Digital Humanities: Tools & Software

Setting up an environment for digital humanities computational work can be time-consuming and difficult. DHbox addresses this problem by streamlining installation processes and providing a digital humanities laboratory in the cloud through simple sign-in via a web browser.

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world but does require significant set-up and skills.

A collaborative tool to share images history across time and space, and place those memories on maps and timelines.

Mukurtu (MOOK-oo-too) is a grassroots project aiming to empower communities to manage, share, preserve, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways.

Allows scholars, students, and curators to tell stories with maps and timelines. It also has add-on tools for Omeka.

Omeka is a free, open source content management system for creating rich narratives or online digital collections that is easy to use. Create online exhibits, projects, and teaching tools and more.

Free platform for generating interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds developed by the Library of Congress.

Open-source blogging software that is free and easy-to-use. Can also be used to build websites with a variety of features, though not quite as versatile and robust as Drupal.

Use a combination of HTML 5, JavaScript and jQuery to build visualizations.

Eloquent JavaScript dives deep into the JavaScript language to show you how to write beautiful, effective code. Author Marijn Haverbeke immerses you in example code from the start, while exercises and full-chapter projects give you hands-on experience with writing your own programs.

N. B. You will need a copy of Adobe Flash Professional to make use of these tutorials.

A basic coding introduction for all ages and skill levels.

This site makes spiffy HTML5
site templates that are: Fully Responsive, Built on intelligent, HTML5 + CSS3, SuperCustomizable, and 100% Free under the Creative Commons.

The basics of Java, an object-oriented programming language.

A guide to using Python coding in relation to data mining.

Stack Exchange is a network of question and answer Web sites on topics in varied fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process.

A language-independent collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers.

Lets you search for whether a work is still under copyright or not.

A clearinghouse for fair use information, including well-researched and industry-endorsed Best Practices guides for Documentary & Web Videos, as well as teaching materials, FAQs, and more. Developed by American University.

Searchable summaries of approximately 170 fair use cases in U.S. courts, updated and maintained by the US Copyright Office.

A guide for how to credit Creative Commons resources.

Gateway to the tools used in sophisticated text analysis and retrieval.

DiRT is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use.

Chronos allows scholars and students to dynamically present historical data in a flexible online environment.

A web widget for visualizing temporal data.

TimelineJS is an open-source tool that enables you to build visually-rich interactive timelines and is available in 40 languages. Created by Northwestern University's Knight Lab.

Timetoast can be used to create interactive timeline in minutes.

Tiki-Toki is web-based software for creating beautiful interactive timelines that you can share on the internet.

D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.

At Gapminder World, you can view preloaded data using their visualization software.

Gephi is a tool for data analysts and scientists keen to explore and understand graphs. Like Photoshop™ but for graph data, the user interacts with the representation, manipulate the structures, shapes and colors to reveal hidden patterns.

Visualize and publish your data as maps, timelines and charts. Host your data tables online. Combine data from multiple people.

Palladio is a web-based platform for the visualization of complex, multi-dimensional data. Visit Humanities+Design to learn more about this NEH funded project.

Prefuse is a set of software tools for creating rich interactive data visualizations. The original prefuse toolkit provides a visualization framework for the Java programming language. The Prefuse Flare toolkit provides visualization and animation tools for ActionScript and the Adobe Flash Player.

Tableau is free software that can allow anyone to connect to a spreadsheet or file and create interactive data visualizations for the web.

Garin Kilpatrick put together a great collection of 10 Twitter analytical and visualization tools including Archivist, Portwiture, MentionMap, Twitonomy, and Tweetstats etc.

An Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.

Voyeur is a web-based text analysis environment. It is designed to be user-friendly, flexible and powerful. Voyeur is part of the Hermeneuti.ca.

Walrus is a tool for interactively visualizing large directed graphs in three-dimensional space. By employing a fisheye-like distortion, it provides a display that simultaneously shows local detail and the global context.

This site, full of links, resources, best practices, and recommendations for oral histories in the digital age is a product of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership project and a collaboration among the Michigan State University Museum; Michigan State University Digital Humanities Center, Matrix; the American Folklife Center (AFC/LOC), the Library of Congress; the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH); the American Folklore Society (AFS); the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries; and the Oral History Association.

This book intended for scholars, librarians, museum and archive professionals, and others with a humanistic background who want to build robust digital projects using the open source content management system Drupal. The first book in the new Coding for Humanists series, which provides an introduction to technologies applicable to digital humanities scholarship, without assuming the reader has prior technical background. Contains a nice comparison of Drupal to other web options, such as Omeka, Wordpress, TEI, etc.

This site makes spiffy HTML5
site templates that are: Fully Responsive, Built on intelligent, HTML5 + CSS3, SuperCustomizable, and 100% Free under the Creative Commons.

