Digital Humanities at Carolina: Projects and Tools

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has created an incredible array of digital projects. It is usually easier to join a project already in progress than to start one from scratch. Before you embark on a new project, consider how that project might connect to existing work. If you're interested in discovering digital tools for a particular a humanities project, the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) project is a great place to start.

Carolina Digital Humanities Projects
A collection of projects organized by the Digital Innovation Lab

Library Data Services Project Gallery
A selection of projects supported by Library Data Services

Digital Collections Projects
A collection of projects organized by the University Libraries

Scalar
A free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. 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.

Neatline
A suite of add-on tools for Omeka, Neatline allows scholars, students, and curators to tell stories with maps and timelines.

Viewshare
A free platform for generating and customizing views (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow users to experience your digital collections.

Digital Research Tools (DiRT)
DiRT offers a comprehensive and up-to-date collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. This makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.

Google Refine
A tool for working with data, cleaning up data, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases.

XML
eXtensible Markup Language. A markup language designed to store and transport data. It's easy to learn, and tags can be customized by the user.

Google Drive
A free web-based tool for storing, accessing and sharing files.

Trello
A free, web-based project management application which helps you keep track of and organize tasks.

Zotero
A free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials

Evernote
A suite of software and services designed for notetaking and archiving.

Omeka
A project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Omeka's Showcase includes projects powered by Omeka. 

Manifold
An intuitive, collaborative, open-source platform for scholarly publishing with iterative texts, annotation tools, rich media support, and a robust community dialogue. 

Curatescape
a web and mobile app framework for publishing location-based content using Omeka.

WordPress
A free and open source blogging tool and content management system, whose flexibility as a digital humanities tool stems from its extensive library of plugins.

Mukurtu
A grassroots project aiming to empower communities to manage, share, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways.

Prospect
A free, open-source data curation and visualization plugin for Wordpress, developed by the Digital Innovation Lab at UNC.

Tumblr
A blogging and social networking website.

Commentpress
An open source theme and plugin for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text.

Drupal
Drupal is a free, open source software package that allows you to easily organize, manage and publish your content, with an endless variety of customization.

Drupal for Humanists
A guide geared specifically at humanists that details how to shape Drupal core and its community-developed "modules" into web environments that are highly customized for use in the humanities, but don't require code-writing expertise to develop or maintain.

Mbira (under development)
An open-source platform for creating, managing, and sustaining location-based and mobile cultural heritage experiences.

Vega (under development)
An open-source platform that will provide publishers and authors with the means to produce high quality academic publications that make use of rich media, source data, video, and interactive experiences.

Tales of Things
Allows users to link any object to a video or text which provides further description for that project. It makes use of QR codes.

Idea Sketch
An intuitive iPhone and iPad app that allows users to create concept maps.

MIT App Inventor
A tool for android app development that requires little programming knowledge.

PhoneGap
Create mobile applications for iOS, Android, Blackberry Windows Phone, Palm WebOS, Bada and Symbian using HTML5, CSS and Javascript.

Tableau Public
A free data visualization software. It allows users to connect to a spreadsheet or file and create interactive data visualizations for the web.

Palladio
A web-based platform for the visualization of complex, multi-dimensional data.

Voyant
A web-based text reading and analysis environment.

Raw Graphs
A tool for creating vector-based visualization based on data.

Simile
A collection of free, open-source web widgets, mostly for data visualizations.

rgraph
An open source web charts library that produces charts dynamically with JavaScript.

NodeXL 
A free and open-source network analysis and visualization software package for Microsoft Excel 2007/2010. 

Gephi 
An open-source software for visualizing and analyzing large networks graphs. 

Chronos Timeline
Designed specifically for needs in the humanities and social sciences to represent time-based data. Chronos allows scholars and students to dynamically present historical data in a flexible online environment. Switching easily between vertical and horizontal orientations, researchers can quickly scan large number of events, highlight and filter events based on subject matter or tags, and recontextualize historical data.

Simile Widget 
A suite of free, open-source web widgets, mostly for data visualization.

TimeGlider
A web-based timeline builder.

Timeline Builder (Neatline)
Create timelines for Omeka

TimelineJS
An open-source tool for creating interactive, visually-rich timelines.

TimeToast
A tool for creating timelines which can be added to a website or blog.

ArcGis Explorer Online
A client for using, creating and sharing ArcGIS maps online.

MapAList 
A tool for creating customized Google maps from lists of address. 

Historypin 
A digital, user-generated archive of historical photos, videos, audio recordings and personal recollections. Users are able to use the location and date of their content to "pin" it to Google Maps. 

Neatline 
A suite of add-on tools for Omeka that allows users to create timelines. 

QGIS 
A cross-platform free and open source desktop geographic information systems (GIS) application that provides data viewing, editing, and analysis capabilities.

PLOTS Map Knitter
An easy-to-use DIY tool for combining ("stitching") maps together Network Analysis 

Balsamiq
A web-based wireframing and mock up tool.

Visio
(Requires a PC) A tool for creating and sharing diagrams and flowcharts.