CDS Workstation Software

The Center for Digital Scholarship houses six Workstations available for patrons to use a growing number of specialized software provided by the Library. They can be reserved online, although walk-in use is also allowed. Workstations include a computer loaded with a growing selection of specialized software. They are listed below alongside links to relevant resources and tutorials.

Use of Library computers and wireless networks is subject to the terms of the Library's Policy on Acceptable Use of Electronic Resources and the University's Policy on Information Technology Use and Access. Some software require third party accounts, which may only be available to current UChicago students and/or faculty.

Gephi is an open-source software that offers users a comprehensive set of features for network visualization and analysis. The software allows users to import, explore, analyze, spatialize, filter, cluster, manipulate and export all types of networks. Additionally, Gephi helps data analysts reveal patterns and trends, highlight outliers and tell a story with their data.

Visit Gephi's Quick Start page to get started with the software and this Youtube video for any questions about the software's latest update!

OpenRefine is a data cleaning, transformation, and analysis tool originally made by Google. It's a great way to quickly clean large batches of data or find patterns in datasets.

Learn the basics about OpenRefine from their user manual or try lessons on Cleaning Data and Fetching and Parsing Data from the Web made by Programming Historian.

QGIS is a geographic information system (GIS) software suite known for its powerful spatial analysis capabilities. The suite contains software that supports geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, map and graphics production and spatial and temporal modeling and visualization. Additionally, the software supports raster, vectors, image processing and graphic data, and can not only connect to spatial databases but also interface with a variety of third-party systems and libraries.

Visit the QGIS website for step-by-step overviews of procedures and tips! We also recommend Frank Donnelly of Brown University's Introduction to GIS with QGIS for additional information.

RStudio is software environment for statistical computing and graphics creation. RStudio provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques that allows for data manipulation, data visualization, data analyzation, calculations and the creation of graphics. There are numerous add-ons and modules available for RStudio, which also help to facilitate the manipulation, visualization, analyzation and creation of data.

There are plenty of resources available for using R! Some good places to start for beginners include RStudio Education and Swirl. UChicago students also have access to LinkedIn Learning video courses on the multitude of uses for R. For specific project examples, students can visit the Programming Historian.

Stata is a statistical software that provides a comprehensive set of tools for data manipulation, visualization and statistical analysis. Stata is used by researchers in many fields including biomedicine, political science, economics, sociology, data science and more. Stata can be used for data management, analyzation, manipulation, exploration, automated reporting and reproducibility, and graphical visualizations of data.

Visit Stata's resources page and UCLA's learning modules for a variety of helpful information and guides.

Tabula is an open-source tool that allows users to extract data tables from PDFs. The software automatically detects and identifies data tables within PDF documents and then allows users to extract and then export these tables into various file formats such as CSV, TSV, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and others.

Visit Tabula's website to get started.

The CDS is always looking to hear from the UChicago community about what digital tools they are using in their scholarship. If you have a tool you'd like the CDS to consider providing its users, please share it with us using this form!