorder (2016, manufactured by webrecorder (https://webrecorder.net/): a suite of open source projects and tools to capture interactive websites and replay them at a later time as accurately as possible. Tools for capture: archiveweb.page, Chrome extension to archive pages; Tools for replay: replayweb.page, Browser-based web archive replay system. Collaboration with them is encouraged! Email at info@webrecorder.net and/or join the forum at https://forum.webrecorder.net

Perma.cc (2013, developed by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab): a service to provide archiving of web pages for research purposes.  Researchers at Virginia Tech are able to archive, manage, and annotate an unlimited number of web pages with persistent shortlinks for citing, create multiple users with access to the same folders, and receive local support. See the Perma.cc LibGuide for more information

Publishing

PressBooks (developed by Hugh McGuire): book writing software that lets you create a book in all the formats you need to publish**

Omeka (2008, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media(CHNM) at George Mason University): a web publishing platform for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits**

Reclaim Hosting (2013, developed by Tim Owens and Jim Groom): provides educators and institutions with an easy way to offer their students domains and web hosting that they own and control 

Scalar (developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture): open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online**

WordPress (VT) (Virginia Tech University Libraries): Virginia Tech’s production instance of WordPress, open to anyone at Virginia Tech to make their own blog**

WordPress (General) (2003, developed by the WordPress Foundation): open source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app**

Text

Hypothesis (developed by the Hypothesis Project): an online tool for annotating the web**

oXygen (developed by SyncRO Soft Ltd.): suite of XML authoring, editing, and development tools*

R Studio (2011, developed by RStudio, Inc.): open-source integrated development environment for R, a programming language for statistical computing and graphics

Scrivener (2007, developed by Keith Blount): word-processor with notes management and outlining features

Voyant (2003, developed by Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwel): a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts**