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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. 042 AI

      spaCy

      Python toolkit that, among other things, finds names of people, places, organisations and dates in text.

      At a glance
      Maker
      Explosion
      Released
      2015
      Licence
      Open source (MIT)
      Cost
      Free
      Runs
      Your own machine (Python)
      Skill
      Programming
      Historian’s notes
      Where your sources go Fully local.
      How it’s been tested Lowest of three tools on 18th-century texts (F1 about 0.4). Off-the-shelf about 0.15–0.19 on colonial Persian Gulf records; 0.65–0.78 after retraining.
      Known problems on historical sources Its ready-made models learned from modern web text, so they miss historical spellings and transliterated names. Plan to annotate examples and retrain.
      Used in research0

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

      Used to build corpora1
      Tested in2
      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