Awesome Digital History

A curated list of awesome things related to digital history.

In the historical sciences and other humanities disciplines, digital tools have become an integral part of everyday academic life. This collection brings together the best publicly accessible tools, source collections and platforms for digital history and related disciplines.

Contents

• Journals
• Primary Sources
  • Archives and Search Engines
  • Newspaper, Books and Magazines
  • Maps
  • Varia
• Data and Statistics
• Encyclopaedias
• Tools
  • Learning
  • Visualization
  • Bibliography and Sources Management
  • Data Collection
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Augmentation
  • Publishing
• Platforms
• DH Centers

Journals

• 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.
• Current Research in Digital History - Annual open-access, peer-reviewed publication of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Primary Sources

Digitized or digital born primary sources.

Archives and Search Engines

• Archives Portal Europe - European archives search engine.
• Internet Archive - Non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
• Europeana - Search engine for European textual and non-textual archival sources.
• Gallica - Digital library of the National Library of France.
• CENDARI - Search engine for libraries containing resources on the Medieval era and World War One.
• Archives Online - Archival search engine for Switzerland.

Newspaper, Books and Magazines

• e-newspaperarchives.ch - Swiss newspapers.
• E-Periodica - Swiss journals.
• Spiegel Online - SPIEGEL archive since 1947.
• impresso - Historical newspaper collections of the Swiss National Library, the National Library of Luxembourg, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Le Temps, the Valais State Archives and the Swiss Economic Archives.
• Delpher - More than 100 million pages from Dutch newspapers, books and magazines.

Maps

• Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection - More than 250,000 maps.
• David Rumsey Map Collection - Over 94,000 maps and related images.

Varia

• Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland - Diplomatic documents of Switzerland.
• e-rara - The platform for digitised prints from Swiss libraries.
• e-manuscripta - Manuscript material from Swiss libraries and archives.
• infoclio.ch Edition projects - A database containing all current historical edition projects in Switzerland.
• MEMOBASE - 70,000 audiovisual documents from 13 Swiss memory institutions.
• COSMOV - COSMOV includes a digital edition of the events of the Zurich summer of 1968.
• Awesome Computer History - An Awesome List of computer history videos, documentaries and related folklore.
• Ad*Access - Over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements covering five product categories - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda - dated between 1911 and 1955.
• Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv - An interactive portal on the history of women's movements in Germany.
• Marxist Internet Archive - Everything you ever wanted to know about Marx (and other important socialists).

Data and Statistics

• histHub - Search engine for all major standadized data APIs.
• HSSO - Historical statistics of Switzerland online.
• timeSTAT Cubes - The Federal Council reports to parliament on income and expenditure for the past years.
• Industriekultur - Swiss national inventory of industry artifacts.
• fxtop.com - Forex rate history since 1953.

Encyclopaedias

• Historical Dictionary of Switzerland - Dictionary on Swiss history.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Encyclopedia on philosophy and related disciplines.

Tools

Learning

• HIST 7370 - Methods and Readings in Digital History by Cameron Blevins at Northeastern University.
• AdFontes - An Introduction to Working with Sources in the Archive.
• Parthenos - Training modules and resources in digital humanities and research infrastructures from PARTHENOS.
• Clio Guide - A handbook on digital resources for the historical sciences.
• Digital Humanities Literacy Guidebook - Overview on the field of Digital History and Digital Humanities.
• UCI Digital History - Overview on the field of Digital History and Digital Humanities.
• Digital History Guide - Introduction to the web for historians—teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts—who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium.
• forText - Learn to explore literature digitally (in German).
• Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education - How to teach digital literacy.

Visualization

• StorylineJS - Tell the story behind the numbers.
• StorymapJS - Maps that tell stories.
• TimelineJS - Easy-to-make, beautiful timelines.
• Gephi - Gephi is the leading visualization and exploration software for all kinds of graphs and networks.
• Palladio - Palladio. Visualize complex historical data with ease.

Bibliography and Sources Management

• Zotero - Free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.
• JabRef - Open source bibliography reference manager.
• Tropy - Research Photo Management.

Data Collection

• Transkribus - Transcribe. Collaborate. Share and benefit from cutting edge research in Handwritten Text Recognition!
• Textgrid - Open source tools and services support humanistic scholars during the entire process of research, especially in digital scholarly editing.
• webrecorder.io - Web archiving service anyone can use for free to save web pages.
• Social Feed Manager - Open source software that harvests social media data and web resources from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo.
• OpenArchive - Making it easy to store, share, and amplify your mobile media while protecting your identity.
• Open EU Data Portal - European Union open data.

Data Analysis

• Open Semantic Search - Free Software for your own Search Engine, Explorer for Discovery of large document collections, Media Monitoring, Text Analytics, Document Analysis & Text Mining platform based on Apache Solr or Elasticsearch open-source enterprise-search and Open Standards for Linked Data, Semantic Web & Linked Open Data integration.
• Data Pen - Framework for humanities researchers to access, explore, and manipulate multidimensional historical data.
• Breve - Visualize and edit tabular data.
• Voyant - Reading and analysis environment for digital texts.
• Lexos - Online tool for text analysis.
• DocFetcher - Open Source desktop search application.

Data Augmentation

• AutoCat - Create simple text classification models online. Provided by the Allen Institute for AI (AI2).

Publishing

• Scalar - Born-digital, open-source, media-rich scholarly publishing that’s as easy as blogging.
• Omeka - Open-source web publishing platform for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits.

Platforms

• Perspectives on History - The newsmagazine of the American Historical Association.
• wethink.hypotheses.org - Collaborative Digital History.
• HSS Digital - Digital scholarship in the history of science initiative.
• Wikipedia - Digital history is the use of digital media to further historical analysis, presentation, and research.

DH Centers

• Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media - Creators of Zotero and other amazing open-source software tools for historians.
• Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History - Research on new digital methods and tools for historical research and teaching.
• Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities
• Humanities + Design a Research Lab at Stanford University

Contribute

Contributions welcome! Read the CONTRIBUTING.md first.

License

To the extent possible under law, Moritz Mähr has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.