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Digital Humanities

This Digital Humanities LibGuide is an introductory resource and collection of periodicals, reference sources, key articles, projects, initiatives, tools, primary sources, and datasets that are useful for the study and practice of Digital Humanities

Getting Started with Digital Humanities Tools?

ArcGIS is a popular geospatial and mapping software. All computers in Dalhousie's Killam Library are equipped with ArcGIS and it can be downloaded by any Faculty or Staff here

CartoDB is cloud-based geospatial and mapping software that allows users to work with geospatial data online. CartoDB has a free account as well as paid premium accounts.

Google Maps is being widely used in Digital Humanities projects for mapping and visualizing geospatial data. Creating a custom map is accessed through My Maps.

Need help with using ArcGIS, CartoDB, or Google Maps?

GIS center at Dalhousie

ArcGIS help at Dalhousie

See Programming Historians guide to getting started with google maps.

Gephi is a powerful data visualization tool that is popular in the Digital Humanities because of its ability to take spreadsheets and create network analysis nodes out of lists and databases. This is a great tool to get started with for network analysis.
 

D3.js is a JavaScript library that allows one to create powerful visualizations on websites. Essentially, it is a library of scripts and functions that one can draw on to visualize data in a variety of ways. One of its key contributions to Digital Humanities is the ability to create dynamic Digital Humanities projects online.

Need Help?

There are many tutorials for using Gephi one popular choices is from Miriam Posner.

A tutorial for using D3.js meant for a beginner audience geared towards Digital Humanities use can be found here.

Voyant is one of the most popular text analysis suites used in Digital Humanities. It allows users to upload texts and see word counts, co-occurrences, keyword frequency, collocations, relationship between words, and more. Voyant also allows users to create a variety of powerful visualizations.

MALLET is a popular toolkit used in Digital Humanities for Topic Modeling. Mallet can identify topics that are contained in texts and perform analysis such as relationships between topics and frequency of their occurrence.

Google Books Ngram Viewer allows one to analyze the frequency of keyword occurrence found in the Google books corpus.

Need Help?

For a tutorial on getting started with Voyant click here.

For a tutorial on getting started with Mallet and Topic Modeling see this Programming Historian tutorial

Omeka is a web publishing platform mostly used for creating digital exhibits, libraries, archives, and collections. Digital Humanists use Omeka to publish their digital collections and projects.

Drupal is a content management system that allows users to create and host dynamic websites that can display a variety of content. Digital Humanists often use Drupal for their projects because it provides a comprehensive solution for managing texts, metadata, visualizations, interactive maps, and more.

TEI is an XML markup languages that allows scholars to mark up text in order to curate and annotate texts digitally and make them machine readable.

Need Help on Getting Started?

For tutorials on using Omeka see: UCLA Digitial Humanities, What is Omeka?

For getting started with Drupal for Digital Humanities and understanding it see Miriam Posner's Digital Humanities 201

For getting started marking up texts with TEI see: TEI by Example

Digital Humanities Project Template

Looking to get started with a Digital Humanities project and not sure about what's involved? Check out this Digital Humanities Project Planning Template that lists a number of questions that should be considered when starting a Digital Humanities Project.

Please contact Roger Gillis (roger.gillis@dal.ca) if you have any questions or would like further consultation on your project.