About
A key strength of Xanthan is its foundation in stable, open-source technologies. Instead of relying on closed commercial services that can change direction, pricing, or availability with little warning, Xanthan is built on tools that are transparent, community maintained, and designed for long-term preservation. Static websites—simple HTML files generated from readable text—have an exceptional track record of durability. They load quickly, require almost no server infrastructure, and can be archived, migrated, or remixed with ease. This makes them an ideal medium for humanities work, where citations, context, and continuity matter as much as visual polish.
Choosing open-source, static tools also encourages technical literacy in a supportive way. Rather than hiding the mechanics of digital publishing, Xanthan exposes just enough to help scholars understand how their work lives on the web. That awareness fosters independence: you can maintain control of your research outputs, experiment with design, and ensure that your projects remain accessible years after grant cycles, institutional platforms, or proprietary services have moved on.
For emerging academics, a stable digital footprint is not just a convenience—it’s an essential part of professional identity. A personal site or project sandbox becomes a space to experiment with ideas, share works-in-progress, document research methods, and demonstrate competencies that don’t always appear on a CV. It offers a home for syllabi, datasets, digital exhibits, StoryMap-like essays, and other forms of public-facing scholarship that increasingly shape how humanities work is evaluated and understood.
A sustainable website also signals to collaborators, hiring committees, and community partners that you take stewardship of your work seriously. Instead of ephemeral links or platform-bound projects, you can point to a consistent, well-curated portfolio that reflects your scholarly voice. In a field where openness, accessibility, and public engagement are central values, owning your own digital space can be a quiet but powerful form of academic agency.
Xanthan is designed to support that agency. It gives you a long-lasting foundation to build on, a flexible workshop for creative experimentation, and a publishing model that aligns with the principles of open scholarship. Whether you’re drafting your first digital exhibit or building a long-term research hub, Xanthan provides a reliable place for your work to grow.
On “showing your work”
“Show your work” is a classroom instruction before it is anything else: show your working, not just your answer. That is the sense Xanthan means. A finished website, like a finished proof, hides the reasoning that produced it—and in scholarship the reasoning is often the part worth teaching.
It is also the title of Austin Kleon’s 2014 book on sharing creative process in public, which makes a related argument for artists and makers: think process, not product. The overlap is real and worth naming.
Xanthan takes the idea somewhere that book does not go. Kleon writes for the individual creative building an audience. The work Xanthan is built for is usually collective—a seminar, a workshop, a studio, a class that will hand its site to the next class—and the people who need to see the working are not an audience at all. They are students, collaborators, and whoever inherits the project after everyone involved has moved on.
Project Origins
Xanthan was created by Fred Gibbs at the University of New Mexico as part of ongoing research into sustainable, accessible digital infrastructure for humanities scholarship. The project emerged from years of teaching digital methods and watching students struggle with platform lock-in, unsustainable subscription models, and tools that taught them nothing about how the web actually works.
The goal was to create something different: a toolkit that respects both beginners and the complexity of scholarly work, that teaches transferable skills while producing professional results, and that will still work decades from now without constant maintenance or subscription fees.
Xanthan is developed under UNM’s Amaranth Digital Humanities Studio and released as open source (GPL-3.0) to encourage adaptation, contribution, and community growth.
Get Involved
Xanthan welcomes contributions from humanists, developers, educators, and anyone interested in making digital scholarship more accessible. Whether you:
- Fix documentation typos
- Add new components or features
- Share how you’re using Xanthan in your work
- Suggest improvements or report issues
- Help other users in discussions
…you’re helping build better infrastructure for humanities work.
See our contributing guide to get started, or join the conversation in GitHub Discussions.