Thanks to The Wired Campus, I recently stumbled across this new wiki whilst looking for a visualization tool for a ccLearn research project. The new wiki is called Digital Research Tools, also known as DiRT. DiRT is edited by a team of librarians from Rice University’s Digital Media Center and Sam Houston State University’s Newton Gresham library. Basically, DiRT reviews the myriad research tools available for free (and some for profit) on the internet in a human-readable way, so that “professors, students, think-tankers, corporate intelligence gatherers, and other inquisitive folks [can] do their work better.” These “snapshot reviews” are immensely helpful for even seasoned researchers, since the web is always popping up with new open source tools. To see a list of tools in DiRT’s queue and to add your own, check out their del.icio.us page.

So far, the reviews cover tools that allow you to analyze texts, author interactive works, collect and visualize data, conduct linguistic research, and more. All current and future reviews are licensed CC BY.