The Manifold team is delighted to launch a public beta of its new publishing platform for interactive scholarly monographs: http://staging.manifoldapp.org/.

Funded through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Manifold is a collaboration between University of Minnesota Press, the GC Digital Scholarship Lab at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and Cast Iron Coding.We began work on the project two years ago, aiming to create a responsive platform for interactive books that would help university presses share long-form monographs through an appealing and elegant interface. After many meetings and planning discussions, and following 1300+ commits to our public code repository, the initial version of the platform is ready for review. On the beta site, you will find a selection of projects from the University of Minnesota Press that may be read, annotated, highlighted, and shared through social media. These include two recently published full-length scholarly books, a selection from the Forerunners: Ideas First series, and four projects just beginning to take shape on the platform:

Published Books#

• The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientification by Hugo Gernsback. Edited by Grant Wythoff
• Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames by Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux

Forerunners#

• The Uberfication of the University by Gary Hall
• The Anthrobscene by Jussi Parikka
• No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism by Steven Shaviro
• Mandela’s Dark Years by Sharon Sliwinski
• Dark Deleuze by Andrew Culp
• The Geek’s Chihuahua: Living with Apple by Ian Bogost
• Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics by Davide Panagia
• Deep Mapping the Media City by Shannon Mattern

New Projects#

• The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies by Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka, and Darren Wershler
• In/visible Archives of the 1980s: Feminist Politics and Queer Platforms by Margaret Galvan
• Cut/Copy/Paste: Echoes of Little Gidding by Whitney Trettien
• Going the Rounds: Virality in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers by Ryan Cordell, David Smith, Abby Mullen, and Jonathan Fitzgerald

Each project has a homepage that presents an overview of the text, provides a quick link to the text, aggregates recent activity, showcases the evolution of the project, and shares resources—images, videos, files, PDFs, image collections—that have been added to the text. Images that were part of the print version will appear in-line; resources that have been added for the Manifold edition will appear to the left of the text. Texts are responsive and may be read on any device, though the mobile versions are not yet fully featured. Please note that while we will make an effort to retain annotations and highlights left on the beta platform, we cannot guarantee their preservation.Though the beta version only includes Minnesota publications, the platform is being designed so that any press or interested scholar can install Manifold, customize the platform with specific colors and logos, and publish work through the administrative dashboard. Manifold is capable of ingesting a variety of formats—ePub, HTML, Google Docs, Markdown, Microsoft Word—immediately transforming them into interactive web publications.Manifold is proud to be an open-source project. You can find our code on Github, report bugs on our Github issue tracker, check out our progress on our public Pivotal tracker, join our mailing list, read our Building Manifold blog, and follow us on twitter at @manifoldscholar. For a longer introduction to the project, please read “Building Manifold,” by Project Co-PIs Doug Armato and Matthew K. Gold. To learn more about the technology behind the platform, please read “A Technical Introduction to Manifold” by Manifold Lead Developer Zach Davis. We hope you enjoy Manifold and we look forward to your feedback!