Happy Halloween!

My name is Jojo Karlin and I am an English doctoral student and Digital Fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY. I’ve joined Manifold this fall to help get the word out about what the team has been up to, and I am excited to investigate the generative potential built into this iterative, collaborative platform. I love the ways Manifold seeks to enrich scholarly publication by building communities of researchers engaged in collective annotation and networked reading.

When friends and acquaintances unfamiliar with the field hear I work in “digital humanities,” they often react with anxieties about the death of print. Skeptical bibliophiles lament the impact of screens on humanity as they cite popular science articles about babies swiping pages of print books.  Yet I remain a stalwart defender of books in their many forms. I grew up in a house lined with books and have a categorical weakness for library book sales and department book swaps; I also depend on my computer and smartphone as part of my reading practice.

Books, even print-only, are not single-use: people come to them and at them from different angles and at different times. I believe that the many ways we read books should be simultaneously available and that ideas deserve the full range of available outlets and expression. What I particularly love about Manifold is the way it bridges print and digital forms, giving presses and authors the opportunity to benefit from affordances of both - utilizing digital features while reinforcing the value of print-based scholarship.

Since joining Manifold, I have begun to see how the team approaches the transformations of text in recent years, the influx (sometimes numbing inundation) of social media, and the existing endeavors of numerous presses to engage scholarship digitally. “Building Manifold” gives me a sense of Manifold’s dual purpose—platform construction and conceptual restructuring—and Zach’s updates describe incremental decisions of development. By taking pains to publicly share the process of creating the tool, the Manifold team participates in the kind of transparent teamwork that the tool itself proposes. I look forward to sharing my perspective as well.

In the coming months, I will help to surface some of the exciting progress that the team has been making. I will post updates about design, interviews with team members, and reflections on some of the trickier conceptual decisions. Even jumping in now, I have found the whole team—Susan, Zach, Matt, Doug, Terence, Naomi, everyone!—to be wonderfully welcoming and warm. I am looking forward to learning more, and I hope you will share in my excitement.

If you have questions about Manifold, sign up for our newsletter, follow/star/love our git repository, follow @ManifoldScholar on Twitter, and feel free to get in touch.

Thanks and be well,

Jojo