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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. 017 AI

      olmOCR

      Fully open toolkit from the Allen Institute for AI that turns PDFs and scans into clean, reading-order text, built to process millions of pages cheaply.

      At a glance
      Maker
      Allen Institute for AI
      Released
      Feb 2025 (v2: Oct 2025)
      Licence
      Open source (Apache-2.0)
      Cost
      Free; third-party hosting available
      Runs
      Your own GPU (12 GB+); hosted APIs; free web demo
      Skill
      Some code
      Historian’s notes
      Where your sources go Ai2’s terms give it broad rights over content submitted to its services. Run it locally for private sources.
      How it’s been tested 1.93% error on clean 19th-century print, 4.27% on early-modern print (Clifford et al. 2026).
      Known problems on historical sources Silently modernises old spelling, recovers only about half the text on multi-column pages, and invents names (“Gotland” became “Goliath”). English-focused.
      Used in research0

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

      Used to build corpora0

      None recorded yet.

      Tested in5
      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