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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. 071

      World Historical Gazetteer

      Free online index of historical place names worldwide. Look up places with their old names, match your own place lists against it, and publish them as linked open data.

      At a glance
      Maker
      University of Pittsburgh (Mostern, Grossner, Gadd)
      Released
      2019 (now v3.2)
      Licence
      Open-source code; content CC BY 4.0
      Cost
      Free
      Runs
      Web browser; API in development
      Skill
      No code to search; data prep to contribute
      Historian’s notes
      Where your sources go Uploads stay private until you publish. Published data can’t be deleted, only deprecated.
      How it’s been tested The team’s own critique: “The Lure and Limits of Linked Data” (Spatial Humanities 2024).
      Known problems on historical sources Many records have no dates. Africa, the pre-colonial Americas, Oceania and Central Asia are thin. Indigenous nations and unnamed sites are hard to find.
      Used in research0

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

      Used to build corpora4
      Tested in0

      No published evaluations found yet.

      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