Digital Initiatives Centre: PRACTICING: tools, tutorials, workshops, best practices

Project Bamboo is currently piloting a directory of tools, services, and collections that can facilitate digital research. This evolution of Lisa Spiro's DiRT wiki includes new ways of browsing and commenting on the entries.

This web site is designed to be a starting place, an entryway for scholars interested in beginning to explore the possibilities for digital tools, programs, and methods to empower and enhance their scholarship in the humanities. These essays and links are only a brief glimpse into the vast field of potential in the digital humanities, but we hope that they point outward to the field’s many possibilities.

Voyeur is a web-based text analysis environment. It is designed to be user-friendly, flexible and powerful. Voyeur is part of the Hermeneuti.ca, a collaborative project to develop and theorize text analysis tools and text analysis rhetoric. Extensive documentation on Voyeur is available at http://hermeneuti.ca/voyeur.

The Versioning Machine (VM) is a framework and an interface for displaying multiple versions of text encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. While the VM provides for features typically found in critical editions, such as annotation and introductory material, it also takes advantage of the opportunities afforded by electronic publication to allow for the comparison of diplomatic versions of witnesses, and the ability to easily compare an image of the manuscript with a diplomatic version. The Versioning Machine is also a tool for textual editors, providing an environment that allows editors to immediately see the consequences of their editorial decisions. The Versioning Machine can be used locally on a Mac or a PC, or it can be mounted on the WWW for public access.

R is a powerful programing language for statistical analysis and visualization that can be broadly used for many applications in the digital humanities. This tutorial introduces the R environment, describes data structures in R and ways to format data about literary texts for statistical analysis, and provides practical examples of ways to use R to answer questions about literature. These notes are from a hands-on workshop led by Jeff Rydberg-Cox at THATCamp Kansas in September 2011.

A beginner's hands-on guide to practical data mining, collective intelligence, and building recommendation systems using Python. By Ron Zacharski.

A list of tools for text and data-mining. (Compiled by Ron Zacharski for his text-mining workshop at the University of Kansas, March 2011.)

A list of several free chart and graph tools.

Gather, visualize and share your data online. For help see this video tutorial on using Fusion Tables.