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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 I

    AI & History

    Machine learning, vision-language models and speech models. Every card here carries notes on where your sources go, how it was tested, and how it fails.

    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. 016 AI

      Chandra

      Vision-language model that turns scans and PDFs into structured text, keeping tables and layout. Chandra 2 covers about 90 languages.

      At a glance
      Maker
      Datalab
      Released
      Oct 2025 (v2: Mar 2026)
      Licence
      Code Apache-2.0; weights free for research and small organisations
      Cost
      Free to self-host; API about $4–10 per 1,000 pages
      Runs
      Your own GPU, hosted API or web playground
      Skill
      Some code
      Historian’s notes
      Where your sources go Datalab says its hosted service keeps no data by default. Self-host to keep sources on your machine.
      How it’s been tested 0.58% error on clean 19th-century print and 2.58% on early-modern print (Clifford et al. 2026); 13% mean error on degraded Uruguayan microfilm.
      Known problems on historical sources On damaged pages it adds text that isn’t there, swaps one name for another and standardises spelling. Occasional severe failures hide behind good median scores.
      Used in research0

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

      Used to build corpora0

      None recorded yet.

      Tested in2
      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