Tools

This page gives an overview of existing software tools that can be used in digital HPS projects. If you develop your own program or know of one that should be included in this list, please get in contact with Julia Damerow (digitalhpscon@gmail.com).

Agnostic Editor

Agnostic is a tool being developed to meet a specific need of the emergent Digital Humanities and specifically Digital HPS communities. The need to edit structured data without having to train editors in complex theory of structures and to make it harder for editors to enter the data incorrectly.

Agnostic was initially developed because of needs in the Darwin Correspondence project but has expanded to be used by more projects. It is still in beta phase.

Anteater

Anteater (annotation tool to extract endangered animals from text resources) is a tool developed by Julia Damerow to automatically extract certain information (such as the species being studied, the field site, and the researchers and institutions applying for the permit) from U.S. regulatory documents related to endangered species research. Dirk Wintergrün, head of Information Technology at the MPIWG, has developed a search and mapping application (based partly on the europeana4D map/timeline viewer) to display the extracted permit data visually.

Arboreal

The Arboreal XML browser is a powerful and flexible tool developed by the ​Archimedes Project for content-based access to, and annotation of, XML texts. Arboreal includes special features for working with parallel versions of texts, morphology and terminology, and linked images. Integrated language support is currently provided for Latin, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, languages written in cuneiform, and major western European languages. Arboreal supports many standards and is designed as a cross-platform tool that can be used on many different computing systems.

ConceptPower

Conceptpower is an authority file service, which is based on WordNet 3.0 (http://wordnet.princeton.edu) and can be extended as needed. It is being developed by the digital history and philosophy of science group in the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University. Conceptpower is a Java web application that can be deployed in a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat.

Digilib

Digilib is a state-less web-based client-server application for interactive viewing and manipulation of images. It consists of two parts - the image server component proper, called "Scaler" and a client-side part that runs in the user's web browser. The users browser sends an HTTP request for a certain (zoomed, scaled, rotated) image to the Scaler server and the server returns the image data as an HTTP response.

Neotoma phenax

This project was created out of the need to have a repository for all kinds of digital history and philosophy of science (digital HPS) related scripts and tools. Do you have a script lying around somewhere that process Web of Science data? Or small web application to analyses spreadsheets? Don't know what to do with it? Put it into our repository! Maybe someone else could use it.

Omeka

Omeka (http://www.omeka.org) is a project developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. It is a web publishing tool that also has a repository, a plug-in architecture, and a robust and active community that builds open source tools to help institutions sort, present, and archive their digital materials.

Virtual Spaces MWN

Virtual Spaces MWN (VSpace) is an application for structuring information into "virtual spaces." VSpace enables users to arrange texts, images and videos in 2D graphs and create virtual tours, for example virtual exhibitions, from them. Text, images and videos can be integrated in such virtual tours. To publish a virtual tour HTML, PDF or RTF files can be generated. VSpace is a Java application that is based on the Eclipse framework. It is released under the Eclipse Public License.

Vogon

Vogon is a desktop application for annotating texts with quadruples. Quadruples consist of a relationship triplet, which contains what the researcher annotating the text interprets as relevant information, and contextual information. Contextual information is for example information about the annotated text and information about the annotator. For example, the sentence "Biology is the study of life" could be annotated with < Biology - is - study of life – said author X in book Y annotated by Z>. Quadruples are uploaded to a common repository so that they can be searched and analyzed.