 Hello and welcome to Open Publishing Ecosystems, session two, Manifold. So we are thrilled to be joined here for this second session, but it also feels kind of like the first session, particularly because we are joined by Jojo Carlin, who is an expert with Manifold, who's been deeply involved with it for a while, and is going to kind of tell us a bit about her experience and what this awesome Open Publishing tool does. So thank you, Jojo, for joining us. If you could just introduce yourself a little bit and then we can get started. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Jojo Carlin. I am the Digital Scholarship Specialist at NYU Libraries. And previous to that, I was a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center, where I was the Manifold Graduate Fellow. I think that was my official title. And so I started on the project in maybe 2017, if I can do my math. And I began doing some outreach for the project and also sort of getting involved with the general meetings about what the platform's intentions were. And I helped to work, write a grant for developing Manifold, specifically for open educational resources. I also did a big open educational resources report about how different platforms are being used across the CUNY system, the City University of New York, which is one of the three sort of primary producers of the Manifold platform. And my, so my background is in English. And as I said, I got my PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. And when I first started my graduate work, I was really interested in digital scholarship as a way of expressing things a little bit differently from the traditional publications that I'd seen. And as I got invested in digital humanities, I was excited to see different forms of scholarship. And I said, oh, look, we have all these amazing things, but how will they interact with traditional scholarship? Like how does a digital publication get to count towards your path to your career, an alternate academic role, or any sort of like public facing humanities project? Like how do you sort of put your stuff on a shelf with other things? And so I had done research on digital dissertations and that led me to this interest in digital publishing and led me to apply for the Graduate Fellowship for Manifold because I wanted to see like, what is the future of digital scholarly publishing? That is really interesting. I also come from an English background, particularly in medieval studies. So it's always great to connect with that type of origin story. And I did wanna ask what stage, what level was Manifold at when you heard about it and wanted to get involved? Or like how were you hearing about it when you were starting out with this work? So when I joined the project, the sort of like prototype of Manifold existed, which was the debates in digital humanities, the first version of it, which when Matt Gold and Doug Armato sort of first applied to Mellon to be part of the like, what will digital publishing do, the sort of future of open scholarly monographs? They had sort of released the first debates in digital humanities in 2012. I should know this off the back of my hand and I don't. But the whole idea with that, that Matt has sort of brought to Doug is what is the digital version of this book that we can put out there? And so they had built this initial thing and they brought cast iron coating led by Zach Davis on as the developers for that because they had worked together previously. Zach was an English PhD built and scholar. And so this sort of combination of the software development and press understanding of like what digital scholarship needed to be and having that sort of teaching component was like all sitting there, but it hadn't yet gone live. And so there was this moment where it was sort of like starting off the release of the different versions was happening like as I was joining the project. And so a lot of what I was doing at the grad center was sort of helping with the team to develop these resources to say like, okay, this is what this is going to look like in a classroom outside of a university press setting and what it can do really to make beautiful books for people to teach with and also projects that are not quite books but want to sort of play nicely with them for the purposes of teaching. So yeah. That's awesome. Sorry, I wanted to give Taylor space if he... I was like, he looks like he's gonna ask something. I was like, I can keep going. Sorry. No, I'm kind of curious. I have a question, but I'm not sure if it's the right time in the session for it, but we're gonna shoot anyway. You expressed the idea that you're really interested in for a scholar, like what does digital scholarship mean and how does that work for them in terms of their career and everything? And that's, I think that comes up a lot for people and I'm trying to connect that to the tool, like, which is kind of almost an unfair question in terms of like, can a tool solve such a big problem as that, right? And I'm just kind of curious if you have... This is like the worst phrase question ever, but like, is anything about your work with Manifold led you to think of like, yeah, this is something that helps in this regard or is that, maybe it's too much to ask of a tool to try to... Well, it's so funny because I started off studying digital humanities at the grad center and then I went into the English PhD. So I started with digital humanities and when I returned to school after many years being an actress, like, I hadn't been thinking about it. I didn't know what digital tools were. People were like, have you heard of this thing called digital humanities? And I was like, I