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 Extraction and Conversion
  • Data Augmentation
  • Publishing
• Podcasts
  • English Casts
  • French Casts
  • German Casts
  • Multilingual Casts
• Platforms
• DH Centers
• Twitter

Journals

• 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.
• 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.

Primary Sources

Digitized or digital born primary sources.

Archives and Search Engines

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

Newspaper, Books and Magazines

• Delpher - More than 100 million pages from Dutch newspapers, books and magazines.
• e-newspaperarchives.ch - Swiss newspapers.
• E-Periodica - Swiss journals.
• 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.
• Le Temps - Archive of Gazette de Lausanne et du Journal de Genève.
• Project Gutenberg - A library of over 60,000 free eBooks.
• Projekt Gutenberg - Contains 10'000 works by over 2'000 authors in German.
• Spiegel Online - SPIEGEL archive since 1947.
• Zefys - Historical German newspapers.

Maps

• David Rumsey Map Collection - Over 94,000 maps and related images.
• OldMapsOnline - Maps, starting in the 17th century.
• Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection - More than 250,000 maps.

Varia

• 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.
• Amtsdruckschriften - Federal Gazette, Administrative Case Law of the Federal Authorities and more documents from the Swiss Federal Archives.
• Awesome Computer History - An Awesome List of computer history videos, documentaries and related folklore.
• COSMOV - COSMOV includes a digital edition of the events of the Zurich summer of 1968.
• Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv - An interactive portal on the history of women's movements in Germany.
• Digithek - A collection of digital finding aids.
• Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland - Diplomatic documents of Switzerland.
• e-codices - Virtual manuscript library of Switzerland containing 2297 manuscripts from 92 different collections.
• e-gs - Online web portal of the ETH Zurich Graphics Collection.
• e-manuscripta - Manuscript material from Swiss libraries and archives.
• e-rara - The platform for digitised prints from Swiss libraries.
• infoclio.ch Edition projects - A database containing all current historical edition projects in Switzerland.
• Marxist Internet Archive - Everything you ever wanted to know about Marx (and other important socialists).
• MEMOBASE - 70,000 audiovisual documents from 13 Swiss memory institutions.
• The Proceedings of the Old Bailey - London's Central Criminal Court, 1674 to 1913.
• Rijksstudio - Browse 667,894 works of art of the Rijksmuseum.
• Women Working 1800-1930

Data and Statistics

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

Encyclopaedias

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

Tools

Learning

• AdFontes - An Introduction to Working with Sources in the Archive.
• Clio Guide - A handbook on digital resources for the historical sciences.
• 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.
• Digital Humanities Literacy Guidebook - Overview on the field of Digital History and Digital Humanities.
• forText - Learn to explore literature digitally (in German).
• Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education - How to teach digital literacy.
• HIST3814o - Methods and Readings in Digital History by Shawn Graham at Carleton University.
• HIST 7370 - Methods and Readings in Digital History by Cameron Blevins at Northeastern University.
• Missing Semester - Useful tools that are not taught in class.
• Parthenos - Training modules and resources in digital humanities and research infrastructures from PARTHENOS.
• UCI Digital History - Overview on the field of Digital History and Digital Humanities.

Visualization

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

Bibliography and Sources Management

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

Data Collection

• OpenArchive - Making it easy to store, share, and amplify your mobile media while protecting your identity.
• Open EU Data Portal - European Union open data.
• Social Feed Manager - Open source software that harvests social media data and web resources from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo.
• 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.

Data Analysis

• Breve - Visualize and edit tabular data.
• Data Pen - Framework for humanities researchers to access, explore, and manipulate multidimensional historical data.
• DocFetcher - Open Source desktop search application.
• Lexos - Online tool for text 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.
• TinEye - Search by image or image section and find where that image appears online.
• Voyant - Reading and analysis environment for digital texts.

Data Extraction and Conversion

• ImageMagick - Image conversion tool.
• MuPDF - PDF viewer and converter.
• OCRmyPDF - OCR toolkit.
• Poppler - PDF toolkit.
• QPDF - PDF toolkit.

Data Augmentation

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

Publishing

• Manifold - Scholarly publishing and collaborative and social reading platform.
• Omeka - Open-source web publishing platform for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits.

Podcasts

English Casts

• 15past15 - History podcast of the University of Zurich.
• Backstory - Weekly podcast covering historical topics in the US.
• Revisionist History - Something from the past reinterpreted: an event, a person, an idea.
• Stuff You Missed in History Class - Unknown historical topics.
• You're Dead To Me - The history podcast for people who do not like history.

French Casts

• Histoire Vivante - Rediscover a key fact in contemporary history, weekly.

German Casts

• Zeitblende - Contemporary witnesses, experts and those affected describe their memories of historical events.

Multilingual Casts

• Cliocast - Podcast series of discussions with historians about their new books.
• Podcast des Historischen Instituts der Universität Bern - Current topics in historical science.

Platforms

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

DH Centers

• Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities
• Humanities + Design a Research Lab at Stanford University
• 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.

Twitter

• Digital History by @moritzmaehr
• Digital Humanities by @GrandjeanMartin
• Digital Humanities by @normanlippert

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.