Humanities CMS

It’s a good time to be humanities scholar in need of a complex content management system. While WordPress in all its convenience and glory will always be there for the writer who simply wants to write and publish digitally, there are more complex CMSes for the rich display and collaborative creation of humanities scholarship that are growing in accessibility.

Neatline, which is a set of geospatial and temporal extensions to Omeka, is now available to give scholars out-of-the-box capacity to represent complex and sophisticated collections of spatiotemporally-annotated information. I hope to soon put up an extensive review of Neatline, which I’ve been working with for a few months now for two projects here at Stanford, with a third in the process of getting set up. Any digital humanities scholar thinking of creating and presenting rich data should try out Neatline.

There’s also a little thing called Drupal, which while being far more extensible, is also far more intimidating. Quinn Dombrowski and I are in the process of writing (out in the public) a manual on how to use Drupal, oriented toward humanities scholars. Drupal for Humanists is rather rough right now, but will progress and grow to explain this robust content management system for the domain of humanities scholarship. I want to stress here that my role in this is very much an “and bordering on with” because Quinn is far more of the Drupal Guru here than I, with my real contribution coming in an explanation of how to use Drupal’s surprisingly robust spatial data capabilities.

As a note, the forhumanities.org domain was registered with the intent that any digital humanities scholar that wanted to build a similar manual for other tools or methods in the humanities (Whether it was Network Analysis for Humanists or Gephi for Humanists, or Text Analysis for Humanists or MALLET for humanists) would be welcome to do so.

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One Response to Humanities CMS

  1. Megan Miller says:

    I completely agree, and think that we should continue exploration and brainstorming about a Drupal distribution specifically for digital scholarly artifacts. This week, the Web Services team is building a bunch of new features to export for the Drupal community, and we are talking about future feature sprints with partners from around the university. This topic might be a good candidate for something like that going forward.