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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. 018 AI

      DeepSeek-OCR

      Small open model that compresses page images for fast bulk conversion. Built mainly as research into compression rather than careful transcription.

      At a glance
      Maker
      DeepSeek AI
      Released
      Oct 2025 (v2: Jan 2026)
      Licence
      Open weights (MIT; v2 Apache-2.0)
      Cost
      Free; third-party hosting
      Runs
      Your own GPU or third-party APIs
      Skill
      Programming
      Historian’s notes
      Where your sources go No official hosted service; self-hosting keeps sources local.
      How it’s been tested Median error 6.7% on Ancient Greek editions and 20.8% on Arabic (Inria 2026).
      Known problems on historical sources Guesses from language rather than reading the page: it “corrects” unusual words to ones that aren’t there and loops on long outputs. Among the weakest on degraded microfilm.
      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