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Digital Exhibits: Other Tools

This guide will walk you through the basics of preparing your content for digital exhibition, and will give an overview of several applications that can be used to create exhibits.
Last Updated: Jan 31, 2024 11:31 AM

Other Tools

While this guide focuses on three applications there are, of course, many others available. This is a non-exhaustive list of tools that may be of use in creating a digital exhibit or, more generally, in a digital scholarship project. If you've worked with applications that aren't listed that you think should be, drop me an email with your suggestion. Likewise, if you've worked with any of these tools and have feedback you'd like to share, I'd love to hear about that as well.


Color Picking

  • Color blindness simulator - If you are not suffering from a color vision deficiency it is very hard to imagine how it looks like to be colorblind. The Color BLIndness Simulator can close this gap for you.
  • ColorBrewer2 - A web tool for selecting colors for maps

Digital Exhibits

  • Exhibit - A IIIF storytelling tool from The University of St Andrews. Created by Mnemoscene with support from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund.
  • Mukurtu - Mukurtu (MOOK-oo-too) is a grassroots project aiming to empower communities to manage, share, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways.
  • Spotlight - An open source solution enabling librarians, curators, and others to create attractive, feature-rich websites that highlight digital collections.
  • Wax - Wax is a minimal computing project for producing digital exhibitions focused on longevity, low costs, and flexibility.

Dataset Creation

Data Management

  • OpenRefine - A free, open source, powerful tool for working with messy data

Data Visualization

  • DataWrapper - Enrich your stories with charts, maps, and tables.
  • RAW Graphs - an open source data visualization framework built with the goal of making the visual representation of complex data easy for everyone.
  • Tableau Public -  a free platform to publicly share and explore data visualizations online
  • TimelineJS - an open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines

GIS and related

  • ArcGIS Online - Connect people, locations, and data using interactive maps. Work with smart, data-driven styles and intuitive analysis tools. Share your insights with the world or specific groups.
  • ArcGIS StoryMaps - create inspiring, immersive stories by combining text, interactive maps, and other multimedia content.
  • ArcGIS Survey123 - a simple and intuitive form-centric data gathering solution
  • Georeferencer - an online tool that assigns geographical location to any image
  • Historypin - a place for people to share photos and stories, telling the histories of their local communities
  • ODK - build powerful offline forms to collect the data you need wherever it is

Text Encoding

  • Text Encoding Initiative - The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form.
  • TAPAS - the TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service hosted by Northeastern University Library's Digital Scholarship Group

Text Analysis

  • AntConc - a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis.
  • HathiTrust algorithms - web-based, click-and-run tools to perform computational text analysis on volumes in the HathiTrust Digital Library
  • Lexos - a web-based tool to help you explore your favorite corpus of digitized texts
  • Voyant - a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts.

License