Today, Friday the 13th, is your lucky day! I'm excited to announce that we have wrapped up development on version 0.3.0 of Manifold Scholarship. This version has been four months in the making, and includes a number of new features and bug fixes. As we move toward a stable 1.0.0 release, our focus has been on improving Manifold's performance and stability, and to that end we've managed to pack 85 documented bug fixes into this version.

On behalf of the entire Manifold team, I'm super excited to announce the release of Manifold v0.2.0! The release is up on Github now, and we'll be rolling it out to our staging site later today. This release contains a number of new features and bugfixes, listed below. For the full list of revisions and pull requests, please consult the changelog.

Version 0.1.3 of Manifold introduces support for logins using Facebook, Twitter, and Google OAuth services. This version also incorporates a refactored approach to managing application settings, which can now be set via the backend, or managed by way of the dotenv file, which tends to be a more appropriate solution for automated provisioning and deployment.

Version 0.1.1 of Manifold is a bugfix release. It has been pushed to the Manifold staging instance. This release includes the following fixes and improvements.

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:

Manifold is excited to announce the public launch of our in-progress demo next Tuesday, April 4th! In advance of that launch, we're happy to offer a brief preview of some of the features of this intuitive, collaborative publishing platform for scholars, made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Manifold provides an online, mobile-ready interface for reading and responding to texts. The demo version will be populated by University of Minnesota Press books and projects, but any press or other organization can install the open-source platform and upload their own texts for interactive reading and annotation. For technical details about the build, check out posts by our lead developer, Zach Davis of Cast Iron Coding.

Read on for your first sneak peek!

Before the holidays, I had the chance to chat with Manifold Co-PI Matthew K. Gold, who is Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities and Executive Officer of the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. I have been lucky to work with Matt for a couple of years now, through seminars on digital humanities praxis and textual studies, on DH tool-building projects like DH Box, on the editorial collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and with the digital fellows of the GC Digital Initiatives. His widespread commitment to textual scholarship and digital innovation, his seemingly tireless support of his students and digital experimentation, and his humility (which he may not even let me mention) never cease to amaze me. I have spent a lot of time discussing Manifold with Matt, but I was glad to get the chance to ask him more specifically about his personal motivations for developing a hybrid publishing platform.

Last week, calling Portland from the Digital Scholarship Lab at the Graduate Center, I had the pleasure of speaking with Manifold’s lead developer, Zach Davis at Cast Iron Coding. Yet again, my attempts to record the call came to naught, but I will conjure some of the conversation from my notes.

Zach is Principal Chief Technologist at Cast Iron Coding. His previous CIC projects include sites for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the Jersey Give-Back Guide (check out the animation on the “generosity generator”) and Debates in Digital Humanities, a collaboration with The University of Minnesota Press and Matt Gold that served as a prototype for the Manifold project.

Since I last posted, we've been making development progress on a few different fronts. Much of this work is still in feature branches, and has yet to be merged into the main development branch. Therefore, I'm going to skip the full list of revisions in this post, and instead offer a high level description of our recent efforts.

This has been an exciting week for Manifold. The UMNP team—Terence, Dan, Susan, and Doug—and Matt all came out to Portland for one of our regular meetings. We met at the Cast Iron Coding office in the old Washington High School building and spent two days talking through issues, thinking about Manifold use cases, sorted through thorny metadata and DOI concerns, and generally reviewed how far we've come, where we're at, and what's left to do. I always find these meetings inspiring and invigorating, and am reminded of what a strong team we have in place for this project.

In the two weeks leading up to this meeting, the development and design team at Cast Iron has been working furiously to tighten up existing behavior and progress on the project resources. As a result, we don't have a lot in the way of big new features to report for this sprint. We do, however, have a long list of fixes, small improvements, and tweaks, which I'm including below. Next week is a short week, and I likely won't post an update until the following week. In the next sprint, we'll be finalizing project resources, and then turning our attention back to the annotation user interface, and begin work on comment threads.