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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. 104

      SlaveVoyages

      Voyage-by-voyage database of about 36,000 trans-Atlantic and 10,000 intra-American slave-trading voyages, built from archival records, with estimates of the trade’s full size.

      At a glance
      Holder
      SlaveVoyages Consortium (Rice University)
      Launched
      1999 CD-ROM; online 2008
      Coverage
      About 36,000 voyages, 1514–1866; 95,000 named Africans
      Licence
      Source data public domain; estimates CC BY-NC
      Cost
      Free
      Access
      Website; Excel and CSV downloads
      Historian’s notes
      How the data was made Compiled by hand from archives in 27 countries over decades, and corrected through user submissions and yearly releases.
      Known gaps and biases The early Brazilian trade is thin, and illegal voyages after 1807 were deliberately hidden. Estimates are modelled rather than counted, and some values are imputed (marked *).
      What you can do with it Free for research with the site’s preferred citation. Commercial use needs written permission.
      Used in research2
      Used to build corpora1
      Tested in0

      No published evaluations found yet.

      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