don't even do the internet well. Like, why would I do that? Like, it was, to me, the most exciting thing about digital humanities was the possibility of sort of like collaboration and project-based work. So I sort of had come to the English PhD with this sense of like, possibility in digital humanities, which in 2014, when I started doing digital humanities was very tool-based. Like it was like, everybody has to make a tool. That's how you express a new idea in digital humanities is you make a tool. And I was like, you know, doing development on these different projects. And it's like, oh, we're gonna build a tool that does text analysis for you right in your browser window and like all these things that have now come to pass. But at the time, we were like, we're very cutting edge for graduate students. And so there was like, there were a few different threads that brought me into this like can a tool sort of help in this scenario that through my graduate education, which as I said, there was the digital humanities aspect. I was also doing interactive technology and pedagogy, which is a certificate at the grad center, which was sort of like a big part of it too, where we're looking at the history of multimedia and new media and like, how does that enter the classroom? Even as I was writing an illustrated dissertation, like I drew pictures for my dissertation is all very around about way to sort of say like, what is the through line about transforming text into publications and how do you sort of understand how these different pieces can or should work? And I would say that after I finished in 2020, I started a postdoc at NYU before I got my current position. And part of that transition into the libraries for me was about understanding what digital publication meant on that sort of like career trajectory side of things, as well as the sort of like publishing ecosystem, which I had spent so much time thinking about, as I was doing my different, like my coursework, a huge thread had been, what are publications for teaching versus publications for research and why are these different? Are they different? How do they sort of exist in free and accessible ways for certain people and not for other people, depending on your institution? And so it all sort of fed into itself in this wild way, but it had to do with the fact that I was working on this project where I got to watch the developers and the publishers and the academics sort of like meet and say, how do we make a tool that sort of meets the needs of our specific community and the specific publishing needs of scholarly publication? So coming to Manifold when I did was also tied to my academic interests when I was like researching digital dissertations, like why do them? What does it mean to be involved in understanding what requirements your computer system has for those sort of rendering of these words that you've written, where they're just words, it's words, words can be anything, words are forever, words will stand the test of time. It's like, will they? So, whoa, that is awesome. Yes, but that's like this course and what we could only hope to scratch the surface of sounds like what you have spent a very, very long time thinking about. And so, yeah, and in terms of like, I think this is a cool space where you can see all of these different sectors that are involved in something like publishing come together and Manifold, I think, is a really great example of all of those sectors. I can see all of their presence in Manifold in a way that it works as a system and as it works as a platform. So I think that's part of what kind of benefit it can bring to an institution, so to speak. So, absolutely. And it's been interesting to watch the platform grow from the first instances to then sort of like the first round of pilots where it was like different presses were brought on. And once those first presses sort of had, we're supposed to express different use cases of like, what is it if it's a editorial collective that has a Manifold instance? What if it's at a library? What if it's in a teaching and learning center? Like to see how the tool is like best set up to serve people and how it isn't? Because there are cases where it's too much for a single user to sort of spin up their own instance because it's a lot of infrastructure if you're just doing a project or two, which is part of the reason I think the CUNY instance of Manifold is as sick as it is because there are these constituent institutions. The CUNY system is quite large and it's also got a culture around open educational resources. So people are excited about the possibility of building their books this way for their own personal use in ways that I think initially people were concerned about discoverability in terms of like networks of open educational resources but there's something very powerful about having your sort of local library of projects that you can sort of refer across to within the system. And then these newer features around reading groups have really expanded the open educational resource possibilities which has been exciting to watch. But it is different from building your own website for a publication. I think it's a totally valid and reasonable thing that at NYU we also support, right? We have reclaim hosting, web hosting, which is perfect. It's a sort of the domain of one's own aspect of things has its own place within this ecosystem of open publishing where you're trying to sort of help people navigate what supports the stuff they want to do with the things that they're trying to put out in the world. Yeah, I mean, I think you're kind of touching at like one of the things that's even weird about