The "foundational myth" (as cited on the home page of the Digital Theology Lab) of digital humanities was a Jesuit priest named Roberto Busa who sought to explore the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Text analysis tools like NVivo and Voyant allow for insights into a work previously undiscoverable, e.g. word usage and frequency. The portion of the guide will provide information concerning some of the tools at your disposal as an affiliate at Boston University, locating data, and resources available at Boston University.
Using NVivo, researchers are able analyze text documents like sermons, interviews, survey responses, articles and writings, social media, and more to discover and present key insights about a topic. NVivo is a resource available to the Boston University community for free for Windows and Mac (note: the Mac version lacks some functionality available in Windows). The School of Theology Library offers a workshop on using NVivo in theological research. Additional information for getting started can be found via the NVivo Knowledge Center and IS&T-offered training. Wide ranges of file types and data can be uploaded and analyzed within NVivo (text and video files, Zotero citations, images, etc.) Once coding is finished, NVivo offers a multitude of visualization options like word clouds, concept maps, tree maps, sunbursts, and more.
NCapture is a free web-browser extension for Chrome and Internet Explorer that enables you to gather web content to import into NVivo. Capture webpages, Tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook content; it is then able to be imported into NVivo. Social media data captured over time can be merged into one file.
Open-source, free-to-use web-based tool that provides word clouds, contexts, word maps, vocabulary density, and trends with little fuss and little effort getting off the ground. Several documents can be added into a corpus to scan (take, for example, this Jane Austen corpus here). Panels can be exported and placed within webpages, blogs, essays published online, etc.