Toolbox
Here, you will find a general collection of software and tools that, in one way or another, are intended to help get research or analyses done. In the top table, you will find tools that have not been integrated into other applications and are decent stand-alone tools for social scientists. In the bottom table, you will find tools that are quite old now — most of them are outdated or obsolete. Nevertheless, I'm keeping them available here for those users who still would like to access the original programs.
Most of these tools require the some version of the .NET framework in order to run. This framework is available for free via Microsoft at the appropriate download page. Note that this page was originally created in ~2011 and is only updated on an as-needed basis, which is to say that it is rarely updated unless a new program is added.
The Tools
| Program | Version | Upload Date | Citation | Description | Download (Standalone) | Download (Installer) | Source Code | .NET Requirement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Igor | 1.0.4 | 2021-02-19 | Boyd, R. L. (2021). Igor (Version 1.0.4) [Software]. Available from ryanboyd.io/ software/toolbox |
Counts the number of times different types of objects appear across a corpus of images. Built around Alturos.Yolo. | download | n/a | link | Microsoft .NET 4.6.1. Also requires that MS Visual C++ Redist. for VS 2015/2017/2019 x64 are installed. |
| Plug N Chug | 1.01 | 2018-03-13 | Boyd, R. L. (2018). Plug N Chug (Version 1.01) [Software]. Available from ryanboyd.io/ software/toolbox |
General recursive code generator | download | download | link | Microsoft .NET 4.6.2 |
| Royal Sampler | 1.1.4 | 2021-03-26 | Boyd, R. L. (2021). Royal Sampler (Version 1.1.4) [Software]. Available from ryanboyd.io/ software/toolbox |
Takes a large CSV file and subsamples into separate files. Can create both random subsamples (with and without replacement) or "targeted" subsamples of a CSV file. | download | download | link | Microsoft .NET Core 5.0 |
Older and Obsolete Tools
All programs below this point are essentially obsolete as of 2015 or so. They are primarily useful for generating one-off batches of code for very specific analyses, and perhaps for looking at how syntax could be formatted for specific R / SAS methods. Feel free to use them as long as they are useful, although newer software like Plug N Chug are far more versatile.
For most of the rest of these tools, I recommend using BUTTER instead. BUTTER is much more versataile and dynamic, and most of the functionality from the tools below has already been integrated in the software.
| Program | Version | Upload Date | Citation | Description | Download (Standalone) | Download (Installer) | Source Code | .NET Requirement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ExamineTXT | 1.10 | 2018-10-15 | Boyd, R. L. (2018). ExamineTXT (Version 1.10) [Software]. Available from ryanboyd.io/ software/toolbox |
Detect and report the encoding of text-based files in bulk. Built around SimpleHelpers.FileEncoding. Note that this program uses several heuristics to try to identify your files' encodings. While detecting a file's encoding may seem like a simple and arbitrary task, it is actually a very complicated issue (e.g., see here and here). | download | download | link | Microsoft .NET 4.6.2 |
| POSTModern | 0.990 | 2018-08-29 | Boyd, R. L. (2018). POSTModern Part of Speech Tagger (Version 0.990) [Software]. Available from ryanboyd.io/ software/toolbox |
Generates Part of Speech percentages and tags. Built around the Stanford.NLP.NET POS Tagger. Also, just because most models in this setup are based on the Penn Treebank, here is a link to the tags / interpretations: link (see also, here) | download | download | link | Microsoft .NET 4.6.2 |
| KoToken | 0.91 | 2018-04-27 | Boyd, R. L. (2018). KoToken: Korean Text Tokenizer (Version 0.91) [Software]. Available from ryanboyd.io/ software/toolbox |
Tokenizes Korean texts. A simple GUI wrapper around modamoda's tokenization code. | download | n/a | link | Microsoft .NET 4.6.2 |
| SlimCSV | 1.04 | 2020-01-09 | Boyd, R. L. (2020). SlimCSV (Version 1.05) [Software]. Available from ryanboyd.io/ software/toolbox |
Strips columns from CSV files to make for lighter files in your dataset. Can work on CSV files of any size. These days, I recommend using Royal Sampler instead. | download | download | link | Microsoft .NET 4.6.2 |
| Senti-Gent | 0.85 | 2018-06-26 | Boyd, R. L. (2018). Senti-Gent: CoreNLP Sentiment Analysis (Version 0.85) [Software]. Available from ryanboyd.io/ software/toolbox |
