DH TOOLS - A PANORAMIC OVERVIEW
Because digital research projects involve the transformation of objects of scholarly interest into electronic form for specialized, enhanced, or remote analysis the development of software is an intrinsic part of this research.
The current number of digital tools now available for use in the Digital Humanities (DH) is quite extensive. Many DH projects involve a combination of visual, spatial, temporal, quantitative and qualitative representations. Some tools were made specifically for DH and other were re-purposed for Humanities research. An exhaustive listing of these tools requires updating quite often, as DH evolves, and this challenge is not negligible.
In their 2020 article, “Absorbing DiRT: Tool Directories in the Digital Age,” Kaitly Grant et al provide a detailed account about the challenges faced by tool discovery portals:
“sustainability has proven to be the most intractable. (…) Tool development, in general, has not been considered a “scholarly” activity and often suffers from a lack of ongoing support (Ramsay and Rockwell, [Chapter 5 in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2012]). This is even more the case for the development and maintenance of tool directories, which require a great deal of time and some degree of curation, but do not align well to existing frameworks for incentivizing and rewarding work in a scholarly context. However, when tool discovery portals are no longer maintained, it can lead to a loss of Digital Humanities knowledge and history if the data is not, at the very least, archived."
This page includes a selection of links to several portals of DH tools (with varying scopes of information), as well as a very small sampling of articles and books on the evaluation and assessment of DH tools.
Within field-specific pages of this guide, a list of tools relating to the particular field is included.
PORTALS
Awesome Digital Humanities. A curated list of tools, resources, and services supporting the Digital Humanities. This project is maintained by dh-tech.
Digital Arts and Humanities (DARTH) (Harvard University). Choosing Digital Methods and Tools. DARTH provides software engineering, consultation, and instruction to support faculty digital research initiatives. We work at all stages of the research data lifecycle, but particularly excel at modeling complex humanities data, helping organize and analyze data, and building innovative web platforms that showcase and visualize the results. In addition, DARTH sponsors lectures, workshops, and symposia related to emerging trends in technology for artistic creation and scholarship.
Digital Humanities Toolkit. (Richard Dennis (University of Copenhagen). "I created this repository to provide the DH Community a compilation of free, open-source tools for creating and developing digital humanities projects, along with relevant tutorials and examples of projects completed with those tools. A companion guide, Guide for Research Data Management Trainers Toolkit, created by Dennis may also be of interest.
Digital Humanities Tools (Liu, Alan, University of California, Santa Barbara). Online or downloadable tools that are free, free to students, or have generous trial periods without tight usage constraints, watermarks, or other spoilers. Bias toward tools that can be run online or installed on a personal computer without needing an institutional server. (Also see Other Tool Lists).
Digital Humanities - Types of Tools (New York University). A Selection of Digital Humanities Tools grouped by type.
Research Data Services (RSD) (University of Wisconsin, Madison (2009 to the present). RDS is led by the Libraries and partners with Research Cyberinfrastructure, the Data Science Hub, Ebling Library, and the Map Library to provide our services. We provide holistic support infrastructure for research data management and sharing needs at UW-Madison and seek to improve the reproducibility, reusability, and long-term impact of campus research efforts. See: DH Tools Part 1: Off-the-Shelf, and DH Tools Part 2: Moving Computationally.
Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR 3). A large number of curated tool lists. See: Curated Tool lists.
DH TOOLS EVALUATED - A Sampling of books
Critical Digital Humanities by Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 9780252042270Publication Date: 2019Can established humanities methods coexist with computational thinking? It is one of the major questions in humanities research today, as scholars increasingly adopt sophisticated data science for their work. James E. Dobson explores the opportunities and complications faced by humanists in this new era. Though the study and interpretation of texts alongside sophisticated computational tools can serve scholarship, these methods cannot replace existing frameworks. As Dobson shows, ideas of scientific validity cannot easily nor should be adapted for humanities research because digital humanities, unlike science, lack a leading-edge horizon charting the frontiers of inquiry. Instead, the methods of digital humanities require a constant rereading. At the same time, suspicious and critical readings of digital methodologies make it unwise for scholars to defer to computational methods. Humanists must examine the tools--including the assumptions that went into the codes and algorithms--and questions surrounding their own use of digital technology in research. Insightful and forward thinking, Critical Digital Humanities lays out a new path of humanistic inquiry that merges critical theory and computational science.
