Digital Scholarship

Writing and Authoring

In addition to the old standby of Microsoft Word, there are an ever-increasing number of tools for writing text for traditional publication, for authoring e-books, and for producing movies, images collections, and multimedia presentations for the web.

If you collaborate in writing, a good tool can significantly improve the turn-around time needed for sharing, reviewing, and editing. In particular, the best-of-class tools allow more than one person to write to a file at the same time (the more common tools lock the file while someone is editing it, not allowing multiple people access at the same time). 

Examples of Collaborative Writing Platforms

Google Docs/Google Drive: The Google Drive platform makes sharing easy and the editing environment allows up to 50 people to be editing a document simultaneously. There are several different document types available that support simultanous editing—namely word-processing type document, spreadsheet, drawing, and form. All Wesleyan faculty, staff and students have access to Google Drive through their portfolio.

Zoho Collaboration Apps: Zoho's basic tools are very similar to those provided by Google, but they also offer other functionality such as chat, discussions, online meetings and wiki.

Examples of e-Book Authoring Software

iBooks Author: Apple's iBooks author is easy to use, but the licensing agreement requires you to distribute your work exclusively through the iBookstore and any interactive is platform-dependent.

Sigil:  An open source (free)e-publicaiton editor for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Scalar: An online publishing platform for "born-digital" resources; oriented toward visual media, archival research. Open source (free).

Scribus: An open source layout program for typesetting and designing publications (compare to Adobe's InDesign); available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix.