DH Tools
Nástroje AV ČR
- Node Goat
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Nodegoat is a relational database platform designed for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. It enables data modeling, management, and analysis with an emphasis on interrelationships. It offers advanced visualization tools, including timelines, interactive maps, and network graphs, which facilitate the exploration of complex historical, cultural, and social phenomena.
The web environment is designed to support interdisciplinary collaboration and allow users to customize data models without the need for programming. Nodegoat is widely used for working with linked data, analyzing spatiotemporal relationships, and presenting research results.
The research environment and database for the needs of AV ČR researchers is operated on the server of the Historical Institute of the AV ČR. - ICONCLASS
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ICONCLASS is an international classification system for describing, searching, and analyzing visual material. The system enables structured hierarchical description, which facilitates the classification and comparison of visual motifs across media and historical periods. Individual entries contain references to specialist literature, and the system now allows searching using artificial intelligence. This makes it a key tool in digital humanities for analyzing visual motifs in a broad cultural and historical context.
ICONCLASS is widely used in visual culture research, including book illustration and graphic art, and is part of major international digital projects such as RKD Explore, HAB, BSB, and Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett. In the Czech Republic, it has been used to classify image material from the oldest printed production, which is now available in the e-Ilustrace database. - UDPipe
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UDPipe is a tool that uses neural networks for tokenization, lemmatization, and syntactic analysis of text data. Tokenization divides text into the smallest units (tokens), usually individual words. Lemmatization then assigns tokens their basic form (lemma), which facilitates language processing. During syntactic analysis, additional linguistic information is added to these lemmas, including grammatical relationships and sentence structure.
The tool is developed by the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL) at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University. It is available under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. UDPipe is linguistically universal and can be trained on annotated data in CoNLL-U format. For most languages, including Czech, pre-trained models based on the Universal Dependencies dataset are available. UDPipe can also be used as a web service within the LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ digital research infrastructure. - VISE
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VISE is a freely available software tool for scientific work with book illustrations, developed by the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) at the University of Oxford. It uses computer vision technology to search large collections of images based on visual similarity. It allows users to search for illustrations based on a specified image fragment and offers sorting of results by similarity, visualization of identified differences, and automatic grouping of motifs with similar visual characteristics.
The tool is used in a number of international projects, such as Bodleian Ballads, 15cILLUSTRATION, 1516, and Compositor. In the Czech Republic, VISE was deployed in the e-illustration project to examine visual elements in the oldest book production from the Czech lands, where it helps to track the repeated use of woodcut blocks, analyze their circulation among printers, and reveal new connections in early modern book culture. - Tableau Public
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Tableau Public is a free software tool for data visualization. It allows you to create a wide range of visualizations and share them publicly. It supports working with large data files, including SQL operations (selection, grouping, filtering) and the creation of interactive dashboards that link different visualizations into a single interface. Dashboards allow researchers to combine different types of visualizations (maps, timelines, graphs) and transform raw data into understandable stories that reveal new connections and facilitate the interpretation of research results.
Examples of the use of Tableau Public in the humanities include a project focused on the reconstruction and analysis of the geographical and administrative structure of Tsarist Russia (https://imperiia.scalar.fas.harvard.edu/imperiia). The tool was also used in the analysis and visualization of the correspondence of French Slavicist André Mazon (Cinková, S., Hladká, B., Mírovský, J., Archaimbault, S. (2024). Data Storytelling Around André Mazon’s Correspondence. Digital Studies of Culture in Central Europe 13. https://doi.org/10.11649/ch.3109). - NameTag
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NameTag is an open-source named entity recognition (NER) tool that supports both flat and nested entities. It can identify proper names in text and classify them into predefined categories such as people, places, organizations, and more. It achieves excellent results on 21 test sets in 15 languages, including Czech, English, Chinese, Russian, and others.
NameTag is available under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, with language models freely available for non-commercial use under the CC BY-NC-SA license. The tool is developed by the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University and is available as a web service (including REST API) operated within the LINDAT/CLARIN-CZ infrastructure. The source code of the tool and released versions are available in a freely accessible repository on the GitHub platform. - Google Charts
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Google Charts is a library for data visualization that allows you to create various types of charts – from simple diagrams to complex hierarchical tree maps. It offers a wide range of ready-made chart types that can be easily integrated into websites.
The charts are implemented as JavaScript classes. Thanks to interactive elements, the charts can be linked into more complex dashboards or other web applications. Google Charts uses HTML5/SVG technology, which ensures compatibility across browsers and devices.
Source data can come from websites, databases, or services that support the Chart Tools Datasource protocol. For example, Google Spreadsheets, Google Fusion Tables, and external data sources such as SalesForce are supported. - Gephi
- Gephi is an interactive platform for visualizing and analyzing networks and complex systems, including dynamic and hierarchical graphs. It ranks among the tools for Exploratory Data Analysis and is used primarily to explore and understand graph structures. Gephi allows users to interactively work with graphs—editing their structure, shape, and colors to reveal hidden patterns and properties.
- R Studio
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RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for the R and Python programming languages. It offers a console, an editor with syntax highlighting and support for direct code execution, tools for data visualization, history management, code debugging, and workspace organization.
RStudio is available in two editions—a free open-source version and a commercial version with extended features. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems and can be used both on a local computer and in an online environment. - PERO-OCR
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PERO-OCR is an advanced OCR system for recognizing text in printed and handwritten documents, developed at Brno University of Technology.
The tool enables automatic transcription of historical and poor-quality prints and manuscripts. It supports a wide range of languages, including Czech, German (Fraktur), and other European scripts. The results can be exported to Page XML, ALTO XML, and plain text.
PERO-OCR can be used via a web interface, as a command line, or integrated into your own Python applications. It also offers a Docker image for easy deployment.