This provides an overview of the available tools and methods offered by the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative. The examples below are of student work from a former DITI partnership, unless otherwise noted as DITI created examples and/or teaching modules.
Coding
Digital Tools to assist programming and developing processes for data-based research using numeric or textual components (words, sentences, characters, etc.), and data-mining on the web.
Category: Quantitative
Python: An object-oriented programming language that has been widely adopted in digital humanities and data science. Python provides coders the flexibility to transform and analyze data, build applications, and create/run algorithms.
- DITI Python Module (DITI-created Module)
R/RStudio: Programming language (R) and associated platform (RStudio). R was originally developed for usage in statistics, but it has also been taken up in digital humanities and computational social science research.
- DITI R/RStudio Module (DITI-created Module)
Category: Qualitative
NVivo: Qualitative coding tool. Enables analysis on large sets of qualitative data, including unstructured text, audio, video, or images. Can easily import data from bibliographic content management tools, and capture additional data from social media with an added plugin.
Content and Data Management
Digital tools and practices that support the organization and management of files, folders, images, and archives.
Category: Data Management
Excel: Microsoft systems spreadsheet program used to input, organize, and graph textual and numeric data.
- DITI Introduction to Excel (DITI-created Module)
Digital Publication
Tools and best practices for managing content and publishing information online.
Category: Website Building
WordPress: A content management system (CMS) that allows you to host and build websites. Contains a template system, and allows for ample customization.
Wix: A simplified website designer tool. Allows for a variety of themes. Less design control than WordPress.
Category: Digital Archiving
Omeka: A web platform often used by scholars to construct and manage digital archives, or to create online exhibits. Supports digital files and builds appropriate citations/credit to creators of archival artifacts.
Digital Storytelling
Digital tools that allow data to be presented in narrative and visual formats.
Category: Visualization Tools
Knight Lab Timeline: A tool for creating interactive timelines. Requires data organized into a spreadsheet.
- The Emergence of Facebook (DITI-created Example)
Tableau: Creates engaging and varied visualizations of quantitative and qualitative data. Has a mapping option for spatial data.
Category: Mapping Tools
Knight Lab StoryMap: An effective and user-friendly tool for creating narratives using spatial data.
- Mapping Shared Spaces: A Visual History of Boston’s Black and Jewish Communities
- Boston Parks and Playgrounds: Community Scan
- Tapioca Balls
- Boston’s Black Jazz Trail (DITI and INSH 5602 co-created example)
Google My Maps: A simple mapping tool for interactive maps without strong narrative components.
- Boston’s Black Heritage Trail (DITI-created example)
- Boston’s Black Jazz Trail (DITI and INSH 5602 co-created example)
Category: Audio Tools
Audacity: A well-supported tool for creating podcasts, and editing audio files
Text Tools
Open source, web-based tools for text analysis and tools for text encoding
Category: Web-based Text Analysis
Word Counter: A free online tool focused on the quantity of words in selected texts. Primarily used in research to isolate specific words, determine word frequency, and reveal language usage patterns.
Word Tree: A tool used to investigate specific words and phrases, or determine patterns from a corpus of data. Isolates keywords and creates “branches” to illustrate a hierarchy of terms or organize information around a target word. Best used to investigate patterns in writing.
Voyant: A tool used to read and analyze digital texts. Voyant is open source and available through GitHub, and its use is encouraged as a means to illustrate data or provide more effective evidence on scholarly projects. Contains both text-analysis and data visualization tools.
Lexos: A web-based tool to explore text corpora and prepare textual data for analysis.
Student work using one or more of these text analysis tools:
Category: Text Encoding
TEI: Short for Text Encoding Initiative. A set of guidelines for developing digitally-modeled text in the humanities, social sciences, and linguistics. Represented using the XML markup language.
Oxygen: XML Editor with built-in debugger. Available for download for Mac, Windows, and Linux systems.
Student work using these text encoding tools:
- A Compleat Narrative of the Tryal of Elizabeth Lillyman
- The Most Lamentable Tragedie of Titus Andronicus, First Quarto
- A Dialogue Between a Baker and his Wife
Theory and Methods
Exploring how digital technologies can be used to support scholarly inquiries.
Data Ethics: Theory, methods, and best practices for ethical use, sourcing, and curation of data on and offline.
- DITI Data Ethics and Vetting Online Sources (DITI-created Module)
- DITI Data Ethics and Research Bias (DITI-created Module)
Survey Creation and Analysis: Methods for using Google Forms to collaboratively create a survey and view/analyze the results. Understand how to formulate different types of research questions, from open-ended to Likert scale.
- DITI Survey Analysis (DITI-created Module)
-
Type of Program
-
Links and Resources
