PreviewNot yet reviewed. Cards on this preview are seed data waiting for the editors’ approval, so check anything before you cite it.
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 III

    Text Analysis

    Reading at scale: word frequencies, topic models, entity extraction.

    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. 051

      MALLET

      Command-line toolkit best known among historians for topic modelling: finding groups of words that occur together across thousands of documents.

      At a glance
      Maker
      Andrew McCallum; maintained by David Mimno
      Released
      2002
      Licence
      Open source (Apache-2.0)
      Cost
      Free
      Runs
      Your own machine (Java)
      Skill
      Some code
      Historian’s notes
      Where your sources go Fully local.
      How it’s been tested Critiqued for historians in the Journal of Digital Humanities (Schmidt 2012; Graham & Milligan 2012).
      Known problems on historical sources Results depend heavily on settings the documentation doesn’t explain. Neat topic labels can hide incoherent topics; check them against the documents.
      Used in research3
      Used to build corpora0

      None recorded yet.

      Tested in0

      No published evaluations found yet.

      Guides1
      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