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The Digital Historian’s Toolbox

Preview · 19 tools · 6 datasets · 75 projects · seeded October 2026

The tools and datasets historians actually used, and where.

Pull out a drawer to see what’s filed inside. Every card separates research that used a tool from the benchmarks that tested it.

  1. Mistral OCR (2 uses)
  2. World Historical Gazetteer (1 use)
  3. Gephi (1 use)
  4. Voyant Tools (1 use)
  5. eScriptorium (1 use)

Research + corpus-building uses. Benchmarks don’t count.

The drawers

A tool can be filed in more than one drawer
  • DRAWER II

    OCR & Handwriting

    Turning page images into searchable text, from printed newspapers to manuscript hands.

    Guide cards

    Counts research and corpus-building uses in the window, plus “I’m using this now” check-ins. Benchmarks don’t count.

    • tool · No. 011

      ABBYY FineReader PDF

      Commercial desktop OCR that libraries have used for decades to digitise newspapers and books. Has a dedicated mode for Gothic and Fraktur type.

      At a glance
      Maker
      ABBYY
      Released
      1993
      Licence
      Proprietary
      Cost
      From $99/yr (Windows) or $69/yr (Mac); 7-day trial
      Runs
      Desktop app (Windows, macOS)
      Skill
      No code
      Historian’s notes
      Where your sources go Processed offline on your computer, per ABBYY. Cloud features not covered.
      How it’s been tested Compared against Tesseract and others on historical Ontario documents (Code4Lib 2021) and Swedish newspapers, 1818–2018.
      Known problems on historical sources Cannot read handwriting. Blackletter, skew and narrow columns lower accuracy; print before about 1800 needed manual correction in one project.
      Used in research0

      No published research uses found yet. Using it in a project? Tell us.

      Used to build corpora0

      None recorded yet.

      Tested in3
      Visit website
      Add a project that used it See it on the network Suggest a correction

      Nobody has said they’re using it in 2026 yet. “I’m using this now” asks you to sign in with ORCID. One count per person per year; it adds to Trending, and names are never shown.

      Last updated 14 Oct 2026 Not yet reviewed by the editors · Version history