Creating Open Source, Multilingual DH Tools with Rust

This poster was presented on July 17, 2025 at the DH2025 conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

Rust is a popular and still-growing programming language, but has relatively little use in the digital humanities. This poster will explore the benefits Rust can offer DH practitioners and researchers through a case study of three DH packages I wrote in the language, exploring the structure and practical application of these packages in addition to the way Rust lends itself to their use cases.

The packages highlighted in this poster include a package for performing lemmatization, a key NLP process, on text; a package for assessing the readability of a text containing a variety of algorithms to choose from; and a package to perform stylometric analysis on text. They were all built with multilingual support in mind, and as such are specifically designed to move outside of an Anglocentric paradigm often found in technologies for NLP and textual analysis, creating new opportunities for multilingual and non-English textual analysis and digital humanities. This poster will discuss how this multilingual approach is complemented and supported by the features of Rust, as well as how these packages create new opportunities for DH practitioners to use the Rust language in their work, providing groundwork for others to build on. It will also explore how the packages can be used both by experienced programmers and as demonstrations of the applicability of Rust to DH in a pedagogical context while furthering natural language processing and multilingual support within the Rust ecosystem.