Subject and Course Guides: Digital Humanities: Tools & Tutorials

Tools: General

arts-humanities.net: Tools
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This list, produced by arts-humanities.net, is a catalogue of software tools used at different stages of the research lifecycle in the arts and humanities. Tools are selected from among those used for projects within the site's database. The list is updated regularly as new tools are developed/used.
Digital Humanities Resources for Student Project-Building
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Guides, tools, and other resources for practical work in the digital humanities gathered for his students by Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara. This selection is not intended to be comprehensive and is under continual development. Selections are biased toward free tools or tools with generous trial periods available for student use.
Wired Humanities Projects: Tools and Training
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This page lists open-source tools created by University of Oregon's Wired Humanities Projects for their Distance Research Environment. Tool functions vary from enabling collaboration to assisting with markup and text mining.

Content Management

Collex
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Collex is an open-source collections- and exhibits-builder which is both hosted and used by NINES. It is designed to aid humanities scholars working in digital collections or within federated research environments. It enables users to collect, tag, analyze, and annotate digital texts and images; produce interlinked online exhibits; and share collections and exhibits with students and colleagues.
CONTENTdm
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Digital asset management for libraries
Drupal
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Drupal is a web-based content management system. It is able to support a variety of websites ranging from personal blogs to corporate brochures and large community-driven websites. Text and pointers to other kinds of content are stored in a database, dynamically retrieved and composed, and presented in response to user (browser) requests.
Drupal for Humanists
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Drupal for Humanists is an online publication-in-process which serves as an introduction and manual for the Drupal content management system. It is written so as to be particularly aimed at humanists who want to learn Drupal. The website includes introductory materials; specific case studies; a list of examples of online humanities projects which demonstrate the capabilities of Drupal; a list of Drupal modules which might be especially interesting to/useful for humanists; and a blog containing updates, thoughts, and tips contributed by the authors as well as by guest bloggers. Drupal for Humanists will eventually be available in print as an on-demand publication.
Fedora Commons Repository
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FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture) was developed as an architecture for storing, managing, and accessing digital content in the form of digital objects. The Fedora Repository Project (or Fedora) implements this architecture in an open-source data repository system. Fedora also offers supporting services such as search, messaging, administrative clients, and more, in addition to features supporting the preservation of digital content.
VisualEyes
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VisualEyes is web-based tool developed at the University of Virginia to weave images, maps, charts, video and data into interactive and dynamic visualizations. It is freely available for academic and non-profit use. The VisualEyes website includes examples of previous projects, tutorials, and a project tool interface for creating projects.

Metadata

Metadata is sometimes defined as "data about data." It can be used to describe characteristics of a document, such as title, author, or date, in a format which can be read and processed by computers. Sometimes metadata can also provide information about the way a document is structured.

The resources in this box provide information about some of the different standards for creating metadata, and how to choose the best option(s) for your project:

[Choosing a Metadata Standard...]
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This handout from Indiana University Libraries provides brief descriptions of various metadata standards with examples and links to the official documentation. It also, most helpful, provides recommendations as to the type of projects most appropriate for each schema.
[Open Metadata Registry]
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The Open Metadata Registry provides a space for users to identify, declare and publish schemas, schemes, and Application Profiles--essentially, different standards for encoding metadata. It also allows users to map relationships between the elements of different metadata schemas.
Dublin Core (DC) Schema
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The basic metadata schema. Dublin Core is built on the idea of "core metadata" that could provide a simple, easy-to-create description of electronic resources. It uses 15 elements such as Title, Subject, Description, Creator, etc.
Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Schema
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EAD is a metadata standard intended to be used for finding aids, inventories or guides used to provide information about archive and manuscript collections in place of a traditional library catalog.
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
Visual Resources Association (VRA) Core
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VRA Core is a metadata standard intended for visual, cultural objects which require a detailed level of information about time period, style, etc. VRA can accommodate general information about a resource in addition to information about available representations/images.

Courses in Digital Humanities

Academic departments of all kinds are beginning to incorporate DH into their curricula. Check out these links to see summaries and syllabi, including assignments and readings, for DH-related courses being offered worldwide.

[Series] Declassified: Digital Humanities
This blog posting is a discussion and comparison of syllabi from DH courses at Indiana University-Bloomington and the Pratt Institute School of Information & Library Science.
Born-Digital Materials: Theory and Practice
UVA Rare Book School. An introduction to preserving and providing access to "born-digital" cultural heritage and archival materials.
Digitizing the Cultural Record
UVA Rare Book School. Course on scholarly, theoretical, institutional, and practical issues of cultural heritage digitization.
Electronic Texts in XML
UVA Rare Book School. A continuation of XML in Action which intends to further develop practical skills for using TEI, XML datasets and stylesheets.
Introduction to Digital Humanities
Emory University. A course designed to introduce students to concepts and methods in DH and critical evaluation of digital scholarship, and to foster collaboration in digital projects.
XML in Action: Creating TEI Texts.
UVA Rare Book School. Course exploring creation, preservation, and use of electronic texts and multimedia in the humanities, with a special focus on Special Collections.
Zotero DH Education Group: DHSyllabi
This Zotero group collects a range of syllabi from DH and DH-related courses offered as early as 2003 at a range of universities in the US and Canada. Over 300 have been posted so far.