A power prototyping tool: just upload your designs and add hotspots to transform your static screens into clickable, interactive prototypes complete with gestures, transitions, and animations.

Create beautiful HTML5 web content. Interactive web content and animations made with Tumult Hype 3 work on desktops, smartphones and iPads. No coding required.

Open-source blogging software that is free and easy-to-use. Can also be used to build websites with a variety of features, though not quite as versatile and robust as Drupal.

UTK students, staff, and faculty may click the link to learn how to obtain ESRI's ArcGIS software suite for your computer.
Students needing a copy of ArcGIS and Extensions, Student Edition should contact the OIT HelpDesk at 974-9900. Please provide your name and UTK email address and specify the ESRI software version you want when calling. You will be emailed instructions about how to acquire a One-Year Education Use Only copy of ArcGIS.
Faculty and staff needing GIS software and technical support can go here.

Cartagen is a vector-based, client-side framework for rendering maps in native HTML 5. Written in JavaScript, it uses the new Canvas element to load mapping data from various sources, including OpenStreetMap.

CARTO transforms layers of geospatial information into data-driven maps that enable analysis and visual discovery of trends and patterns.

Esri Story Maps let you combine authoritative maps with narrative text, images, and multimedia content. They make it easy to harness the power of maps and geography to tell your story.

View satellite imagery, demographic data, and import gps data and spreadsheet data to be mapped.

An open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps.

MapBox Studio allows you to customize map display, and then pull that map into other services. It's a free service that pulls data from OpenStreet Maps.

OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth.

QGIS is a popular open source GIS software program. Use QGIS to create maps and analyze geospatial data.

A GIS project created by the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library.

StoryMapJS is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events. It is a new tool, yet stable in a development environment, and it has a friendly authoring tool from the Knight Lab.

The International Transport Forum Transport Explorer is an interactive tool that allows users to analyse transport data using an animated graphical or spatial interface. Users can view how indicators evolve over time and examine interrelations between indicators. Users can select colours for indicators in map and scatter plot view and create their own "stories" with animated graphs.

The Transport Explorer includes all annual International Transport Forum Statistics from 1970 until today. The ITF Transport Explorer is based on technology developed in cooperation between the OECD and the National Centre for Visual Analytics at Linköping University, Sweden.

A guide for how to credit Creative Commons resources.

The British Library (BL) has released over one million images from 17th, 18th, and 19th century books on Flickr. Equally important, the images and metadata have been released into the public domain.

Although the images and data are available for use and reuse without restriction, BL is following an increasingly common trend among GLAM institutions where attribution is requested (rather than required).

Freesound is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds. Browse, download and share sounds.

Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 376 billion archived web pages. Be sure to check out the Prelinger Archives!

The LOC Flickr collection offers sets of digitized photos: the 1,600 color images from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, 1,500+ images from the George Grantham Bain News Service, selected panoramic photographs, portraits of jazz musicians and personalities, and other photos from the Library of Congress collections that possess these qualities: they have long been popular with visitors to the Library; they have no known restrictions on publication or distribution, and they have high resolution scans.

The Commons has a variety of equipment available for UT students from laptops & scanners to digital audio recorders & camcorders and everything in between. Most of the Commons Equipment is purchased using Student Technology Fees so only students of the University can check out items.

***Bring your UT ID to the Equipment Desk in the Commons South at Hodges Library to checkout equipment.***

Make great videos, easily. Turn ordinary photos and video clips into stunning, HD videos with Animoto's online video maker.

Explain Everything is a unique interactive screencasting whiteboard app. Create and share ideas as videos and more with easy-to-use tools and integrations.

Make your own whiteboard video animations with Sparkol VideoScribe – award-winning video scribing app for PC, Mac and iPad. Free trial available.

Annotation Studio is a suite of collaborative web-based annotation tools currently under development at MIT.

VideoAnt is a web-based video annotation tool for mobile and desktop devices. Use VideoAnt to add annotations, or comments, to web-hosted videos. VideoAnt-annotated videos are called “Ants”.

Divvy up work, hash things out quickly, make big announcements, keep discussions on-topic, store and organize key files and assets, lay out milestones and deadlines, and have regular check-ins to make sure everything’s all right in Basecamp. And it's free for teachers!

GitHub fosters a fast, flexible, and collaborative development process that lets you work on your own or with others. It is often used by software developers to document and manage their agile workflow.

A messaging app for teams: Organize your team conversations in open channels. Make a channel for a project, a topic, a team, or anything—everyone has a transparent view of all that’s going on.

Trello lets you work more collaboratively and get more done. Trello’s boards, lists, and cards enable you to organize and prioritize your projects in a fun, flexible and rewarding way.

"With Redbooth, projects manage themselves.
When collaboration and visibility meet, fewer tasks fall through the cracks. Know what needs to be done, by whom and when."