“Far too much work in educational technology starts with tools, when what we need to start with is humans.” So start with the humans in the classes, the teaching goals, the questions to investigate. The very partial list of digital tools below may help. The list includes tools that the people at the DSL have used or find useful. There are many other lists of tools out there. We recommend Alan Liu’s DH Toychest and DiRT (Digital Research Tools).
Authoring & Content Management Systems
- Scalar: Enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required.
- Twine: Allows users to compose interactive, nonlinear stories. Story writing takes the form of a flow chart.
- WordPress: A widely used content management system for creating blogs and website.
Exhibits & Collections
- Omeka: Hosts collections, research, and exhibits. Requires users to provide metadata for archived objects. This tool could be useful in leading students to organize, categorize, and describe sources for a research project, or as an end itself.
Text Mining, Encoding, and Analysis
- SameDiff: Compares two or more text files and tells you how similar or different they are. This tool could be an effective way to introduce more complex tools such as Voyant to undergrads. It is simple, has an inviting interface, and provides engaging sample texts such as “Trump’s speeches,” and “Beyoncé’s lyrics”
- SameDiff Activity Guide: A lesson plan to use with SameDiff. Students learn that comparing texts is a powerful analytical tool and that algorithmic analysis can reveal interesting information.
- Voyant Tools: Allows users to perform basic text mining functions using a simple GUI (graphical user interface). The provided functions make it possible to quickly extract characteristics from a text or set of texts and discover themes.
- Poem Viewer: Visualizes poems in support of close reading. This tool focuses on phonetics, providing options for visualizing phonetic types and sound frequency, for example.
- MALLET: A text mining package for natural language processing, clustering, topic modeling, and other machine learning applications to text.
- Stanford’s Named Entity Recognizer: Tags the “named entities” within a text chosen by the user. The user can then turn the tagged text into lists of names. Named entities include person names, locations, organizations, and more.
- Google NGram Viewer: Mines the Google Book database to provide word frequency graphs for words and phrases chosen by the user. User also specify the corpus and the time frame to be mined. Users can use advanced commands to manipulate data and visualization.
- Open Refine: Cleans and transforms format of messy data.
Visualization & Timelines
- Sentiment Viz: Estimates and visualizes sentiment (attitudes prompted by feeling) in tweets. The program often makes mistakes in estimating sentiment, but analyzing its success and its failure with students could be an effective way to approach textual analysis, especially in consideration of writers’ mood and tone.
- Gephi: More advanced with a bit of a learning curve, Gephi allows you to visualize a network of data points and links between individuals without the limitations of movement based on location or linear time. Potentially useful for those who may wish to research biographical data for particular slaves in order to visualize links between several runaway slaves.
- Google Fusion Tables: A web application for data visualization (such as charts, maps, and network graphs)
- Timeline JS: Allows users to easily make attractive timelines.
- Tiki-Toki: Allows users to create interactive timelines with images and media, while situating these images in relation to significant historical events of the period.
Mapping
- History Pin: Allows users to attach historical events to locations on a map. The website also allows users to curate their own collection of locations that others may peruse and explore using the map.
- StoryMap: Allows users to create an interactive map with images and text layers you create based on historical locations. StoryMap can link to an Instagram account and create points on your map based on geo-location references.
- Google Maps: Can be used to create your own maps of relevant locations, and add images and other media to those locations.
Annotation & Social Reading
- ThingLink: Allows users to annotate images. This tool could be useful in teaching visual analysis.
- Annotation Studio: Provides a suite of collaborative web-based annotation tools.
- Genius: A popular platform to share and annotate lyrics that is used for many different kinds of texts (like this 1630 Puritan sermon)
- Social Book: A social reading platform that allows readers to add their own commentary to texts, share these ideas with others, follow others’ comments, and create communities of interactive reader/writers. See it in action here.
- CommentPress: A WordPress plugin that lets users comment in the margins of a text. Can be used to annotate and workshop texts socially.
- A.nnotate: Allows users to annotate images.