What is DM?

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DM is an open-source digital humanities platform for your own workspaces, projects, collaborations, and scholarly publications. That means it's free for anyone to use, and anything you create is your intellectual property. We only ask that when you publish your work, you also make it freely available to everyone on the web. Actually, we require it. We believe the next generation of Humanities scholarship is digital and open-access, and we're here to recruit you.

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Who is it for?

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DM is freely available for anyone and everyone on the web. It is for college and university professors and independent scholars, teachers and students, research groups and individual archivists and editors, medievalists and modernists, historians and literary critics. If you work with digital collections of images and texts, then DM is for you. Once you have it running on a server, it's all ready to go, no code, no plug-ins, never. It's a DH platform built... for the rest of us.

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What can you do with it?

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DM gives you simple but/and powerful tools to mark up, annotate and link your own networked collections of digital images and texts. Mark up your image and text documents with highlights that you can then annotate and link together. Identify discreet moments on images and texts with highlight tools including dots, lines, rectangles, circles, polygons, text tags, and multiple color options. Develop your projects and publications with an unlimited number of annotations on individual highlights and entire image and text documents. Highlights and entire documents can host an unlimited number of annotations, and annotations themselves can include additional layers of annotations. Once you've marked up your text and image documents with highlights and annotations, you can create links between individual highlights and entire documents, and your links are bi-directional, so you and other viewers can travel back and forth between highlights. Three kinds of tools, entire digital worlds of possible networks and connections.

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How does it work?

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DM is open-access software that you can install on either an institutional server or your own personal server in the cloud, or even your own local server. If you're already affiliated with an instance of DM on an institutional server, like at a college, university or library, then then you're all ready to go. If you're not, then you'll need to set up your own instance of DM on a local server or, more likely, a server in the cloud. Getting your own server in the cloud is pretty cheap and easy from cloud server providers like DigitalOcean and Amazon Lightsail, but setting up your own instance of DM does take some background in IT network/system administration. If you're running into some trouble, then get in touch with us and we'll do whatever we can to help you out.

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Okay, you're in, what's next?

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Wonderful, we're thrilled to have you join us along for the ride. Check back soon and you'll be able to explore our showcase projects to see what other people have already been creating. In the meantime, you can take a look at the help materials we've put together for project viewers and creators. When you think you're ready to really get started, then go over to our page for new users where you can find everything you need to know to set up your own instance of DM on a personal server in the cloud.

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