Reach Beyond the Academy
Build open, sustainable, and collaborative humanities projects. Foreground humanities with technology. Showcase your work. Build digital fluency.
What is Xanthan?
Xanthan is a collection of ready-to-use website templates and extensive documentation designed for reseachers,educators, and students who want to showcase their work online and communicate to a wider audience. No installation, no coding required—just choose a template (which is really a handful of text files that make a website), customize it with your content. Built on simple, durable web technologies that will last decades.
Who is it for?
Scholars seeking public engagement. Move your work beyond paywalls and PDFs. Build digital projects that reach broader audiences—interactive arguments, multimedia essays, research portfolios that demonstrate impact beyond traditional publications.
Instructors teaching digital literacy. Turn collaborative class projects into real public scholarship. Students build collectively around shared themes—local history archives, community documentation, thematic collections—learning web fundamentals while creating work that matters beyond the semester.
Students building professional presence. Create portfolios that showcase your research, teaching, and digital skills. Own your academic identity with a site you control, not scattered across platforms that come and go.
What Can You Build?
Here are a few examples of what people have used Xanthan for:
Ready to start? Pick a template in the Getting Started guide and you’ll have a live site in 10 minutes—ready to customize.
Why Xanthan?
Digital public humanities work should be public in its process as its product. Xanthan counters the trend of enclosing scholarship within proprietary platforms and walled gardens. We embrace minimal computing: static sites built on durable web standards (HTML, CSS, Markdown) that cost almost nothing to host, require minimal maintenance, and are designed to last decades, not just grant cycles.
You control your content
Your site is text files in a repository you control—not locked in a proprietary platform. Move it to any web host. Take your site with you after graduation, between institutions, or to your own domain. It’s yours.
Built to last
HTML, CSS, and Markdown are fundamental web technologies that will outlive any proprietary platform. What you build today will still work in 2050, with literally zero maintenance. Static sites have no databases to secure, no software to update, no security patches to apply. They just work.
You learn digital fluency
Markdown, GitHub, HTML, CSS—foundational skills that are essential for any digital cultural heritage work and standard across institutions. These capabilities form the foundation of digitally-engaged humanities work.
It’s free.
GitHub Pages hosting costs $0/month. No ads. No “freemium” upsells. No bills when traffic increases or you use it a lot.
Open for collaboration
GitHub is an industry-standard collaboration tool. Students and colleagues can see how your site works, learn from your solutions, and build on your code. No expensive team plans for multi-user projects.
Scaffolded for AI Assistance
Most humanists have faced a significant barrier to engaging with technology, because it takes a lot of time for an unclear payoff. Without a tech background, sometimes the learning curve is either too steep or too long (or both). AI tools make it possible to experiment and learn with web technologies like never before.
While digital humanists have debated the most versatile coding language to use, now it’s clear: plain English. You just need an idea of how things should go together and that’s what Xanthan provides. You don’t need a drag-and-drop admin interface anymore! They are only going to slow you down and limit what you can do.
Xanthan provides the scaffolding that makes AI collaboration productive and trustworthy. Our clean, well-documented templates give AI (and you) a known framework to work within.
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“I created a new page but it’s not showing up on my top nav bar.” (AI can update your top-nav file to list your new page and explain how it works)
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“I’m trying to make the font on the this page larger but it’s not changing” (AI will evalaute if you have properly loaded the font and referenced it in your code)
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“I changed my font but now the lines are too close together. Help me increase the line spacing so it’s not so cramped.” (AI will show you where in your CSS file to make a change)
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“I made a bunch of changes on my homepage and now my site isn’t updating at all. Can you find the syntax error or tell me how to find it?” (AI will show you where your error is and tell you how to get more details on the error for nex time.)
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“I really want to have a section on my page with a color background two columns of text. Create a new component that does that and explain how i can use it.”
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“My image carousel is not loading my images. Can you double check the code and if files are in the right place?”
What You Learn (And Why It Matters)
Xanthan isn’t just about creating a website. Process matters as much as product. By working with Xanthan, you build digital fluency that can engage broad audiences:
Design thinking for humanities storytelling
How to keep readers curious and scrolling through your argument
Open infrastructure for collaborative work
Tools and workflows used by museums, archives, and cultural heritage projects
Working productively with AI
Prompting, evaluating suggestions, iterating on digital projects
Assembling components into coherent projects
Understanding how digital projects fit together
Web fundamentals
How content is structured (Markdown, HTML) and styled (CSS)
These aren’t “website skills.” They’re how humanities projects need to be visible in a digital world. Whether you’re building a research project, teaching a course, assembling a digital exhibit, or creating a professional portfolio, these capabilities form the foundation of digitally-engaged work.
Learning by Breaking and Fixing
Xanthan is designed to be experimented with. Try layouts. Test color schemes. Break the CSS. Git version control means you can always restore what worked. The risk of experimentation is low; the learning is real.
Yes, it's like the gum.
Xanthan gum is a polysaccharide used as a binder and emulsifier—it transforms disparate ingredients into something greater than the sum of their parts. It brings things together and keeps them stable.
Similarly, this platform binds simple, durable web technologies into a stable framework for digital scholarship. It lets you mix text, media, code, and argument into a cohesive whole with a long shelf life. Good infrastructure should be reliable, maintainable, and built to last.
Read more about our philosophy of openness.
Ready to build and learn?
Start with the Getting Started guide. Deploy a template in 10 minutes. Customize it with copy-paste examples. Get unstuck with AI when you need help. Build digital literacy while creating real scholarship.