This year’s #UPWeek coincides with a meeting of the Manifold Team—representatives from the three founding partners, the CUNY Graduate Center, Cast Iron Coding of Portland, OR, and the University of Minnesota Press. We’ll all be meeting halfway between Portland and NYC in Minneapolis, seeing each other in person for the first time since the pandemic began.

Five years in, it seems like a good time to reflect on a digital publishing platform that has grown and evolved significantly since the launch of its first version in 2018. Now used by over thirty publishers, many of whom began through a pilot program generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Manifold just released its seventh version earlier this year.

Home to hundreds of publications, many of them enhanced with video and audio resources, highlighted and annotated by readers around the world, Manifold was designed to extend the print book into the digital space, without sacrificing the beautiful reading experience that a well-designed print book provides. It remains an open source project, benefitting from community feedback and community-funded features.

With the new journal features of v7, Manifold now hosts publications such as Ada, Cultural Critique, and the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, creating unique digital hubs where these journals’ reader communities can meet and interact. A lot of time and thought has gone into improving the platform for open educational resources (OERs) as well, in collaboration with Manifold publishers such as Affordable Learning Georgia and the Open Education Network, allowing teachers to create and curate Project Collections across Manifold instances, making it possible to frame an entire syllabus within Manifold. We’ve continued to see the platform used to create digital editions of public domain texts that can be highlighted, annotated, and discussed in public or private reading groups in the classroom.

The analytics features have been a favorite of publishers and authors since they were launched in v6—and I can say firsthand what a pleasure it is to be able to report the exact number of engagements, highlights, annotations on an author’s text. Authors continue to get excited about the expanding capabilities of Manifold to enhance and expand their work, and the fact that Open Access allows their work to resonate broadly and internationally.

Of course, each press has its own reasons for turning to a platform like Manifold. At a recent Manifold Community Meetup, Managing Editor Deirdre Mullervy of Gallaudet University Press explained that the press had received a directive from their administration to include more sign language video in their texts, which was what led them to the Manifold platform initially. They have since expanded their offerings significantly, and released a recent guide to bilingual Deaf Education Studies that has become one of the most visited resources on their site.

Here at Minnesota, our Manifold instance now hosts almost 200 projects, far outstripping our initial projections. It has allowed us to release a dozen monographs open access, through the TOME program, and several more through the new Fellowships Open Book program at the NEH. It has also allowed us to work out individual arrangements with both new and backlist authors to open their work through Manifold, in cases where their universities or funding agencies have resources to support open access. Authors who envision multimodal works, or iterative projects that will be published in stages, come to us directly—sometimes specifically because of our association with Manifold. The platform’s ongoing accessibility work has informed our own efforts to make Minnesota books more accessible to all readers.

A recent Modern Philology review of Whitney Trettien’s Cut/Copy/Paste, which has over 400 resources added to its Manifold edition, gives a sense of how far the platform has come. “The printed version of Cut/Copy/Paste is, unusually, no longer the nimblest or richest form to read for review,” reviewer Georgina Wilson wrote. “Through a spiraling array of content ... this volume practices the very affordances of multimedia publishing that it describes.”

With authoring functionality and a payment authorization gateway coming in its next version, now is a great time for university presses to check out the Manifold website where you can learn a lot more about all the possibilities of the platform and start envisioning your own Manifold instance. Or just spend some time with a Manifold text to see how it looks and feels. For all the growth of the platform and the community around it, Manifold has thrived by keeping the reader at the center of it all.

For more #UPWeek posts showcasing the essential work of university presses, please visit this link.

Eric Lundgren
Outreach and Development Manager
University of Minnesota Press

A belated update on the Version 7 release: We were so thrilled to share Manifold version 7.0 with our community in August. Our developers at Cast Iron Coding have put an incredible amount of time and care into the latest release, one of our biggest yet, which continues to build in new features and capabilities that have been requested by our users.

This version of Manifold was created with significant support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, which supported the OER and teaching features. We are deeply grateful to both of these organizations.

