InfoGuides: Humanities GIS: Tools and Software

Data and Visualization Tools

Open Refine
A powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data. OpenRefine can be used to scrape data from websites or convert data between formats.
R Studio
A powerful software for R to phase out a large data, do statistical analysis and visualization.
R Package by Name
A list of available R functions for spatial analysis.
Infoguide on Text & Data Mining
See more resources listed from this guide (via Mason).
Infoguide on R
Lists resources to learn and use R (via Mason).

Voyant
A web-based tool for digital text reading and analysis.
Mallet
A web-based tool for text analysis with topical modelling.
TEI
A standard for the representation of texts in digital form. It provides a way to mark up text for machine readability
R with Analysis of Spatial Data
R packages for moving spatial data into and out of R, and analyzing spatial data in R
R with Spatial Temporal Analysis
R packages for moving spatial data into and out of R, and analyzing spatial data in R

ArcGIS Online
Go to https://mygmu.maps.arcgis.com and log in with your Mason credentials (with 2 Factor Authorization). The new beta version has many enhanced functions including a time slide bar to visualized your time aware layers.
more...less...
Set up a free account to make maps and share them online. Including various ready made applications to build an interactive mapping platform (i.g. story maps).
Carto
A web mapping tool to create maps with geospatial data
Gephi
A network visualization analysis tool
Google My Maps
Easily make online maps with anything related to places.
Kumu
A data visualization tool for organizing complex information into interactive relationship maps
Neatline
A plug in module for Omaka to create maps within Omaka (digital content management) exhibits
Other Recommended Tools
via the Data Visualization Infoguide (at Mason).
Palladio
Stanford product for data visualization and mapping.
StoryMapJS
An open-source tool created by Northwestern University Knight Lab for creating interactive story maps along with time.
Story Maps (ArcGIS)
A great tool to present your documents (text, images, videos) along with maps
Tableau
Easily analyze, visualize and share data
TimeMapper
Transform Google Spreadsheet into an interactive timeline and map.

Georeferencing Tools

Georeferencing refers to the process of taking an image of a map (in a raster format such as JPEG or TIFF) that you've scanned from a paper map, or a scanned image and adding locational information to it so that GIS programs or other mapping applications will be able to place it correctly onto the landscape.

Once properly georeferenced, you can overlay other layers on it or use it as the basis for creating your own editable layers (feature- or vector-based layers. ArcGIS or QGIS can do this job easily but there are several web applications that you can also use. See the list:

QGIS Georeferencing - see the tutorial guide for georeferencing topo maps and scanned images
QGIS tutorial from Mason
ArcGIS Desktop from Mason
Map Warper (via NYPL) - see the tutorial guide on this
Google Fusion Table - see the tutorial on this.
Georeferencing Tutorials - in ArcGIS online and QGIS.
Georeferencing - lesson 4 from Programming Historian.
Scanning and Digitizing - resources available for scanning and digitizing at Mason Libraries

Other Useful Sites

Computation Historical Thinking: With Applications in R
Includes Worksheets in RMarkdown (by by Lincoln Mullen)
GIS Tutorials in R
Brought by Rstudio. Includes tutorials on geocoding, spatial data types, making maps, operations with spatial data and introduction in R.
GPS Visualization-Do- it-Yoursefl
An open source tool that creates maps and profiles from GPS data.
Introduction to visualizing spatial data in R
Tutorial by Lovelace (2015). Basic map-making with R’s ‘base’ graphics and various dedicated map-making packages for R including tmap and leaflet.
Recommended tutorials for text & data mining
See more from the Text and Data Mining Infoguide (at Mason).
Spatial-analyst.net
Topics including temporal spatial analysis, GPS tracking. geovisualization and more.
Tutorials with GIS and spatial data - Neon Data Skills
Includes data to exercise for the tutorials
Using R studio as an interactive GIS with Leaftlet
WorldMap (via Harvard)
A portal to build maps for your research and search layers created with this tool
Spatial Humanities Workshop (via Mason)
The SH workshop materials via GMU History Department (Dr. Mullen)
World Historical Gazeteer (WHG)
A repository for publishing and discovering historical projects including historical maps for scholars and individual researchers.