There are some online tools that can help the historian with analyzing large bodies of text:
– The Voyant website is a very simple tool, where the user uploads texts or pastes them right into a textbox. It is also possible to use URLs (of online journals, for example). The program will count the frequency of unique words in the text and also supply a visual representation in the form of a tag cloud.
– The Google Ngram Viewer is a very powerful, if somewhat crude, program that trawls through Google’s vast digital library (20 million books and counting), spitting out a graph charting the popularity of user-defined words through the ages (1800 – 2008).
There are also various podcasts and online workshops on digital tools for historians on the Institute of Historical Research‘s History SPOT website.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Jochen Hung (June 25, 2012). Digital Tools for Historians. Weimar Studies Network. Retrieved February 13, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/vbk3