Software for Digital Humanities
As users, creators, and critics, digital humanists engage with digital tools in order to experiment, research, teach, play and publish. Below are some of the tools humanists at Northwestern are using—most are free and easy to begin working with, some are hosted and supported by Northwestern, and all come highly recommended.
Archives + Exhibits
- Mukurtu
A free, mobile, and open source platform built with and for Indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage that respects and enacts cultural protocols.
- Omeka
Provides open-source web publishing platforms for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits.
- Reclaim Hosting
Provides affordable web-hosting that faculty and students own and control. Includes a free website domain name, great user support, and one-click install of a number of digital humanities platforms.
- Scalar
A free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital, multimodal scholarship online, enabling users to assemble media and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of interactive ways.
- Wax
A minimal computing project for producing digital exhibitions focused on longevity, low costs, and flexibility. Our underlying technology is made to learn and to teach, and can produce beautifully rendered, high-quality image collections and scholarly exhibits.
- WordPress
A massively popular open source software which you can use to easily create a beautiful website, blog, or app.
Maps + Data Visualization
- ArcGIS Online
A tool for making interactive web maps. Northwestern University Libraries offers GIS support to affiliated students, faculty and staff.
- Palladio
A web-based tool for visualizing complex historical data with ease using maps, network graphs, and other forms of reading and analyzing data.
- StoryMapJS
A free tool to help you tell location-based stories on the web that can include images, videos, text, and more.
- TimelineJS
An open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines. Beginners can create a timeline using nothing more than a Google spreadsheet.
Research Tools
- Atlas.ti
A qualitative data analysis package, Atlas.ti helps researchers to organize and analyze complex textual and multimedia data. The software allows users to classify, sort and arrange thousands of pieces of information, accommodating a wide range of research methods.
- Conifer
A web archiving service that creates an interactive copy of any web page that you browse, including content revealed by your interactions such as playing video and audio, scrolling, clicking buttons, and so forth.
- Documenting the Now
Documenting the Now responds to the public's use of social media for chronicling historically significant events as well as demand from scholars, students, and archivists, among others, seeking a user-friendly means of collecting and preserving this type of digital content.
- Tropy
Take control of your research photos with Tropy, a tool that shortens the path from finding archival sources to writing about them. Spend more time using your research photos, and less time searching for them.
- Zotero
A free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.
Text + Data Analysis
- AntConc
A freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis.
- Digital Scholar Lab
Gale Digital Scholar Lab equips students and scholars with text and data mining resources, visualization tools, and methodology suggestions. The incremental process of Build, Clean, and Analyze supports newcomers and experienced users alike as they interpret both Gale Primary Sources and their own documents.
- OpenRefine
A powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data.
- Tableau Public
A free platform to publicly share and explore data visualizations online.
- TDM Studio
A tool to mine large volumes of published content from the millions of pages of newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, dissertations, and other publications provided to the Northwestern Community through subscriptions to contemporary and historical ProQuest databases. Connect your own rights-cleared data with ProQuest content.
A web-based text reading and analysis environment. It is a scholarly project that is designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practices for digital humanities students and scholars as well as for the general public.