Digital Humanities and Social Sciences in Galaxy

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Whether you are analysing texts, images, audio data or other media, Galaxy is here to help!

How can you use Galaxy for Digital Humanities analysis?

Galaxy is a flexible setup, so it can leverage analysis in Digital Humanities (DH) and Social Sciences in various ways. Due to the platform's flexibility, you can create an analysis that fits your research needs and supports you with tools for easier research data management on the go.

Here are some examples:

Publications / Examples

  • We explored Instagram posts from the Bavarian State elections provided by the BERD Data Portal. Read more to see how the dataset was cleaned and mined to visualise not only the most frequent words in the post to get an idea of its contents, but also extracted and mapped where most of those posts originated in just a couple of steps in Galaxy.

  • Check out the poster on Galaxy in the Humanities that Daniela Schneider and Jan Leendertse presented at the E-Science Days 2025.

  • A German article from Daniela Schneider and Jan Leendertse, building on this presentation, is forthcoming.

  • Check out this article to get an example workflow of how you can automatically transcribe and translate an audio file using Galaxy.

What is available?

To make your own analysis, start by checking out the tools (the term we use in Galaxy for programs) in your Galaxy instance, for example, Galaxy Europe. On the website, you can access the tools by clicking on the bar on the left-hand side. The second icon there is tools. You can search there or click on the arrows and search for more details in the help text. You can combine various Galaxy tools into workflows to automate and re-run the analysis or export the data you created to a repository.

Tools

This is a non-exhaustive overview of Galaxy tools applicable to Humanities and Social sciences use-cases.

General tools

  • Text cleaning tools such as text manipulation, select lines, add lines, search in text files, Line/Word/Character count, etc.

Text tools

  • diff: Comparing two text documents
  • Editor: make manual changes that will not be tracked. Find the editor on the left-hand side panel under Visualisations.
  • Regular Expressions: Various tools in Galaxy to help you select specific patterns from your text as explained here.
  • GPT: Large language model - this is only accessible with the OpenAI credentials. Find more information on how to set this up here.

Tools for working with tabular data

  • Text Manipulation for tabular data: Replace Text, Replace text in a specific column, Replace parts of text, text reformatting, Text transformation, Sort a row, reverse a file, Compute an expression, Regex replace, Subtract Whole Dataset, Merge Columns, Unique occurences, Add column, Merge Columns together, Convert delimiters to TAB, Change Case, Trim characters, Secure Hash
  • Filter and Sort for tabular data: Unique, Unique lines, Sort, Select random lines, Select first lines (head), Select last lines (tail), Remove beginning, Cut columns, Search in textfiles, XPath, Column arrange, Query tabular, Filter data on any column, Sort data, Select lines, Remove columns, Sort Column Order
  • Join, Substract and Group for tabular data: Join two files, Split file, Reverse, Transpose, Datamash, Subtract, Join two Datasets, Group data by a column
  • Further: Tabular data prediction using TabPFN

Audio tools

  • Audio Player: Find the player to listen to audio files in Galaxy on the left-hand side panel under Visualisations.
  • Whisper: Audio to text conversion
  • FFmpeg Format Converter: Convert between video and audio formats

Image and video tools

  • flux: text to image conversion
  • Convert image format
  • Enhance contrast: image pre-processing
  • Convert coordinates to label map: converts a GeoJSON of an image with rectangles to a label image (or binary image) for later cropping
  • Crop image: for cutting images
  • Image annotator: Annotate your images manually in Galaxy on the left-hand side panel under Visualisations.
  • Tiff viewer: View TIFF files in Galaxy on the left-hand side panel under Visualisations.
  • Video player: View video files in Galaxy on the left-hand side panel under Visualisations.

File or format conversion

  • General tools: Tabular to CSV, CSV to Tabular, convert delimiter to TAB,
  • markitdown: Converting documents to markdown format - for easier processing with large language models.
  • Convert image format
  • FFmpeg Format Converter: Convert between video and audio formats

Interactive tools

  • OpenRefine: data cleaning and enrichment
  • R-Studio
  • GIS
  • Jupyter Notebook

Visualisations

  • general: Bar chart, Histogram, Scatterplot, Plotting tool for multiple series, Boxplot, etc.
  • Word cloud
  • OpenLayers map: Visualise locations on a map with GeoJSON

Research tools

  • OpenAlex explorer: Research and fetch papers from OpenAlex using DOI or title

AI and Machine Learning tools

  • flux: text to image conversion
  • Whisper: Audio to text conversion
  • GPT: Large language model - this is only accessible with the OpenAI credentials. Find more information on how to set this up here.
  • TabPFN: Tabular data prediction

Domain-specific tools

Work in progress

  • Yolo DocLayout: Document layout analysis
  • WhisperX: Audio conversion including speaker diarisation
  • E-Scriptorium: Handwritten text-recognition (HTR)
  • Stanford Core NLP: Natural language processing tool
  • Optical character recognition tool (OCR)

If tools are missing or information is not up-to-date in the list, please help us! We are available via this Matrix Channel

Workflows and tutorials

You can find an overview of the existing tutorials on the dedicated DH-section of the Galaxy Training Network. Those are open educational resources (OER) that you can create from your workflows or reuse in teaching and training. Documentation for providing further tutorials can be accessed here.

In addition to those mentioned above, we are currently working on:

  • Galaxy introduction for Digital Humanities
  • Using OpenRefine in Galaxy to analyse data

Training material and events

The Galaxy community organises regularly scheduled training events. You can check the event pages here to get the latest ones.

Join us

Anybody interested in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences in Galaxy is welcome to join this community! Join our Matrix Channel here