Finding Humanities Data

• Digital Libraries and Archives:

  • Digital Public Library of America (DPLA): A collection of texts, images, and audiovisual content.

  • Europeana: A digital library providing access to European cultural heritage.

  • HathiTrust Digital Library: Contains a vast range of digitized texts, particularly books.

  • Internet Archive: Offers free access to digital texts, images, and historical snapshots of websites.

• Specialized Humanities Data Sources:

  • ProQuest Historical Newspapers or Gale Primary Sources: Newspaper and periodical archives.

  • Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC): Provides linguistic data sets for research, including spoken and written corpora.

  • American National Corpus (ANC): Text corpus for linguistic research in American English.

  • Google Ngram Viewer: A tool for analyzing the frequency of words or phrases in books across centuries.

• Institutional Repositories:

Many universities and libraries have repositories that house digitized collections and datasets. Examples include Harvard Database Search, Texas Data Repository, and Stanford Digital Repository.

• Define Your Research Needs: Articulate your research question. This will help you narrow down data sources. 

• Search Using Keywords: Search using specific terms (e.g., "historical texts," "census data," "image archives"). Identify synonyms, as this can help yield a broader range of results.

• Use Academic Databases and Aggregators: Tools like JSTOR Data for Research and SSRN often have humanities and social science datasets that could be repurposed for analysis.

Explore Cultural Heritage Websites: Large organizations like UNESCO, which often have open data on cultural heritage sites, and government repositories like the Library of Congress.