Maximizing Minimalism
DIY Digital Publishing Tools Starring Markdown
ASECS 2026, Philadelphia
Tools and platforms
Digital scholarship publication
- CollectionBuilder - open-source static digital exhibit tool (Jekyll)
- Quire - static digital book or edition tool, created and maintained by the Getty
- Ed and Wax - open-source tools for static digital editions and digital exhibitions, respectively, both using Jekyll and created by minicomp
- Juncture - open-source visual essay tool created by JSTOR Labs
- Canopy IIIF - open-source static digital exhibition/essay tool from IIIF manifests and markdown
Other tools and platforms
- Pandoc - open-source CLI application for converting between document formats (including from Markdown to HTML, docx, pdf, and more)
- Quarto - open-source tool for building static OERs, computational notebooks, and other simple websites
- Neocities.org - free static webhosting, featuring HTML tutorials and discoverability options
- Obsidian - free (for local use) markdown-based knowledge management tool with database-like features
- Twine - open-source tool for creating static text-based games and nonlinear stories (uses WYSIWYG editor and simple markup)
- Simply Static - WordPress plugin to export a WP site as static HTML
- Open-source static website frameworks: Jekyll, Build Awesome (aka Eleventy), Hugo, Gatsby, VuePress, Pelican
Resources
- Lib-Static: a methodology, a collection, a community
- Minimal Computing - blog with definitions and resources
- Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown, Programming Historian tutorial by Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff
Projects
- Digital Grainger: An Online Edition of The Sugar-Cane (1764) - minimal edition of James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane created using Ed by Julie Chun Kim, Cristobal Silva and colleagues at Fordham and Columbia.
- Recusant Readers: Reading with the Finches of Mawdesley - digital collection created using CollectionBuilder by Stonyhurst College Historic Libraries.
- Transpacific Crossings: Art, Trade, and the Manila Galleon, edited by Jorge F. Rivas Pérez, Karina H. Corrigan, and Kathryn Santner, symposium papers from 2024 symposium at the Denver Art Museum focused on Spanish colonialism and trade from 1565-1815. Created using Quire.
- Plant Humanities Lab - visual essays created using Juncture by Dumbarton Oaks.
Bibliography
- Risam, Roopika, and Alex Gil. “Introduction: The Questions of Minimal Computing.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 016, no. 2 (2022).
- Kleppman, Martin, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg, and Mark McGranaghan. “Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud.” 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward!). October 2019, 154–78. https://doi.org/doi:10.1145/3359591.3359737.
- Dombrowski, Quinn. “Minimizing Computing Maximizes Labor.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 016, no. 2, June 2022.
- Sander, Christoph. “Minimal Computing and Weak AI for Historical Research: The Case of Early Modern Church Administration.” Histories, vol. 5, no. 4, Dec. 2025, p. 59. www.mdpi.com, https://doi.org/10.3390/histories5040059.