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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 VIII

    Public Datasets

    Open corpora and collections others have built and shared. Each card says how the text was made and what you’re allowed to do with it.

    Guide cards

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

    • dataset · No. 106

      HathiTrust

      Shared digital library of more than 18 million books and serials from research libraries. Full-text search across everything; full reading of public-domain works.

      At a glance
      Holder
      HathiTrust (University of Michigan)
      Launched
      2008
      Coverage
      18 million+ volumes; about 6.7 million public domain
      Licence
      Public domain readable; in-copyright restricted
      Cost
      Free to read; some datasets need a member institution
      Access
      Website; datasets by agreement; Extracted Features (CC BY)
      Historian’s notes
      How the text was made Uncorrected OCR of scans by Google, the Internet Archive and member libraries.
      Known gaps and biases Many duplicate copies skew word counts, and it over-represents what US research libraries held. Secure computational access to in-copyright text closed on 30 September 2026.
      What you can do with it Bulk text for non-commercial research only; Google-scanned volumes carry extra conditions.
      Used in research2
      Used to build corpora1
      Tested in1
      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