by Jessica Gentile, Social Media Intern

The field of digital humanities has been around for decades, but with recent advancements in digitization and internet technologies, it’s quickly emerged as one of academia’s most exciting areas. It’s even being hailed as the "next big thing" by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Columbia’s Digital Humanities Center (DHC; formerly the Electronic Text Service) offers many resources and services in this blossoming area.

Located in 305 Butler Library, the DHC contains all the tools you need when it comes to working with digital texts, still and moving images, and other materials in the humanities, including:

• Digital text creation and editing software and equipment including 6 dedicated high-end text scanners, 4 dedicated high-end image scanners (which can work well with many text projects, too), and a microfilm scanner, all equipped with ABBYY FineReader, Adobe Acrobat, and Adobe Photoshop to produce either image files or machine-readable texts and more.
• Digital video editing tools such as FinalCut Pro, iMovie, Final Draft, Sound Track Pro and more.
• Textual and qualitative analyisis software such as WordSmith, Crawdad, NVIVO, and TAPor and more.

In addition to all these great resources, expert help from the library staff is always available as well. They’re always open to your comments, questions and suggestions too. Send them an email at dhc@libraries.cul.columbia.edu.