Skip to content
Skip to main content

About this free course

Become an OU student

Share this free course

Digital humanities: humanities research in the digital age
Digital humanities: humanities research in the digital age

Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.

1.3 DIY tools

Increasingly tools are available on the web (rather than needing to be installed on your machine), and they increasingly have access to digital sources, making it easy to import the content that you need. Online services make content available to these tools via an ‘application programming interface’ (API).

Some researchers also write computer programs to help with their research – creating new tools for themselves and others. You don’t need to program to do digital humanities, but it can be useful.

Programming

If you are interested in learning more about coding there are many resources available such as librarycarpentry.org/ [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Even if you don’t become an expert coder, it’s useful to gain intuitions about ‘computational thinking’ within Humanities.