Digital Humanities and Social Sciences in Galaxy

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 platform that enables analysis in Digital Humanities (DH) and the Social Sciences in various ways. Due to the platform’s flexibility, you can create an analysis that meets your research needs and provides tools for easier management of research data on the go. Simply visit the Galaxy instance of your choice, such as the European Galaxy Server, create an account, and get started.

Here are some examples:

📄 Publications / Examples

Posters and Articles

See the poster on how Galaxy can help researchers in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences presented at the Historikertag 2025.
Check out the poster on Galaxy in the Humanities that Daniela Schneider and Jan Leendertse presented at the E-Science Days 2025.
Read the German article from Daniela Schneider and Jan Leendertse, building on the above poster. It explains Galaxy’s applicability to Humanities and Social Sciences research within a reproducible research environment.

Looking for more inspiration and use-cases for Galaxy in the arts, Humanities and Social Sciences?

Find a list of our blogposts on the Galaxy Hub!

What is available

Unsure where to start your own Galaxy journey? Maybe you want to check out some tutorials or see what tools you can access in Galaxy?

🎓 Workflows and training materials

Try the Galaxy Training Network and see how others use Galaxy. If you have never worked with Galaxy before, we recommend starting with our Introduction to Digital Humanities in Galaxy. If you want to learn more about Galaxy and Research Data Management, check out this tutorial.

Are you already familiar with Galaxy? Try one of our other tutorials or consider creating one from your workflows for teaching and training. Documentation for providing further tutorials can be accessed here. We welcome new contributions!

Tools

To conduct your own analysis, start by exploring the tools (the term we use in Galaxy for programs) in your Galaxy instance, such as 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 the arrows to find 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.

The following is a non-exhaustive overview of Galaxy tools applicable to Humanities and social sciences use cases. You can find the tools by going to a Galaxy instance, for example, the European Galaxy Server, and clicking “Tools” in the left-hand sidebar. There, you can search the tools by name or browse them by category.

📥 Uploading/accessing data

You can upload your files in various ways in the upload section on the left sidebar of the Galaxy website.

If you have larger amounts of data, check out this tutorial to Bring Your Own Data.
You can access repositories like the BERD Data Portal, Dataverse or Zenodo directly from within Galaxy.
You can access HuggingFace directly from within Galaxy - click here to read how.

🛠️ General tools

Text cleaning tools such as text manipulation, select lines, add lines, search in text files, Line/Word/Character count, etc.
Text file format converters (dos2unix): Convert text files with DOS or Mac line breaks to Unix line breaks and other text cleaning options.
Concatenate multiple datasets tail-to-head while specifying how: Join multiple single files into one bigger file based on your needs.

📖 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.
LLM Hub: Run various locally hosted LLMs within your workflows.
GPT: Large language model - this is only accessible with the OpenAI credentials. Find more information on how to set this up here.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Tools

Vader: Performs sentiment analysis using VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner)in text.
Co-occurrence Analysis: Computes term co-occurrence from NLP-annotated JSON output produced by the spaCy or Stanza Galaxy tools.

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, Subtract 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, Cleanlab Issue Handler to detect and optionally clean data issues, SaQC for quality control

🔊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
WhisperX: Audio conversion including speaker diarisation
FFmpeg Format Converter: Convert between video and audio formats

🎞️ Image and video tools

Tesseract: Optical Character Recognition (OCR). You can see an example workflow using Tesseract to transcribe a German newspaper in this video
flux: text to image conversion
Convert image format (including extracting images from a PDF)
PDFimages: Extract images from a PDF file
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 - see this example workflow to learn more.
Crop image: for cutting images
jdeskew: estimates and corrects the skew angle of a document image - used for image pre-processing.
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.
Yolo DocLayout: Document layout analysis - click here for an example workflow.
LLM Hub: Run various locally hosted LLMs within your workflows.
File Format Identification: Check multimedia files for corrupt or duplicated files

🔃 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
PDFimages to extract images from PDFs
FFmpeg Format Converter: Convert between video and audio formats
Excel to Tabular: Extract a specific sheet (by name) or all sheets from XLS/XLSX file to a tabular file

👩‍💻 Interactive tools

OpenRefine: data cleaning and enrichment - for example, with the Gemeinsame Normdatei (translated as Integrated Authority File) or GND as explained here.
R-Studio
QGIS
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
GROBID DataStet: Identify dataset mentions in scientific articles
GROBID: Extract structured TEI XML from scholarly documents and patents

🤖 AI and Machine Learning tools

flux: text to image conversion
Whisper: Audio to text conversion
LLM Hub: Run various AI models hosted by the Freiburg Compute Center (RZ) without any API keys. Interested? Read here on how to set this up.
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
Cleanlab: Identifies label issues in Machine Learning datasets
Yolo DocLayout: Document layout analysis - click here for an example workflow.

Domain-specific tools

ONTO-ToolKit working with OBO files for ontologies

📤 Export your data

Galaxy lets you share your data in various ways if you prefer. Once you have set your credentials, the tool Export datasets to repositories allows you to directly export your analysis results to the repositories of your choice, such as Zenodo. Check out our example video to see what this could look like.

🏗️ Work in progress

E-Scriptorium: Handwritten text-recognition (HTR)
Stanford Core NLP: Natural language processing tool
New Fave
Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA)

If tools are missing or the list is outdated, please let us know. We are available via this Matrix Channel

🏛️ Upcoming events

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

Join us

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