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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. 020 AI

      Mistral OCR

      Commercial cloud OCR that converts scans into structured text in about 170 languages, cheaply per page for bulk jobs.

      At a glance
      Maker
      Mistral AI (France)
      Released
      Mar 2025 (now 4.1)
      Licence
      Proprietary
      Cost
      About $4 per 1,000 pages ($2 by batch)
      Runs
      Hosted API and web playground
      Skill
      Some code
      Historian’s notes
      Where your sources go Sent to Mistral; kept 30 days for abuse checks unless zero-retention is granted. Terms say no training on customer data, with exceptions.
      How it’s been tested 1.4–3.4% error on the 1743 Dictionnaire de Trévoux (LIRIS, Lyon).
      Known problems on historical sources Kurrent and other German scripts remain hard; poor on Greek and Hebrew. The “latest” model changes underneath you, so pin a version for a consistent corpus.
      Used in research0

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

      Used to build corpora2
      Tested in1
      • socOCRbench · Noah Dasanaike (Harvard, Government), 2026
      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