DH Tools
- nodegoat
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Nodegoat is a relational database platform designed for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. It enables data modelling, management, and analysis of data with emphasis on their interrelationships. It provides advanced visualisation tools, including timelines, interactive maps, and network graphs, which facilitate the examination of complex historical, cultural, and social phenomena.
The web-based environment is designed to support interdisciplinary collaboration and allows users to customise data models without the need for programming expertise. Nodegoat is widely employed for working with linked data, analysing spatio-temporal relationships, and presenting research findings. A research environment and database for Czech Academy of Sciences researchers is hosted on the Institute of History's server.
- ICONCLASS
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ICONCLASS is an international classification system for describing, searching, and analysing 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 scholarly literature, and the system now incorporates artificial intelligence-powered search functionality. Consequently, it serves as a key digital humanities tool for analysing visual motifs within broad cultural and historical contexts.
ICONCLASS is widely employed in visual culture research, including book illustration and prints, and forms 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 visual material from the earliest printed production, which is now accessible 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 analysing images, developed by the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) at the University of Oxford. It employs computer vision technology to search extensive collections of visual material based on visual similarity. The tool enables searching for images using a specified image crop and offers result ranking by similarity, visualisation of identified differences, and automatic clustering of motifs with comparable visual characteristics.
The tool is used in numerous international projects, including Bodleian Ballads, 15cILLUSTRATION, 1516, and Compositor. In the Czech Republic, VISE has been deployed in the e-ilustrace project to examine visual elements in the earliest book production from the Czech lands, where it helps trace the repeated use of woodcut blocks, analyse their circulation among printers, and reveal new connections in early modern book culture.
- Tableau Public
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Tableau Public is a free platform for creating and publicly sharing data visualisations online. It enables the creation of a wide range of visualisations using web authoring or Tableau Desktop Public Edition. The platform supports work with extensive datasets, including SQL operations (selection, grouping, filtering) and creation of interactive dashboards that integrate various visualisations into a unified interface. Dashboards allow researchers to combine different types of visualisations (maps, timelines, graphs) and transform raw data into comprehensible narratives that reveal new connections and facilitate interpretation of research findings.
Examples of Tableau Public usage in the humanities include a project focused on reconstructing and analysing the geographical and administrative structure of Tsarist Russia. The tool was also employed in analysing and visualising the correspondence of French Slavist André Mazon.
- 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.