Xanthan for digital scholarship
Xanthan gives your research, teaching, and collections a website of their own. Begin with a starter site, then shape the words, images, and reading experience around your work.
Your pages are text files you can read, edit, and keep. Write directly in them, or ask an AI assistant to help with the layout. You make the editorial decisions.
The other xanthan. It’s in a ton of shelf-stable food to improve texture and stability. A little goes a long way.
Your writing and layout choices live together in one readable document. Compare the page with the text that makes it, then choose an image, a pull quote, or a note. Change a heading or a few words to see the page respond.
A caption connects what readers see to what you want them to notice.
The page readers see
Buildings tell one part of a campus’s history. This essay follows the paths, gathering places, and everyday journeys that give those buildings meaning.
An aerial view makes the campus’s paths and open spaces visible.
Tracing the paths between buildings brings everyday journeys into view. The spaces between landmarks become part of the story.
## Reading a campus
Buildings tell one part of a campus's history. This essay follows the paths, gathering places, and everyday journeys that give those buildings meaning.
{% include images/figure.html
image-path="/assets/images/site/default.jpg"
image-width="80%"
caption="An aerial view makes the campus's paths and open spaces visible."
alt-text="Aerial photograph of campus buildings, roads, and open ground."
%}
### Paths and gathering places
Tracing the paths between buildings brings everyday journeys into view. The spaces between landmarks become part of the story.Edit a heading or paragraph. Then try changing 80% to 50%, or rewrite the caption. Edits here stay in this example.
A pull quote lets a key thought linger in the reader's attention.
The page readers see
Buildings tell one part of a campus’s history. This essay follows the paths, gathering places, and everyday journeys that give those buildings meaning.
Tracing the paths between buildings brings everyday journeys into view. The spaces between landmarks become part of the story.
## Reading a campus
Buildings tell one part of a campus's history. This essay follows the paths, gathering places, and everyday journeys that give those buildings meaning.
{% include typography/pullquote.html
text="Buildings tell one part of a campus's history."
width="80%"
%}
### Paths and gathering places
Tracing the paths between buildings brings everyday journeys into view. The spaces between landmarks become part of the story.Edit the prose around the pull quote, or choose another sentence for text.
A note keeps sources, methods, or a useful aside close to the argument.
The page readers see
Buildings tell one part of a campus’s history. This essay follows the paths, gathering places, and everyday journeys that give those buildings meaning.
Tracing the paths between buildings brings everyday journeys into view. The spaces between landmarks become part of the story.
## Reading a campus
Buildings tell one part of a campus's history. This essay follows the paths, gathering places, and everyday journeys that give those buildings meaning.
{% include typography/alert.html
class="info"
title="Reading the photograph"
heading-level=3
text="An aerial photograph shows routes and buildings, but leaves out the voices of people who used them. Read the view alongside oral histories and other accounts."
%}
### Paths and gathering places
Tracing the paths between buildings brings everyday journeys into view. The spaces between landmarks become part of the story.Rewrite the note's title and text, or edit the prose around it. Edits here stay in this example.
The starter supplies the design. Your document supplies the words, images, and editorial choices. You can edit them yourself or ask AI to help.
Course archives, oral history collections, digital exhibits, scrolling narratives, mapped directories, annual reports—every one of these is a real Xanthan site, and every one of them is plain text underneath.
Successive classes each add buildings to a shared campus archive, so the site keeps growing after any one semester ends.
Several courses contribute to one site, showing how student essays from different classes can share a home and a design.
An object-centred exhibit where each artefact gets its own page, a structure students can fill in one item at a time.
A single long scrolling argument, showing what one student can build when the format is a narrative rather than a page.
Each location is a page and a point on a map, so a class can divide a region between them and still produce one atlas.
A short workshop left behind a permanent essay collection instead of a folder of files nobody opens again.
UNM's Digital Humanities Studio.
Students research goods, routes, and objects separately, and the cards assemble their work into one navigable collection.
Interviews gathered by many students become a public archive that the communities involved can actually read.
Each student recovers one woman's history; together the pages become a reference work no single essay could be.
Student writing on music and politics, published for readers outside the class rather than submitted and filed away.
Essays and oral history excerpts side by side, letting students contribute in whichever form suits their material.
Digital humanities work should be as open in its process as in its product. Xanthan is built on a simple conviction: scholars shouldn’t have to rent their web presence from proprietary platforms, and they shouldn’t need a computer science degree to publish online.
Your site is text files in a repository you control. Move it to any host, take it between institutions, keep it after the grant ends. Hosting on GitHub Pages is free—no ads, no subscription, no terms-of-service surprises.
HTML, CSS, and Markdown have worked for decades and will keep working. There’s no database to secure, no software to update, no security patches to apply. What you build today will still run in 2050 without maintenance.
Start with plain-language prompts and Markdown, then pick up HTML, CSS, and Git as you go. These aren’t “website skills”—they’re foundational to digitally-engaged humanities work, and you learn them by building something real.
Your site is a folder of plain documents, not text sealed inside a system you can’t open. A colleague can fix a typo, a student can add an essay, and you can hand the whole thing to whoever comes next—without everyone arriving with the same technical confidence.
AI is more useful when you can direct the work and understand what changed. Xanthan gives you and your assistant a shared vocabulary: a figure with its caption, a pull quote, a gallery. Each is a named piece with a defined job and documented options.
Put the photograph beside the opening paragraph, keep its caption, and leave the rest of the page as it is.
The assistant can translate that request into a focused change to the relevant component. The same names and documentation let you follow the work, learn the vocabulary, and make the next edit yourself.
You remain the editor: judging the result, asking for revisions, and deciding what serves your argument. The framework supplies the structure; the vision is yours.
Scholars seeking public engagement. Move your work beyond paywalls and PDFs. Build research portfolios, multimedia essays, and interactive arguments that reach broader audiences—on a site you control, not a platform that controls you.
Instructors teaching digital literacy. Turn 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 outlasts the semester.
Students building professional presence. Create a portfolio that showcases your research, teaching, and digital skills. Own your academic identity rather than scattering it across platforms.
Xanthan gum is a polysaccharide used as a binder and emulsifier—it transforms disparate ingredients into something cohesive and stable. This platform does the same: it binds simple, durable web technologies into a framework for digital scholarship. Text, media, code, and argument become a coherent whole with a long shelf life.
Good infrastructure, like good binding agents, should be reliable, unobtrusive, and built to last. Read more about our philosophy.
This is one of those things that takes longer to describe than to do. The guides run long because every step is written out—you shouldn’t have to work anything out on your own, or guess what a page means by “commit.”
The doing is short. Make a site from one of the starting points, change a line of text, watch it go live. Ten minutes of that will teach you more about how this works than any paragraph here can.