Some of the highlights of version 7 include:

• Collections and Reading Group Improvements. Users can now gather content in collections to make it easier to find in the future. This feature will be especially helpful for instructors who can build a collection of content on a Manifold instance and categorize it for their students. New features in Reading Groups make it easier to view, archive, and clone reading groups, as well as to keep track of individual responses to texts.

• Journals This release adds initial support for publishing a journal on Manifold. We’ve added a new top-level “Journals” model that can be managed in the Manifold backend interface. We hope to build out this feature in future releases in response to user feedback.

• Accessibility As part of our ongoing work to make Manifold usable by as many readers as possible, this release includes a number of significant accessibility improvements. Most notably, users may now use carat browsing to navigate annotations and can make annotations without using a mouse.

Manifold 7.0 also includes a client refactor (moving from monolithic Sass stylesheets to the more modular CSS-in-JS) and now ships with all client application labels stored in a json localization file, making it possible to translate Manifold’s interface into other languages. We are most grateful to Melusina Press and the University of Luxembourg for supporting this localization feature, and invite Manifold publishers to contribute translations.

You can read more about the latest release and all the relevant documentation for this release here.

We hope you have fun experimenting with version 7—and as always, please get in touch with us to share your experiences with the new release. Thanks so much for being part of our community and for all you have done to support the continuing evolution of Manifold!

One of the highlights of 2021 was that we held our first quarterly Manifold Community Meetup. Something we love about building Manifold is seeing all of the amazing projects and initiatives that Manifold makes possible across the different groups and institutions who use it. At the same time, we found that publishers using Manifold often asked us for a means through which to discover what other Manifold instances are up to and how they have solved common challenges and obstacles. And so we inaugurated Manifold Community Meetups: a quarterly virtual meetup for Manifold community members to share practices, discuss strategies, ask questions, troubleshoot difficulties, and learn from each other.

Our first meetup was held on November 17 from 3-4 pm and featured short presentations on two wonderful projects: The Greater Chaco Landscape from University Press of Colorado, and Race &/in America at Brown University. Both projects bring together a variety of media in an exciting hybrid publication.

Darrin Pratt, director of UP Colorado, discussed the creation of The Greater Chaco Landscape, a book of essays based on a seminar held at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in August 2017 that addressed the conflict between Native communities and energy development in the Chaco Canyon. The open access version of this work on UP Colorado's Manifold instance hosts video footage of the individual seminars that served as the underpinnings of each chapter as well as interviews with Native elders and scholars that explain the importance of the Chaco Canyon to their culture and society. We also got to hear from two members of the core development team for Race &/in America: Allison Levy, Digital Scholarship Editor for the Brown University Library’s Digital Publications Initiative, and Crystal Busch, Brown Univeersity’s Designer for Online Publications. Similar to The Greater Chaco Landscape, Race &/in America began as a live event - a panel discussion series held by the Centre for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University that investigated the long legacy of anti-Black racism in America. Race &/in America is an eight-part open access series that contains videos of the original panel discussions alongside expanded content and resources. Darrin, Allison, and Crystal shared their experiences organizing and supporting these amazing projects. We then had time to break into discussion groups for press, teaching, and library users, where we got to talk about what has worked and what has been a challenge in developing Manifold projects, sustaining a Manifold instance, and training users. We also discussed what topics people would like us to cover in future meetups.

We are looking forward to the second Manifold Meetup, which will be held on Tuesday, February 15 at 11 am EST, and will focus on making the best use of reading groups on your Manifold instance.

The Manifold Team is delighted to announce the six publishers who will be joining the Manifold community in 2022 with grant-funded support packages, thanks to generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This international group takes Manifold in bold new directions, and includes two renowned art museums; an association for cultural studies and digital collection research; a digital magazine that unites the best of the university with the openness of the internet; a scholarly journal of film, media and digital culture; and a network of open education advocates.