A simple, GUI-driven sentiment analysis program. Built around Stanford's CoreNLP for .NET (v3.9.1, English model). Uses a trained RNN model to classify sentences from "very negative" to "very positive". Produces sentence-level and document-level scores as output. | download | n/a | link | Microsoft .NET 4.6.2 |
| TextEmend | 1.01 | 2018-10-31 | Boyd, R. L. (2018). TextEmend (Version 1.01) [Software]. Available from ryanboyd.io/ software/toolbox |
Batch regex.replace() across multiple text files. Requires moderate knowledge of regular expression formulation. Example of input list is located here. | download | download | link | Microsoft .NET 4.6.2 |
| TranscodeTXT | 1.02 | 2019-02-02 | Boyd, R. L. (2019). TranscodeTXT (Version 1.02) [Software]. Available from ryanboyd.io/ software/toolbox |
Change the encoding of text-based files in bulk. Can be used on any plaintext files with any extension (e.g., txt, csv, json, etc.). You must know the input files' encoding to make use of this software. | download | download | link | Microsoft .NET 4.6.2 |
| VADER-Tots | 0.92 | 2018-06-26 | Boyd, R. L. (2018). VADER-Tots Sentiment Analysis (Version 0.92) [Software]. Available from ryanboyd.io/ software/toolbox |
A simple, GUI-driven sentiment analysis program. Built around VaderSharp, which is a .NET port of Hutto & Gilbert's (2014) VADER. Outputs sentence-level and document-level sentiment scores. | download | n/a | link | Microsoft .NET 4.6.2 |
| ZhToken | 0.65 | 2018-05-19 | Boyd, R. L. (2018). ZhToken: Chinese Text Tokenizer (Version 0.65) [Software]. Available from ryanboyd.io/ software/toolbox | Tokenizes Chinese texts using Stanford NLP .NET v3.9.1. | download | n/a | link | Microsoft .NET 4.6.2 |
| 2-Level MLM Generator for R | 1.1.7 | 2014-08-22 | Generates R scripts to run 2-level multilevel linear models. Uses the nlme package. | download | n/a | n/a | Microsoft .NET 4.5 | |
| Linear Mixed Effects Generator | 0.3.0a | 2013-08-05 | Generates R scripts to run LME models. The script generation process needs to be streamlined so that scripts are less redundant (and thus, smaller), but everything is fully functional. | download | n/a | n/a | Microsoft .NET 4.0 Client | |
| MLM Generator | 0.7.0b | 2012-11-26 | Generates SAS scripts for a specific type of MLM. Scripts may be modified to some gain for different models. | download | n/a | n/a | Microsoft .NET 4.0 Client | |
| Multiple Linear Regression Generator | 1.0.0 | 2013-11-22 | Generates R scripts to run simple, 2-predictor multiple linear regressions. Very streamlined. | download | n/a | n/a | Microsoft .NET 4.0 Client | |
| Repeated-Measures GLM Generator | 0.0.4b | 2012-03-01 | Generates scripts for repeated-measures GLM (specifically, LME) models in SAS. | download | n/a | n/a | Microsoft .NET 4.0 Client | |
| SAS Multiple Regression Generator | 0.1.0b | 2013-04-23 | Generates scripts for simple, 2-predictor multiple linear regression models in SAS. | download | n/a | n/a | Microsoft .NET 4.0 Client | |
| StringSmoosh! | 0.2a | 2013-02-06 | This is a zippy little tool that drastically reduces the amount of time required in order to get a large spreadsheet of data into separate files that are intended to be fed into RGCalc | download | n/a | n/a | Microsoft .NET 4.0 Client | |
| The Personality Scrubber | 1.4.2 | 2013-04-25 | This is a tool developed for use in the Robinson Lab at North Dakota State University. The Personality Scrubber generates SAS scripts intended to systematically produce most of the information that one would want to get for certain self-report measures. This is the standalone version (not the private installer version) and, thus, has a specific DLL requirement (download). It may not run on most machines without this DLL. | download | n/a | n/a | Microsoft .NET 4.0 Client | |
| Oldschool Scrubber | n/a | 2011-??-?? | This is a wholly obsolete, older version of what eventually became the Personality Scrubber. It is essentially a very simple batch script that pegs together text files in the same directory. The idea was to have text files for all of the coding schemes that you would want to assemble, then just drop the appropriate ones in an empty folder with a copy of the scrubber, and it would piece them together for you -- no muss, no fuss. I have included a link here largely for posterity and because I have a soft spot in my heart for batch scripting. If you want to apply it to other purposes, be my guest. I've included a few example files just for kicks. | download | n/a | n/a | n/a |