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Manifold

Manifold Digital Services
United States
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About

Launched: 2018
Record Updated: Apr 25, 2024
Publishing system
Manifold is an open-source platform for scholarly publishing developed by the CUNY Graduate Center, University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding. Manifold allows users to create dynamic projects with embedded notes, files, images, videos and interactive content as well as collaborative annotation.

Mission

Manifold helps publishers create networked, dynamic, iterative publications that go beyond static publishing formats. We aim to make professional-level publishing on the web intuitive and accessible for both established presses and library/DH based publishers. Manifold is used by both academic presses and scholars publishing open educational resources and student-authored work. Manifold places emphasis on beautiful design and interaction, sophisticated annotation systems, and social interactivity around the text.

Key Achievements

Grants

  • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant $732,000 (2015)
  • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant $789,000 (2018)
  • Andrew. Mellon Foundation Grant $750,000 (2020)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Advancement Grant $375,000 (2020)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Grant (2023)

    • Technical Development

  • 8 version releases (open source code on Github)
  • Over 4,000 commits; favorited more than 200 times on Github

    • Publishers

  • Manifold is used by over 50 publishers worldwide, who have published thousands of texts through the platform - https://manifoldapp.org/community

    • Publications

  • Krystyna Michael, Jojo Karlin, and Matthew K. Gold, “Hybrid Scholarly Publishing Models in a Digital Age.” In Print Culture in the Americas: Archives, Materiality, and the Rewriting of Literary History, Edited by Jesse W. Schwartz and Daniel Worden. Bloomsbury, 2022.
  • Case Study 7: Evolving Manifold Scholarship: From Monographs to OER Jojo Karlin, Krystyna Michael, and Robin Miller in The OER Starter Kit for Program Managers by Abbey K. Elder, Stefanie Buck, Jeff Gallant, Marco Seiferle-Valencia, and Apurva Ashok.

    • Community Engagement

    Community Engagement

    Implemented

    Contribution Guidelines or Fora

    In Progress
    Website (Opens in new window)

    Code License

    Implemented

    Organizational Commitment to Community Engagement

    Multiple communication channels

    User Contribution Pathways

    • Contribute to code

    Additional Information

    Organizational History

    Organizational history

    Organizational Structure

    Business or Ownership Model

    Non-profit organization

    Full-time Staff

    2.5

    Funding

    Primary Funding Source

    Program service revenue

    Funding Needs

    Funding will enable us to develop new features that have been requested by our publishers, such as:

    OAI-PMH feed: To help facilitate the inclusion of Manifold projects in library and agency collections, we are going to expose Manifold metadata via instance-specific OAI-PMH feeds.

    External authentication: We will develop and document options for integrating Manifold with external login via LDAP, Oauth, or SAML. When configured with a university’s authentication management system, students will be able to log into Manifold using their existing school credentials. This will ease one of the major barriers to using Manifold in the classroom, which currently involves the creation of a new account or authentication through third-party services like Google or Twitter.

    Resources revisited: We are going to revisit how resources display in the reader and add support for additional ways of embedding resources into texts.

    Code splitting: When the Manifold client application is requested, Manifold currently returns a very large bundle that includes all code. Code splitting involves splitting this bundle into smaller bundles, which will reduce the time it takes for the initial render to take place. Reducing the bundle size will lead to improved performance, especially on low-bandwidth connections.

    We will also use funding to maintain the established Manifold codebase and support the growth of the Manifold user community
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