Building on our previous attempts to extract digital tools mentioned in abstracts of Digital Humanities conferences, we conducted a similar exercise for this week’s virtual DH2020. We again used our simple string-matching programme ToolXtractor and an updated list of tools in the TAPoR database.

So here is an overview of tools mentioned in more than one abstract (out of a total of 475 abstracts for all conference formats), including links to the actual texts – followed by some observations at the bottom of this blog post:

spaCy (5)

• Annotating spatial entities in Romanian Novels
• The Semantics of Structure in Large Historical Corpora
• Annotating Reader Absorption
• PoetryLab. An Open Source Toolkit for the Analysis of Spanish Poetry Corpora
• “Network Analysis and Spatial Stylometry in American Drama Studies” (NASSA)

word2vec (5)

• Computation and Rhetorical Invention: Finding Things To Say With word2vec
• When Classical Chinese Meets Machine Learning: Explaining the Relative Performances of Word and Sentence Segmentation Tasks
• The semantics of the U.S. street map
• Topics, buckets, and psychiatry. On the collective creation of a corpus exploration tool
• Human-Centered Computing for Humanists: Case Studies from the Computational Thinking and Learning Initiative at Vanderbilt University

Gephi (4)

• Identifying relations between characters in Afrikaans, Tshivenḓa, and Xitsonga book
• Teaching at the Intersection of Digital Humanities and Visualization
• Culture Analytics Workshop: Networks
• Extracting a Social Network of Musicologists

Natural Language Toolkit (4)

• Stop Words
• “Network Analysis and Spatial Stylometry in American Drama Studies” (NASSA)
• A comparative study of sentiment and topics in migration related tweets
• Studying Geographical Patterns Across John Milton’s Genres

Voyant Tools (4)

• Trans-Hispanic Networks of Feminist Solidarity: The Rise and Spread of #8M
• From data to visualisation: Dante’s Divine Comedy as a case study
• Teaching at the Intersection of Digital Humanities and Visualization
• Human-Centered Computing for Humanists: Case Studies from the Computational Thinking and Learning Initiative at Vanderbilt University

Drupal (3)

• Ten years recovering the memory of republican exile with citizen collaboration. The results of E-xiliad@s Project: a perspective from the Digital Humanities and the Digital Public History.
• The Historic Graves crowdsourcing project: 10 years transcribing Irish history
• Enhancing Community through Open DH Website Design

Google Maps (3)

• The GeoNewsMiner: An interactive spatial humanities tool to visualize geographical references in historical newspapers
• Time Information System, HuTime — A Visualization and Analysis Tool for Chronological Information of Humanities
• Linking Time, Space, and Statements in One GIS System: A Use Case of Studying Individuals’ Biographies

Tesseract (3)

• A Neural OCR Engine for North Saami
• Fast Search with Poor OCR
• Serving the city: an automatic information extraction for mapping Amsterdam nightlife (1820-1940)

ArcGIS (2)

• Project Twitter Literature: Scraping, Analyzing, and Archiving Twitter Data in Literary Research
• The Fight for National Language Rights in the USSR + “Empowered Minorities: Differential Outcomes For Minorities Enjoying Kremlin Support” (lightning + poster)

Cytoscape (2)

• “Telling bigger stories”: Formal ontological modelling of scholarly argumentation
• “Webs of Violence in Beowulf”

MALLET (2)

• HANDLE: Get a Grip on MALLET
• Topics, buckets, and psychiatry. On the collective creation of a corpus exploration tool

Neo4j (2)

• Visualizing a Translational Queer Poetics
• A Visualization-Assisted Reading Systemfor a Neo-Confucian Canon

Omeka (2)

• The Fight for National Language Rights in the USSR + “Empowered Minorities: Differential Outcomes For Minorities Enjoying Kremlin Support” (lightning + poster)
• Creating Digital Collections with Minimal Infrastructure: Hands On with CollectionBuilder for Teaching and Exhibits

OpenStreetMap (2)

• “Network Analysis and Spatial Stylometry in American Drama Studies” (NASSA)
• Dynamic Systems for Humanities Audio Collections: The Theory and Rationale of Swallow

Some Acknowledgements and Observations

• Programming languages were excluded in this list (for a reality check: Python is mentioned in 26 abstracts, JavaScript in 11, MySQL in 4). Also, no full-text, data or code repositories like HathiTrust, Google Books, GitHub, Dataverse or Islandora were included.
• Disambiguation was needed: The stylo R package didn’t make it into the list, although the term ‘stylo’ is mentioned in two abstracts. But the second time it did not refer to the well-known stylometry library, but to another tool.
• So, hm, only 14 tools that were explicitely mentioned more than once. Our guess is still that not all tools that contributed to a research project or workshop were mentioned, which makes it more difficult to understand how things were done. One reason for this could be the limited writing space for conference abstracts, but there is definitely room for improvement in terms of specifically mentioning the tools used.
• The TAPoR list of tools, even if updated, still isn’t (and never will be) exhaustive, so as usual, take this with a grain of salt.

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