What can kiara do?

Kiara enables digital humanities researchers to:

• Create and customize data workflows: Use pre-built modules for common DH tasks in network analysis and topic modeling, or adapt existing Python code into new modular components that can be rearranged and chained together according to your specific research needs.

• Document the research process with comprehensive metadata: Automatically track and record all transformations your data undergoes, creating a complete data lineage with both automatic and manual metadata. This documentation enables critical reflection on your methodological choices and supports writing a self-reflexive meta-history of your relationship with your sources.

• Make informed methodological decisions: Each module provides clear descriptions of the required inputs and expected outputs, helping you understand what's happening at each step and make conscious choices about how to proceed.

• Interactive exploration with accountability: Unlike most batch processing tools, kiara offers an interactive approach that allows you to engage with your data at crucial decision points while still maintaining a record of your actions and choices.

• Share and collaborate: Create modular components that can be shared with other researchers, enabling collaborative development of digital humanities methodologies.

Kiara particularly excels at the preparation, transformation, and initial analysis stages of research, providing fine-grained control over processes that are often hidden inside "black box" tools. By encouraging transparency and traceability, it helps researchers maintain and share their critical thinking as they leverage computational methods.