As a Public Service Announcement (PSA) to all scholars working in the humanities or social sciences in need of software to help manage, analyze, organize, preserve, and otherwise deal with data digitally, DiRT [Digital Research Tools] is the tool to help you find a tool to accomplish whatever it is you need to accomplish for your research. Kept up and running by volunteers curating the directories, a lengthy list of folks on DiRT’s editorial board, as well as the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of Arts and the Humanities, DiRT is made by scholars for scholars. [i]
While there is not room in this article to list the copious amount of tools available through the directory, categories are explicit in their labelling, including the need to archive data, collaborate, comment, store, share, transcribe, and publish data. Tools can be sorted by platform, cost, status (e.g. active, in-development, Beta, etc.), as well as by category. An alternative sorting method that may be useful to some is the implementation of the Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities (TaDiRAH). TaDiRAH organizes tools through broader umbrella goals (e.g. Capture, Enrichment, Storage) and sub-categories of their respective methods (e.g. methods under the Capture grouping include Conversion, Recording, and Imaging) to allow researchers to better find tools that will meet their needs.
If you are still having a hard time figuring out which tool within the relevant category is best suited for your project, DiRT is now integrated with DHCommons. DHCommons is a community essentially geared for matching digital humanities projects with other scholars for collaboration and assistance.[ii] This integration means that research projects from DHCommons using any of DiRT’s resources will now be linked to from the tool’s profile as an example of the tool in use. Projects are not listed for every tool in the database, but wherever applicable and available the link is there.
With a Spanish translation in the works and a new option for members of the community to create tool reviews, DiRT is growing. Find a tool to help you manage data for your research project on the DiRT Directory.
[i] “DiRT Directory.” Welcome //. Web. 17 Mar. 2015. <http://dirtdirectory.org>.
[ii] “DHCommons.” About. Web. 17 Mar. 2015. <http://dhcommons.org/about>.
[iii] [Digital Research]. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://alanabeeblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/digital-tools-that-marketers-need-to-dominate-the-digital-era.jpg