Please join us in welcoming them to the Manifold community:

• Apparatus Journal
• Malaysian Institute of Art
• Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel Research Association
• Open Education Network
• Public Books
• Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art

We hope to introduce some of these new publishers at the next Manifold Community Meetup, which will be held virtually on Tuesday, February 15, 2022 at 11:00 am EST. These quarterly meetups are a chance for Manifold users to make connections and solve common problems, to showcase how they're using Manifold's features, and hear about cutting-edge developments to the platform. Save the date! We will be sending out a formal invitation early in the new year.

In welcoming these new publishers to our platform, we also reflect gratefully on all our friends who have supported this open-source project and brought such wonderful contributions of creativity and knowledge to Manifold in the past year.

Thank you for being part of our community, and warmest holiday wishes from all of us.

— The Manifold Team

Good afternoon, everyone!

A few people have asked me about Manifold’s susceptibility to critical log4j2 vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) that was announced last week.

So far, we haven’t seen evidence that Manifold is vulnerable to this exploit. Manifold relies on Elasticsearch for its search functionality, and Elasticsearch in turn uses the vulnerable log4j logging library. The version that ships with Manifold is vulnerable, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the vulnerability can be easily exploited. Manifold does not expose its Elasticsearch service to the public, and all connections to it are mediated through the API. We’ve investigated, and it’s our view that no user input from a public Manifold instance can make its way into log4j logs, which means that Manifold does not appear to be vulnerable. Furthermore, the Elasticsearch team claims that version 7, which is what is in the Manifold package, is not susceptible to remote code execution.

That said, it pays to be especially cautious in these matters, and we’re working on 6.0.1 packages that will include updates to Elasticsearch and log4j. As of earlier this morning, we were still waiting on Elasticsearch 7.16.1 to be released, and it will take us a few days to build and test new packages. I expect we’ll release 6.0.1 on Tuesday or Wednesday of this week, which will be an easy upgrade for everyone already on v6. It should also be easy for people on v5, as we haven’t had any significant reports of upgrade problems.

If you installed Manifold from one of our packages (for Ubuntu or CentOS), you can easily mitigate the problem by adding one line to a file and restarting Elasticsearch. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Shell into your server and edit /var/opt/manifold/elasticsearch/jvm.options as root.
2. Add this text on a new line at the end of the file and save it: -Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true
3. Restart Elasticsearch to pick up the new configuration: sudo manifold-ctl restart elasticsearch

If you are hosting Manifold through Manifold Digital Services, rest assured that we will be releasing a similar mitigation in the next couple hours to all instances.

We will also publish updated docker images when 6.0.1 is released later this week.

—Zach

The Mill on The Floss​

As part of Open Access Week, Manifold is featuring interviews with the creators of exemplary projects that use Manifold's capabilities to the fullest. Our fourth installment in this series is an "Anthropocene Edition" of The Mill on The Floss. We interviewed its creators, Megan Butler, Francesca Colonnese, and Mara Minion, about this exciting project.

The Negro and The Nation​

As part of Open Access Week, Manifold is featuring interviews with the creators of exemplary projects that use Manifold's capabilities to the fullest. Our third installment in this series is The Negro and The Nation. We interviewed Justin Rogers-Cooper, a Professor at CUNY LaGuardia and the Graduate Center, about this collaborative project.

The Greater Chaco Landscape​

As part of Open Access Week, Manifold is featuring interviews with the creators of exemplary projects that use Manifold's capabilities to the fullest. Our second installment in this series is The Greater Chaco Landscape. We interviewed Darrin Pratt, director of the University Press of Colorado, about this amazing project.

As part of Open Access Week, Manifold is featuring interviews with the creators of exemplary projects that use Manifold's capabilities to the fullest. Our first installment in this series is Race &/ in America. We interviewed Allison Levy from Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship about this impressive project.

At Manifold, we treat accessibility as a top-tier concern. Our developers at Cast Iron Coding are accessibility experts who design and develop the application with accessible functionality foremost in mind. In addition to the extensive testing they do in-house using screen-readers and browser add-ons, we’ve had the benefit of collaborating with the University of Washington’s library, press, and accessibility office over the past three years. The Washington team has performed an ongoing audit of Manifold over that time, and our two groups meet regularly to discuss new ideas and strategies for making the application even more performant for readers and content creators using assistive technologies.