I made a twine resource for a forthcoming critical AI symposium that helps people make informed decisions about AI use in education.
I made a twine resource for a forthcoming critical AI symposium that helps people make informed decisions about AI use in education.
My undergraduate students in English publshed their works in Scalar https://scalar.rula.info/visualcultureeng705/index
My graduate students in Communication and Culture created a Pressbooks archive for their scholarly and research creation work. https://pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca/visualculture-howtosee/
More Digital Humanities Resources:
TMU's Center for Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities Summer Insitute (DHSI) - Scholarships available
These are some of the digital tools we have used to build our projects:
Twine — https://twinery.org Open-source tool for building interactive, branching narratives and nonlinear stories with no coding required (though it supports HTML/CSS/JS for more advanced work). A staple for electronic literature and interactive fiction.
Scalar — US hosted authoring at https://scalar.usc.edu -- Canadian libraries host their own installation. A free, open-source publishing platform from the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, supported for media-rich, born-digital scholarship. Strong easy to use for nonlinear, recursive, multimodal essays and exhibitions. My students publish in it and I created a number of projects including the award-winning Happenings and Solastalgia with Jolene Armstrong.
Pressbooks — https://pressbooks.com --- Book-production platform (built on WordPress) for creating open educational resources, monographs, and multi-format ebooks (web, EPUB, PDF). Widely used for open-access and OER publishing.
GitHub Pages (web design/hosting) — https://pages.github.com Free static site hosting straight from a GitHub repository — ideal for portfolios, project sites, and lightweight DH archives, with full version control.
Voyant Tools — https://voyant-tools.org Free, web-based environment for text analysis and reading — word frequencies, concordances, trends, and visualizations.
ArcGIS — https://www.arcgis.com (storytelling builder at https://storymaps.arcgis.com) Esri's mapping and spatial-analysis platform; ArcGIS StoryMaps lets you combine maps with text, media, and narrative. Powerful but institutionally licensed (worth flagging cost vs. the open tools above). I used their free version for Careless Water.
Omeka — https://omeka.org Open-source platform for building digital collections, archives, and exhibits with strong metadata standards (Dublin Core). Use Omeka Classic for self-hosting; Omeka S for linked-data, multi-site projects.
StoryMapJS (Knight Lab) — https://storymap.knightlab.com Free, open tool from Northwestern's Knight Lab for telling place-based stories on a map (or over a large image/"gigapixel"). Much lighter-weight than ArcGIS for simple spatial narratives.
Adobe Creative Cloud (Adobe Suite) — https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html Subscription suite (Photoshop, Premiere, InDesign, After Effects, etc.) for image, video, and layout production. Industry standard, but proprietary and subscription-based.
Scroll Cinema — https://www.altsalt.com/scrollcinema/ A tool from AltSalt (Artemio Morales) for authoring scroll-driven cinematic web experiences without programming. Its editor works like other creative software — you build animations on a timeline with reels, axis switches (vertical/horizontal scrolling), easing, and post-processing filters — to make immersive, scrollable narrative pieces that run on the web and mobile.
AR — Halo AR — https://www.haloar.app A full-service augmented/mixed reality platform aimed at museums, education, and exhibitions. It lets you build interactive 3D experiences (models, audio, video) viewable instantly on visitors' phones and tablets or on headsets like Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest, and Microsoft HoloLens — no coding required. We used it for the Metamorphoses exhibit with the Decameron Collective.
VR — Unity — https://unity.com Real-time 3D development engine for building VR (and AR/3D) experiences across desktop, mobile, and headsets. Industry-standard and highly flexible, with a steeper learning curve than the web-native options — which matches your team having a dedicated developer for it.
For more DH tools see: Alan Liu's DH Resouces for Project Building
Additional resources for webbuilding (collected at DHSI 2025):
Dhrift.org: Digital Humanities CUNY online and extensive Learning Resources https://dhrift.org/
DHRIFT (Digital Humanities online course) https://app.dhrift.org/dynamic?user=dhri-curriculum&repo=workshops&file=javascript&page=8&instUser=dhri-curriculum&instRepo=dhrift-site-template
CCS Cascading Style Sheets language (which tells a program how a document should be rendered): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS
HTML Reference elements: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements
JavaScript Guide: How to use this coding language: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide
JavaScrilpt Lexical grammar - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Lexical_grammar
Leaflet - a lovely JavaScript library maintained in Ukraine that lets you build interactive maps https://leafletjs.com/examples.html
Bootstrap: a coding library https://getbootstrap.com/