Biologists use extensive databases to manage nearly endless wells of biological information. The discipline of biology utilizes many specific digital tools such as:
- Bioinformatics Software
- Geographic Information Systems,
- Data Visualization Tools
By manipulating digital resources, the process of accumulating and locating information becomes less strenuous. Biology is an extensive field that requires a nearly endless number of digital tools.
Specific Examples
Although Biologists and Digital Humanists use a multitude of different tools to enhance the quality of their projects, the specific software and tools vary from project to project. In the publication about the 1918 pandemic, the primary digital tool used was a visual software called ThemeDelta.
What is ThemeDelta?
An abstract from the ThemeDelta page:
We present ThemeDelta, a visual analytics system for extracting and visualizing temporal trends, clustering, and
reorganization in time-indexed textual datasets. ThemeDelta is supported by a dynamic temporal segmentation algorithm that
integrates with topic modeling algorithms to identify change points where significant shifts in topics occur. This algorithm detects not only the clustering and associations of keywords in a time period, but also their convergence into topics (groups of keywords) that may later diverge into new groups. The visual representation of ThemeDelta uses sinuous, variable-width lines to show this evolution on a timeline, utilizing color for categories, and line width for keyword strength. We demonstrate how interaction with ThemeDelta helps capture the rise and fall of topics by analyzing archives of historical newspapers, of U.S. presidential campaign speeches, and of social messages collected through iNeighbors, a web-based social website. ThemeDelta is evaluated using a qualitative expert user study
involving three researchers from rhetoric and history using the historical newspapers corpus.