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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 VII

    Mapping & GIS

    Historical places, boundaries and movement on maps.

    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. 070

      QGIS

      Free desktop GIS. Historians use it to georeference scanned old maps, geocode places from censuses and directories, and trace historical features in layers.

      At a glance
      Maker
      QGIS project (volunteer community)
      Released
      2002 (now 4.2)
      Licence
      Open source (GPL-2+)
      Cost
      Free
      Runs
      Desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux)
      Skill
      No code (steep learning curve)
      Historian’s notes
      Where your sources go Fully local: you work with map files on your own computer.
      How it’s been tested Weighed against ArcGIS by a historian (Colson, IHR blog 2016): free, but with fewer analysis tools.
      Known problems on historical sources Georeferencing old maps carries over the original survey’s errors and forces fuzzy historical boundaries into hard lines. Most studies never report that uncertainty.
      Used in research1
      Used to build corpora2
      Tested in0

      No published evaluations found yet.

      Guides3
      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