Software for Scholars

This page lists software especially designed to meet the needs of scholars in the panoply of fields associated with STS. Given that commercial software publishers can afford to advertise, perhaps the focus should be placed on free/libre/open source software, but there’s certainly room for less-well-known commercial apps.

You have GOT to try this

May be useful to some

Nascent, of borderline interest, buggy, or less-than-brilliantly conceived

Scribe

URL: http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/scribe/index.php

DOWNLOAD: MacOSX Windows XP

LICENSE: Unclear. Scribe employs a runtime version of FileMakerPro as well as a number of modules that aren’t open source; other components are licensed under the GNU GPL. It’s free, and I think it is freely redistributable, but it isn’t open source (the source code isn’t available).

DESCRIPTION: Scribe 2.5 is a free cross-platform note-taking program designed especially with historians in mind. Think of it as the next step in the evolution of traditional 3×5 note cards. Scribe allows you to manage your research notes, quotes, thoughts, contacts, published and archival sources, digital images, outlines, timelines, and glossary entries. You can create, organize, index, search, link, and cross-reference your note and source cards. You can assemble, print, and export bibliographies, copy formatted references to clipboard, and import sources from online catalogs. You can store entire articles, add extended comments on each card in a separate field, and find and highlight a particular word within a note or article. Scribe’s uses range from an undergraduate history research seminar to a major archival research project.

=Tapor (Text Analysis Portal for Research)

URL: http://taporware.mcmaster.ca/~taporware/

LICENSE: Currently, the only version available is online and is free.

DESCRIPTION: For at least three decades, ethnographers have used text analysis software to reveal patterns in voluminous amounts of textual data that they’ve collected, using such tools as concordances, collocation, and word frequency analysis. The Tapor project extends text analysis to the online world in that it can process HTML and XML files without requiring you to strip out the tags. You can visit the site, supply the URL of a text to be analyzed, choose options, and view the output online. However, analysis is limited to documents less than 50K in length.