While the seismic ruptures of the election have unsettled the ground beneath us, it feels necessary to continue working on projects that look beyond the next four years, that address the possibility of connecting people through ideas and through constructive debate. Last week, in the midst of national turmoil, I had the pleasure of interviewing Susan Doerr, University of Minnesota Press Assistant Director, Digital Publishing and Operations. During our phone call, I asked Susan a number of questions about her thoughts on reading and the Manifold platform.

I started by asking Susan what matters most to her about Manifold. She talked about the process of collaborating with the Manifold team on writing the grant proposal, and thinking about publishing books in the browser. Susan believes the real revolution of an epub or pdf ebook is the speed of distribution—instant access for a reader. Susan said, “ebook reading devices are siloed—a reader is stuck in an app or device.” What the Manifold team wanted to do was “break free from that constraint. Ebooks today are replications of print—active media that don't do much more than the print edition of a book. And we wanted to do more.”

Thanks for joining me for another installation of "This Week in Manifold."

First off, please accept my apologies for missing last week's update. When last Friday rolled around, we had a number of updates ready to go out to our staging site. However, when it was time to deploy, we hit a few unexpected problems.

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.

Welcome to a new regular feature on the Building Manifold blog: "This Week in Manifold." As we move toward a beta version of Manifold (scheduled for March, 2017), I'll be releasing a Manifold build to our staging server every Friday afternoon. Each release will be accompanied by a blog post explaining what the development team accomplished in the sprint leading up to the release. This post comes a few days late. When the Internet broke last week, our ability to release builds from Github was impacted, which delayed things a bit. I expect we'll be back on schedule this week, with our next build going out on Friday, October 28.

As Jason indicated in this space earlier, Manifold is not simply an endeavor to create a better publishing platform; it is an answer to the challenge of rethinking and reframing the concept of scholarly publishing. In broad strokes, scholarly publishing is very much still a print-centric enterprise. Despite the vast libraries of electronic publications available, the systems, mindsets, and expectations of the greater university press culture—including those of authors and the academy—are engineered specifically for print.

As Manifold Scholarship progresses through its first rounds of wireframes, editors at the University of Minnesota Press are already discussing the platform with authors and considering book projects. Manifold will have an impact on the full span of a project, from the early stages of researching and collecting data for a book, to the drafting of a proposal, to peer review and press evaluation, and across the iterative stages of a manuscript’s organic development leading to the peer reviewed, published edition. Just as Manifold is designed to transform the nature of scholarly publishing, we are also asking scholars, from their earliest articulations, to think elastically about the ways in which Manifold can expand their project beyond the static, physical book.

Hello Manifoldians!

I'm Zach Davis, principle at Cast Iron Coding, a web development studio in Portland, Oregon. My team and I are responsible for UX design, visual design, and development of Manifold over the course of the grant, and it is my hope that I'll be able to post regular updates here detailing development and design decisions, challenges, and milestones over the course of the project.

For now, however, I'd like to walk through the technology stack we've settled on, and the reasoning behind some of these choices. If anyone has any questions, please don't hesitate to post a comment!

On Tuesday, November 10, I was very happy to participate in an online conversation convened by the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) on the topic of "Opening Access: The Reinvention of the Academic Book." During the session, which was moderated by Jennifer Howard of the Chronicle of Higher Education, I discussed the Manifold Scholarship project and issues related to digital monographs with my fellow panelists Frances Pinter (Manchester University Press/Knowledge Unlatched), Peter Suber (Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet & Society), and Augusta Rohrbach (author of Thinking Outside the Book). An archived video of the session is below, along with descriptive information about the event. I'm grateful to the AAUP for this opportunity to discuss the project!

Welcome to Building Manifold, a blog that will document the process of creating Manifold Scholarship , a project at theUniversity of Minnesota Press in partnership with the GC Digital Scholarship Lab at the Graduate Center, CUNY and Cast Iron Coding. Manifold Scholarship is funded through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of a series of 2015 grants made to university presses.