Subject and Course Guides: Humanities Data: Finding Data

DH Data Sources

Martin Grandjean [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

Kaggle
Kaggle has over 19,000 public datasets that can be downloaded in a variety of formats.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a collection of over 60,000 free eBooks. You can download books as .txt files and use them for text analysis in a tool like Voyant.
Google Dataset Search
A search engine that lets you search for datasets from a variety of disciplines.
GitHub
Sometimes, researchers and institutions post their data on GitHub. You can download their data as a CSV file and explore it with your tool of choice. Some organizations and institutions that have uploaded data include FiveThirtyEight, the Getty Museum, and more.

Data formats

There are many different file formats to choose from when working with humanities data. The format you choose will depend on the kind of data you are using, what tool you are using to analyze or visualize it, and what you want to do with it.

Some examples of file formats you'll use for different projects include:

Maps - KML, KMZ
Text - TXT
Spreadsheets - CSV, TSV, XSLX

According to Digital Humanities at UC Berkeley: "When possible, opt for human-readable file formats over proprietary, binary file formats (i.e. choose .csv over .xslx for spreadsheets; choose .txt over .doc for text files). Proprietary formats, such as those created by Microsoft Excel and Word, contain extraneous binary code that make them less transparent and harder to manage over the years. Human-readable formats, like .csv, can be used directly by many tools and can be opened and manipulated with a simple text editor."

University of Nebraska - Lincoln - Best Practices for DH Projects

DH Data Resources

Data Management - DH 101