Making Marx More Readable: A Minimal Computing Approach to a Community-Driven Edition of <title rend="italic">Capital Vol. 1 Avery Wiscomb https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1159-4337 Virginia Tech awiscomb@vt.edu

Avery Wiscomb is Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Virginia Tech. His research examines how computational methods reshape knowledge production in the humanities, with a focus on the institutional politics of digital scholarship and the history of computing and AI.

 Steven Gotzler https://orcid.org/0009-0005-9155-6075 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sgotzler@unc.edu

Steven Gotzler is a Teaching Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Associate Director of the Digital Literacy and Communications Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research explores historical regimes of labor and work, cultural studies of games and play, and materialist theories of media and technology.

 Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Association for Computers and the Humanities 000864 020 PLACEHOLDER 2 24 April 2026 article

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 DHQ classification scheme; full list available at https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/taxonomy.xml Keywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabulary DHQ project registry; full list available at https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/projects.xml collaboration editing reading The version history for this file can be found on GitHub.

The following article presents MARXdown, a minimal digital reading edition of Karl Marx’s Capital Vol. 1, as a retrospective case study in applying minimal computing principles to create accessible, community-driven digital humanities (DH) projects. Developed by graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University in 2019–20, MARXdown demonstrates how framing minimal computing as “practical commitments” can lower access barriers, demystify computing labor, and facilitate knowledge sharing. The project leveraged lightweight, open-source tools to create a collaborative reading environment that addressed specific community needs. This approach allowed for adaptability during the COVID-19 pandemic, transforming MARXdown into a vital support for collaboratively reading Marx under lockdown. The article argues that practical commitments to minimal computing can promote replicable models for building digital reading editions, useful for distributing marginalized or banned texts in underserved communities. By unpacking some of MARXdown's development process, this study offers insights into both the potential and limitations of minimal computing in academic and community-driven contexts, contributing to discussions about accessibility, sustainability, and ethics in DH.

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