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Syracuse University Libraries

Digital Humanities Resources: Tools

Tools for Getting Started

This page provides tools for beginners to start a Digital Humanities project. There are non-coding options which could be useful for getting started, depending on the level of complexity of the project or the researcher's desire for customizability. If you would like to step into coding, there are also novice-friendly tutorials, some of which are specific to Digital Humanities projects. All of these resources provide skills that could be used on a specific project or simply to improve your digital skills. As the existence of the DH field shows, STEM fields and the Humanities often need each other to seek out answers for difficult questions. This TED Talk covers this fascinating subject if you are interested:

Handy Analytics Tools (No Programming Needed)

Data Basic

A suite of easy-to-use web tools for beginners that introduce concepts of working with data.

Voyant Tools

Simple text analysis.

Tableau Public

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

SimplyAnalytics

A web-based data visualization platform for creating thematic maps and reports with demographic and socio-economic data of the United States. Four Simultaneous users.

Dandelion API

An online text analysis platform which provides services such as Text Similarity Analysis, Entity Extraction, and Text Classification. An example of a suite/platform available (for a fee if you are doing anything beyond basic) with many techniques. 

Tutorials for Programming Tools

The Programming Historian

Novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching.

The JavaScripting English Major

This free, novice-friendly tutorial introduces prospective digital humanists to basic JavaScript tools through hands-on projects using literary text repositories.

Text Mining with R

Introduction to doing sentiment analysis, word and document frequency analysis, and topic modeling with the tidytext R package.

GIS in R

Tutorials designed for users with some familiarity with R, but require no knowledge of spatial analysis. 

GIS in Python

Tutorial materials for managing GIS data with Python.

Humanities Programming

Teaching command line,html, and python basics for humanists.