Looking for a tool (preferably free and easy to use) for a scholarly project?  Maybe you need to clean up, model, or interpret data. Perhaps you are looking at ways to visualize information, or you have a large number of audio files that you have to transcribe. Building a website for your project? Trying to learn how to program? Look no further, here’s DiRT, Digital Research Tools. “The DiRT Directory is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. DiRT makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.” Beyond your own scholarly endeavors, think of how these tools could be used by your students for their course research projects.

The welcome page greets uses with “I need a research tool to…” followed by a long list of possible tasks.  Each category has a number of suggested tools. Many of these are free and open source, many have been developed at universities to accommodate specific faculty scholarly needs.

There are several ways to search for tools beyond the list of tasks. Searching by category will lead you to the TaDiRAH (Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities) listing. “TaDiRAH breaks down the research lifecycle into high-level “goals”, each with a set of “methods. …In addition to goals/methods, TaDiRAH includes open lists of ‘techniques’ (which are more specific than methods, and may be used with more than one method) and ‘research objects’.” This will give you and your students another way to think about and find tools appropriate for your needs.

You don’t need an account to use DiRT to find a tool. If you want to add a review of a tool,  have found something that you like to use that isn’t listed on DiRT and would like to add it, or have developed a tool that you want to share, it is easy to create an account for these purposes.

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Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image source: DiRT logo: http://dirtdirectory.org/