Tutorials: Web Design & Programming

This box contains tutorials on topics related to web design and computer programming:

CodeAcademy
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Codeacademy is a free, interactive resource designed to introduce users to programming basics. It includes a series of courses as well as labs in which users can practice their coding skills and create working programs. As of January 2012, the site primarily offers Javascript courses, with more languages to come; Codeacademy Labs additionally supports the languages Ruby and Python.
Greenfoot
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Greenfoot is digital, interactive software designed to assist users in learning the Java programming language through both traditional, text-based coding and visualization aids. The website's documentation section includes tutorials and other reference for using the Greenfoot software. The software is designed to allow an easy transition to more-advanced programming environments such as BlueJ and other professional tools.
Introduction to Computer Science & Programming
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This course, offered through MIT OpenCourseWare, is aimed at students with little-to-no programming experience. It is intended to provide students with an understanding of basic programming concepts, using the Python programming language. The online course includes video lectures, a series of assignments, and course exams with solutions.
Omeka
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Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions.
thenewboston
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This site provides free video tutorials covering a variety of topics including general computer science, various Adobe software programs, web design tools such as HTML/XHTML and CSS, programming for iPhone, and programming languages including C, C++, Java, PHP, Python, VisualBasic and more.
Treehouse
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Treehouse aims "to teach Web Design, Web Development and iOS, to everyone in the World who wants to learn." Its courses are based primarily on video tutorials, most of which are freely available. Users earn badges by successfully completing courses in specific subject areas.

Tools: Working With Text

Juxta
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Hosted by NINES, Juxta is an open-source, cross-platform tool for comparing and collating multiple witnesses to a single textual work. The software allows users to set any of the witnesses as the base text, to add or remove witness texts, to switch the base text at will, to annotate comparisons revealed by Juxta, and to save all results.
MALLET
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MALLET (MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit) is a package for natural language processing, document classification, clustering, topic modeling, information extraction, and other machine learning applications to text. It includes a sophisticated set of tools, as well as routines for transforming text documents into numerical formats for more-efficient processing.
MONK
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MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) is a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study. It provides a base collection of texts, along with tools to enable literary research through the discovery, exploration, and visualization of patterns. Users typically work with predefined toolsets, which they can apply to worksets of texts selected from MONK's collection.
PhiloLogic
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PhiloLogic is a full-text search, retrieval and analysis tool which provides sophisticated searching of a wide variety of large encoded databases on the World Wide Web. Its functions were originally designed, and continue to be used, for scholarly research in databases of primary literary, religious, philosophical, and historical texts.
Scripto
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Developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Scripto is a free, open-source program intended to facilitate crowdsourced transcription projects. It is based on the MediaWiki platform, and can support multiple user contributions and editing when combined with content management systems such as Omeka, WordPress, and Drupal. Scripto can be used to transcribe any kind of file provided that content, and not format, is the emphasis of the final product.
TAPoR
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TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) is a portal which allows users to track digital texts which they want to study (either on the web or uploaded to the portal), learn about and explore various text analysis tools, and then run these tools on their texts to produce different types of analyses. It provides a large variety of tools and texts with which users may experiment.
TextGrid
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The joint project TextGrid aims to support access to and exchange of data in the arts and humanities by means of modern information technology (the grid). It works to provide services and tools for researchers independently of data format, location and software. The TextGridLab includes XML text/image editors, dictionary search, workflow management, and more. Note that some areas of the site, including the navigation menu, are in German.
T-PEN
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T-PEN (Transcription for Paleographical and Editorial Notation) is a web-based tool designed to assist users in working with and transcribing manuscript images. T-PEN has negotiated access to 3,000+ manuscripts; users can also add their own images for which they have research rights. One of the tool's most unique features is that it allows users to view images and produce line-by-line, encoded transcriptions within a single interface, reducing the risk of transcription errors.

For more information about T-PEN and how it works, see the walkthrough on the T-PEN website or click here.

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Digital Humanities: Tools & Tutorials

Tools: General

Content Management

Metadata

Courses in Digital Humanities

Tutorials: Web Design & Programming

Tools: Working With Text

Locations

Richard J. Daley Library

Library of the Health Sciences-Chicago

Library of the Health Sciences-Peoria

Crawford Library of the Health Sciences-Rockford

Library of the Health Sciences-Urbana