Digital Scholarship Resources

Digital Scholarship at the Main Library offers consultation and instruction, with a focus on:

  • Quantitative approaches to texts, corpora building/analysis, language variation and change
  • Best practices for working with, organizing, and preserving your humanities data
  • Text encoding and digital scholarly editing

The Data Cooperative also helps with digital humanities project management, as well as connecting you to other related services, including: 

 

Software and tutorials

Commonly used software (all free to use)

  • OpenRefine - Open-source text and data cleaning software 
  • Voyant Tools - web-based text reading and analysis environment, designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practices both at a distance and close up. 
  • AntConc - Free-to-use concordance software for analyzing collections of language at scale 
  • Collection Builder - Open-source website builder for creating digital collection and exhibition websites based on metadata and powered by modern static web technology
  • Gephi - Open-source software for generating network visualizations
  • GeoBrowser - extract geocoded data, including location names and/or addresses (individually or in bulk, via reconciliation services)

Tutorials

Tons of data already exist and are ready for your analysis, and they live in all sorts of places. The Libraries list of databases is a great place to get started, as we offer access to lots of databases with primary and secondary sources: https://libguides.library.arizona.edu/az.php. Tips:

  • Search for "ProQuest", or "Gale" to get the full extent of some of our resources
  • Adam Matthews Digital Explorer is also a rich source!
  • Try your keywords too.

Another rich source is the The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/), which often offers OCRed material printed before the mid-1920s, and sometimes full text images are also available for download too. Look around here.

We are also members of HathiTrust, which offers a wide view of the history of printed text, primarily in English, but also in German, French, Spanish, and Russian, among over 400 other languages. HathiTrust offers both fictional and non-ficitonal writing, from early novels to present-day works, and a very robust collection of government documents from their partner institutions. 

Additional useful resources