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Digital Humanities Resources & Toolbox

Whether you're just starting or looking to deepen your digital scholarship, this toolkit offers a curated collection of open-source publishing platforms, guides, and tools. Designed to support faculty, students, and staff, the resources here aim to make Digital Humanities work more accessible, practical, and sustainable across disciplines.

Tools

A selection of digital tools for research, analysis, and presentation in the humanities, designed to support your scholarly work and digital projects.

 

CMS  & Digital Collection

These tools are designed to help scholars and institutions create, manage, and showcase digital collections, archives, and exhibits. They offer robust functionality for organizing, presenting, and sharing scholarly materials in digital formats.
WordPress Open-source platform for creating and managing websites and blogs. It offers a user-friendly interface, customizable themes, and a wide range of plugins, making it an ideal choice for both beginners and advanced users in the digital humanities for building digital archives, blogs, or scholarly websites.
Drupal Open-source content management system (CMS) used for building complex websites and applications. Known for its scalability and robust customization options, Drupal is widely used in the digital humanities for creating interactive websites, digital archives, and collaborative platforms.
CollectionBuilder An open-source tool designed for building digital collections and exhibits. CollectionBuilder allows users to easily create and display multimedia-rich collections, making it a valuable resource for scholars in the digital humanities to organize, present, and share their research in a visually engaging format.
Omeka An Open-source platform for creating and managing digital exhibits and collections. Omeka is widely used in the digital humanities to showcase archival materials, curate digital exhibitions, and create online collections with rich metadata, making it ideal for scholarly and educational projects.
Mukurtu An open-source content management system designed to support the unique needs of Indigenous communities. Mukurtu allows users to manage and share digital cultural heritage with respect for local cultural protocols, access restrictions, and community-defined metadata. It prioritizes ethical stewardship, storytelling, and collaborative curation of cultural materials.
Wax A minimal, open-source framework for building digital exhibits using Jekyll and GitHub Pages. Developed by the Digital Humanities Workshop at NYU, WAX is designed for creating scholarly, static websites that showcase digital collections, with an emphasis on sustainability, simplicity, and long-term accessibility.

 

Design and Collaborative Tools

These tools facilitate digital scholarship by supporting visual design, project collaboration, and content creation. They allow teams to brainstorm, prototype, share feedback, and co-author work in flexible, often real-time environments, enhancing both creativity and productivity.
Canva A simple graphic design tool that helps users create visually appealing content, such as posters, infographics, and social media posts. Canva's ease of use makes it great for creating research presentations, digital posters, and academic visuals.
EndNote A reference management tool designed to help researchers collect, organize, and format citations. EndNote streamlines the process of managing bibliographies and references, making it an essential tool for academic projects that require accurate citation and easy integration with word processing software. Available to Loyola faculty, staff, and students through institutional access.
GitHub A web-based platform for version control and collaboration built on Git. GitHub allows researchers, developers, and project teams to track changes, manage code or data, and collaborate on digital projects in real time. It’s widely used in digital humanities for managing websites, data sets, TEI/XML projects, and collaborative scholarship.
Figma A web-based platform for collaborative design and prototyping. Figma allows teams to create, share, and iterate on visual projects in real time. It's widely used in digital humanities for designing user interfaces, visualizing data, and creating digital archives or exhibits, enabling seamless collaboration across geographies and disciplines.
Milanote A web-based platform for visual organization and collaborative brainstorming. Milanote enables teams to organize ideas, create mood boards, and plan projects visually. It’s widely used in digital humanities for mapping out research, organizing project workflows, and collaborating on content creation in a flexible, intuitive workspace.

 