Interdisciplining Digital Humanities by Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 9780472900138Publication Date: 2015Interdisciplining Digital Humanities sorts through definitions and patterns of practice over roughly sixty-five years of work, providing an overview for specialists and a general audience alike. It is the only book that tests the widespread claim that Digital Humanities is interdisciplinary. By examining the boundary work of constructing, expanding, and sustaining a new field, it depicts both the ways this new field is being situated within individual domains and dynamic cross-fertilizations that are fostering new relationships across academic boundaries. It also accounts for digital reinvigorations of "public humanities" in cultural heritage institutions of museums, archives, libraries, and community forums.
Laying the Foundation - Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries by Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 1612494498Publication Date: 2016Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries examines the library's role in the development, implementation, and instruction of successful digital humanities projects. It pays special attention to the critical role of librarians in building sustainable programs. It also examines how libraries can support the use of digital scholarship tools and techniques in undergraduate education. Academic libraries are nexuses of research and technology; as such, they provide fertile ground for cultivating and curating digital scholarship. However, adding digital humanities to library service models requires a clear understanding of the resources and skills required. Integrating digital scholarship into existing models calls for a reimagining of the roles of libraries and librarians. In many cases, these reimagined roles call for expanded responsibilities, often in the areas of collaborative instruction and digital asset management, and in turn these expanded responsibilities can strain already stretched resources.Laying the Foundation provides practical solutions to the challenges of successfully incorporating digital humanities programs into existing library services. Collectively, its authors argue that librarians are critical resources for teaching digital humanities to undergraduate students and that libraries are essential for publishing, preserving, and making accessible digital scholarship.
Small Tech by Call Number: Available OnlineISBN: 0816653852Publication Date: 2008-01-01Experts examine the ways digital tools affect social and cultural experience.
DH TOOLS EVALUATED - A Sampling of articles
Research on the evaluation and assessment of DH tools is quite extensive and it usually appears as an intrinsic part of field specific analyses (e.g., history, media studies, teaching, to name just a few). The three most useful databases for the discovery of such research are: JSTOR, Project Muse, and Proquest.
Use key word search - title: digital humanities tools.
The listing below provides a minute sampling of research examples relating to the conversations about DH tools as essential components of DH projects.
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Crafton, D., & Ohmer, S. (2017). Editors' Foreword: Digital Tools and Networks. The Moving Image 17(2), vii-x. "Media scholars, specialists, and those of us who engage with the materiality of film, television, and old and new media in our lives have been aware for a long time of the digitization of our endeavors. Some of us use rapidly evolving tools to teach and write; some of us use them mainly to access sources; some of us innovate those tools and curate the sources; some of us are still, figuratively speaking, trying to figure out the TV remote. This special issue of The Moving Image addresses all these constituencies."
Du, J., Yuen, C., Slaughter, M., & Chen, A. T. (2021). Perceived usability and experience with digital tools in the context of digital humanities research. American Society for Information Science and Technology. Proceedings of the ...ASIST Annual Meeting, 58(1), 435-439. "This paper examines differences in the user feedback of scholars with varied experience with digital tools. As part of a usability study of a historical digital collection, our team conducted semi-structured interviews with scholars with varying backgrounds. We categorized the sample into two groups, one with significant experience and one with little experience in using digital technology. Qualitative analysis of the interview data showed that users generally provided similar feedback. However, there were instances in which those with significant experience provided more design suggestions, and those with less experience expressed confusion and provided more feedback on website content. Drawing upon our findings, we provide recommendations for the usability evaluation of historical digital collections."
