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Digital Scholarship Tools

Selecting a tool is one of the most challenging aspects of starting a digital scholarship project. OU Libraries can help! Our experts can offer consultations on the tools listed below. For an overview, please visit Digital Scholarship @ OU Libraries.

Tools

The majority of these tools are open source, but a few are propriety. 

Organize and Clean Data

​Excel – Spreadsheet software with calculation, graphing tools, and pivot table options for analyzing data.
Google Sheets – Spreadsheet software that works well for collaborative projects.
Open Refine – A tool for cleaning messy data, transforming it between different formats, and exploring data.

Hosting

​OU Create – Managed by the Center for Teaching Excellence, OU Create allows students, faculty, and staff to register a web domain and easily install popular open-source applications.
GitHub – A web-based repository service which offers the distributed revision control and source code management functionality of GIT with a graphical user interface, desktop, and mobile integration.

Analyze and Visualize Data

Tableau Public – A data visualization tool that does not require any programming knowledge. Tableau is not open source but is available for free if you save your work publicly on the Tableau public server.
Library MakerSpace –  Flexible experimentation and innovation space at OU Libraries that provides access to extended reality technologies, such as 3D printing, 3D scanning, and virtual reality. Regular workshops are offered through the library makerspace as well. 

Map Data

Leaflet – A JavaScript library can be used to create mobile-friendly interactive maps.
ArcGIS – A suite of software that lets you create, edit, and analyze geographic knowledge.

QGIS – An Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS) maintained by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).
Google – Google offers some mapping solutions. To use these services, you must first have a Google account.

  • MyMaps – Allows users to quickly create and publish maps online.

Create Digital Collections or Exhibits

Omeka - A content management system designed for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions.
Drupal  - A flexible general content management system with numerous plugins that provide scholar-oriented functionality.
ArcGIS Story Maps - Allows users to combine maps with a narrative and embed multimedia content.​ This application does not meet accessibility standards currently, but is useful for creating a storyboard in preparation for building a site.

Blog or Website Building

WordPress - An easy-to-use web publishing platform originally designed around blogging that has now evolved with functionality as a robust content or learning management system, with many themes and plugins for extra functionality.
Grav - An open source web development platform focused on simplicity​ that uses the lightweight markup language Markdown.​
ArcGIS Story Maps - Allows users to combine maps with a narrative and embed multimedia content.​​ This application does not meet accessibility standards currently, but is useful for creating a storyboard in preparation for building a site.
 

Text Analysis

Antconc – Part of a suite of related tools for text processing and analysis.
Juxta – An open-source, cross-platform desktop tool for comparing and collating multiple witnesses to a single textual work.
oXygen XML editor – A cross-platform XML editor that may be used to create and validate XML documents and associated schema.
Voyant - An easy to use, web-based text analysis software. 

Programming Languages

Python – A general-purpose, open-source programming language that places an emphasis upon code readability. 
  • Beautiful Soup – A library, written in the Python programming language, for pulling specific pieces of data out of HTML and XML files. 
  • Pandas – An open source, BSD-licensed library providing high-performance, easy-to-use data structures and data analysis tools for the Python programming language.

R - Another open source programming language. R was originally developed for statistics but also works well for graphics and text mining. 

People​

Don't know where to start?
Contact a digital scholarship specialist for an initial consultation. 
 

Schedule a Consultation

Liorah Golomb, Humanities Librarian

Specialization: Text Analysis​
 

Data Analytics Specialists

Below is a list of specialists, for more information visit the Data Services Unit page.
 

Mark Laufersweiler, Research Data Specialist

Specialization: Research Data Management, Python, GitHub​
 

Claire Curry, Science Librarian

Specialization: Geography & GIS, Programming in R, Open Science Framework, Software Carpentry instructor
 

Tyler Pearson, Director of Digital Scholarship and Data Services

Specialization: Python, Scripting, CyberCommons
 

Amanda Schilling, Science Librarian

Specialization: Citation Management, Open Science Framework, LaTeX