Data Visualization & Digital Storytelling Tools

A selection of open-source and free tools for visualizing data, exploring texts, and crafting digital narratives—ranging from network graphs and timelines to interactive maps and multimedia storytelling environments
Knight Lab A collection of free, open-source tools designed for digital storytelling and media creation. The toolbox includes resources like TimelineJS (for creating interactive timelines), StoryMapJS (for geospatial storytelling), and JuxtaposeJS (for comparing images), making it ideal for creating engaging narratives and visualizations in digital humanities projects.
TAPoR The Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) is a comprehensive platform that provides access to a range of text analysis tools for scholars. It supports text mining, analysis, and visualization, offering resources that allow researchers to explore and interpret large volumes of textual data in digital humanities projects.
Simile An open-source project offering tools for data visualization and digital humanities research, including TimeLine and VisualTime. Simile allows users to create interactive timelines and visualizations, helping scholars explore temporal and spatial relationships within historical data and text-based research.
Palladio A free, web-based platform for visualizing complex historical data. Developed by the Humanities + Design lab at Stanford, Palladio offers tools for mapping, network analysis, and temporal visualization, making it especially useful for exploring relationships and patterns in humanities datasets.
Voyant A web-based text analysis tool designed for scholars working with large corpora of text. Voyant offers a suite of visualization and analysis tools, including word clouds, frequency analysis, and topic modeling, making it ideal for exploring and interpreting textual data in digital humanities projects.
RAWGraphs An open-source data visualization tool that allows users to create custom visualizations from raw data. With its intuitive interface, RAWGraphs supports a wide range of chart types and is particularly useful for transforming complex datasets into clear, accessible visual representations in digital humanities and other research projects.
Tableau Public A free version of the powerful Tableau software used for data visualization. Tableau Public allows users to create interactive and shareable visualizations from their data, making it an excellent tool for digital humanities projects that require advanced graphical representation and public dissemination of research findings.
R An open-source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. Widely used in the digital humanities for data analysis, text mining, and visualization, R provides a powerful suite of tools for working with complex datasets and performing advanced statistical analysis.
Gale Digital Scholarship A cloud-based platform for text mining and analysis using Gale’s extensive primary source collections. With built-in tools for cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing textual data, the Lab supports digital humanities research and teaching. Available to Loyola faculty, staff, and students through institutional access.

 

Digital Publishing Text Tools

Platforms that support the creation, management, and dissemination of digital publications, including scholarly books, journals, and multimedia works. These tools enable collaborative authorship, flexible design, and open access distribution, tailored to the needs of digital humanities publishing.
Scalar An open-source platform for creating digital books and scholarly content. Scalar allows authors to combine multimedia elements, including text, images, videos, and audio, to craft nonlinear narratives and interactive academic works, making it ideal for digital humanities projects.
Manifold An open-source publishing platform designed to support collaborative, multimodal scholarly projects. Manifold allows authors to create dynamic, interactive books, combining text, multimedia, and annotation features for a more engaging and flexible digital publishing experience.
PubPub A web-based publishing platform focused on open collaboration and transparent peer review. PubPub facilitates the creation of academic articles, journals, and other scholarly materials, supporting easy collaboration between authors, editors, and reviewers.

 

Geolocation Visualization Tools

Tools for visualizing and analyzing spatial data, ideal for creating interactive maps and geospatial representations of historical or geographical data. These platforms allow researchers to map, analyze, and share location-based information.
ArcGis Explorer Online A powerful geographic information system (GIS) platform for mapping and spatial analysis. ArcGIS enables users to visualize, analyze, and interpret spatial data, making it essential for detailed geographic and environmental studies, as well as creating custom interactive maps. Available to Loyola faculty, staff, and students through institutional access.
Mapbox A platform for designing custom maps and geospatial visualizations. Mapbox offers flexible mapping tools and APIs, allowing users to create interactive and visually stunning maps for a wide range of digital humanities projects, from historical mapping to real-time data visualization.
Felt A user-friendly, web-based mapping tool designed for easy collaboration and geospatial storytelling. Felt allows teams to create and share interactive maps, making it a great resource for visualizing and analyzing spatial data in digital humanities, urban studies, and environmental research.

 

Accessibility Tools

Tools for improving access to digital content, designed to support individuals with disabilities. These platforms ensure that websites, digital projects, and materials are usable by people with visual, auditory, or mobility impairments, helping to create inclusive and accessible digital experiences.
Color Oracle A free desktop application that simulates color blindness on y our screen in real time. Color Oracle helps designers and developers ensure that visual content is accessible to users with various types of color vision deficiencies by allowing them to preview how designs appear to colorblind users.

Guides & Collections

These are resources, instructional guides, and community platforms that support learning, exploration, and collaboration in digital humanities. These tools help newcomers and experienced scholars navigate technologies, methodologies, and best practices in the field.

 

Whether you're just starting or looking to deepen your digital scholarship, this toolkit offers a curated collection of open-source publishing platforms, guides, and tools. Designed to support faculty, students, and staff, the resources here aim to make Digital Humanities work more accessible, practical, and sustainable across disciplines.