Digital Humanities: Technology development

In some cases, you may find that there are no existing tools that will allow you achieve your research goal, or maybe you have an idea for a tool that would be useful to others working in the digital humanities. In these instances you may consider developing your own technology to create a new tool. This can include:

• Software development – using a programming language to create a new software tool 
• Hardware development – designing and engineering a new piece of equipment

Tools:

• GitHub
  • A software development platform for hosting and reviewing code, managing projects, and building software.
  • Used by the Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana (DM2E) project.
• Python
  • An open-source programming language with a large, active community and many useful libraries and modules.
  • Used by researcher Tim Sherratt for many of his projects, including Redacted, which samples redactions from ASIO files from the National Archives of Australia.

Techniques:

• Commercial partnerships
  • Hardware development is likely to require financial investment and partnership with engineering or manufacturing experts.

• Style Guide for Python Code
  • Coding conventions for the Python code comprising the standard library in the main Python distribution.

• Stylo R package
  • A suite of stylometric tools provided as a package for use with the software R.
• TXM
  • Textometry software for textual analysis.
• Emotive
  • A project to prototype tools and applications for heritage professionals and visitors that produce interactive, personalised, emotionally resonant digital stories for museums and cultural sites.

Training

The Sydney Informatics Hub have a training schedule for learning programming and computational tools.

Commercial partnerships

Resources to assist staff in developing industry and commercial partnerships.