Gonzalez-Perez, Cesar. 2020. "Editorial for the Special Issue on “Digital Humanities”" Information 11, no. 7: 359. " Digital humanities are often described in terms of humanistic work being carried out with the aid of digital tools, usually computer-based. Other disciplinary fields in, for example biology or economy, went through a digital turn a few years or decades ago. Now, many areas of the humanities are going the same way. This is especially so of literary studies, linguistics, and archaeology. Many researchers in the humanities regularly carry out their work in information- and computing-intensive settings, employing techniques and tools that so far have been limited to software engineers or computer scientists. However, there is little consensus on what digital humanities actually are, whether they constitute a new discipline or just a passing fad, or how they change the nature of humanistic enquiry. / In this setting, the role of information is especially relevant. As with any other field of study, researchers in the humanities produce large amounts of information that is generated, stored, manipulated, communicated, and visualised through digital means. This Special Issue attempts to contribute to a better understanding of digital humanities by focusing on the role that information plays in humanistic research and, specifically, how humanistic knowledge is generated, communicated, used, and institutionalised through information-intensive tools, techniques, and methods."
Kee, K. F., Hayes, C., Gesing, S., Rugg, A., Bradley, S., Brandt, S. R., . . . Dombrowski, Q. (2023). "Science gateways and the humanities: An exploratory study of their rare partnership." Computing in Science & Engineering, 25(1), 25-33. "Researchers and educators in humanities such as computational linguists, digital humanists, and those doing historical reconstructions are increasingly heavy users of computational and/or data resources. Many know about activities, working groups, and initiatives around the findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR) principles and are a driving force for improving the sharing of data and software. However, it seems humanities researchers are less aware of the science gateways community and the end-to-end solutions that science gateways could provide, therefore lacking a driving force for adoption of this technology. This small-scale exploratory study will clarify some of the challenges and needs faced by computational researchers in the humanities that may explain their relatively low participation in the science gateways community. For this paper, we present the results of 19 interviews with seven women, 11 men, and one nonbinary individual from seven states and DC in the United States with a range of professional backgrounds and roles."
Swafford, J. (2016). "Messy Data and Faulty Tools." In M. K. Gold & L. F. Klein (Eds.), Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (pp. 556–558). University of Minnesota Press. "With our newfound access to unprecedented levels of data, we can ask questions we could not have dreamed of twenty years ago and better answer questions that would previously have taken scholars a lifetime to address: by examining thousands or millions of texts, we can learn about the GreatUnread, look for changes in periodicals through topic modeling, and examine changes in poetic meter over the centuries. However, unless we focus more on creating quality-control systems for our work, werun the risk of drawing erroneous conclusions based on messy data and faulty tools / (…) Although digital humanities scholars occasionally post their code online, members of our field are still learning to embrace the open-source philosophy of reviewing each other’s code and making suggestions for improvement. As a result, scholars either consult the DiRT directory or informally recommend tools on Twitter. As useful as these systems are, they do not have the rigor that peer review should provide. Certainly a peer-review system for tools presents serious challenges."
Tracy, D.G. (2016). "Assessing Digital Humanities Tools: Use of Scalar at a Research University." portal: Libraries and the Academy 16(1), 163-189. "As librarians increasingly support digital publication platforms, they must also understand the user experience of these tools. This case study assesses use of Scalar, a digital humanities publishing platform for media-rich projects, at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Based on a survey, interviews, and content analysis, the study highlights the platform’s usability, its functionality, and its successes and failures in meeting user expectations. The media upload process, image annotation, and aesthetics factored into user issues. Writing pedagogy also emerged as an important consideration. Results suggest lessons for digital literacy instruction, as well as how and when Scalar might serve patrons’ publishing needs."