talking about some of these tools is like publishing in the context of the web is sort of like, well, we're talking about I want someone to see this thing that I made. That's kind of what it is, right? Like on some level and that means or can mean so many different things. We talked about or we touched on in our first session of like some of these tools that we're going to feature are and you mentioned it too. Some of these tools are great for a person. Some of them are not really for one person. They're for a greater ecosystem network of things that are published and I, my understanding is that manifold is a really intentionally designed tool for something like that, which I guess kind of gets me to, we've been talking about this, but like what is manifold? Yes, this is the part where I'm like, I should have it open so I can read the blurb. I mean, the way that I've got it on ours, a home for NYU library's collaborative open source, open access, scholarly publishing. Oh, you want here. I can properly do the other thing if we want to. Sure. Are you seeing my screen? This is this amazing endless loop where I just keep zooming in and out of it because I can't tell what you can see. Okay, it's good. That's why it said you should have two monitors and I do in the library, but I'm recording this not in the library, so whoops. So this is NYU's manifold, which is as they go less thrilling, it's relatively young and sort of developing the culture around publishing things this way. It takes time, which I know from experience, but it's been a really great way to sort of highlight, for instance, this is just an example of an exhibit catalog created for a artist. This was a, I don't even know what it was called. They had sort of like a fellowship. It was a full project that recruited artists from across NYU to put together perspectives on the climate emergency technology and equity, and each person contributed an artwork which was shown at the library and they used manifold to create a catalog that would reflect the artist statements and also exist after the exhibit came down. But the idea is that you have these publications and in them you sort of have this, it's meant to be a reading space. So you have sort of laid out things about how to navigate through the contents, but you also have audio and images and for these, you also have your sort of table of contents, that you can see that different artists' works were photographed and described, and you have the sort of statements around what was going on. But another part of it, of manifold, which gets this back Taylor to your comment before about what it was sort of made to do. And that is this social sort of networked component of scholarly publishing. When debates in digital humanities first came out, the big thing that they were sort of emphasizing was how do we share real-time reactions with people who are reading our scholarship and sort of publish things in an iterative way so that we can get this community around the things. And so it had to do with social annotation. And the key was to have annotations built in. Printed, I don't know. But you have sort of options around how to do this. And the idea was to have your annotations set up within the platform so that you could also connect them to social media, which of course is changing now that social media is changing as much as it is, but also to add resources that might be sort of supplementary media or to highlight things and to share them through different means. I don't know if you're curious. Oh, look at that. It's perfect. This is what's great when librarians make your projects. The metadata is great. But to have sort of like these built-in features around the ways that scholars choose to share their work. So it's meant to be a place that you can read. And I didn't demo all of the sort of like change the margins, change the color profile, change the serif sans serif, sort of basic accessibility things for people who have different needs when it comes to visually reading, but also sort of like all of the built-in components for turning off the extra noise around what you're reading. So it's got the social annotation, but you can also read without the social annotation. You can do it with just your own annotations. You can do it with public annotations, private annotations. So having these sort of controls over the reading experience to make it so that you can read the work but also meet in the margins of the work. And one of the big emphasis with the open educational resources built in Manifold is this idea of collaborative annotation and really bringing your students into what they're reading and having them see their own words mingling with other people who have read it before. So there's definitely a vein of this that comes from textual scholarship and the sort of idea of the life of readers as part of what makes a book. So that's definitely sort of built in with a lot of the amazing social annotation projects that are available through the Digital Humanities like the Nines Project down at UVA and other sorts of ideas around bringing people, bringing up these sort of like ways that people read and interact with each other as readers. It is really interesting that Manifold as a tool has this opinionated, I would say opinionated design around not what does this do as a website but what does this do as a reading experience? Like that's, and I think is particularly unique about that that it's thinking a lot about how is this, I'm gonna say the difference between how is it displayed which is plenty of tools do that, like WordPress lets you change how things are displayed but this is more about the experience of reading the thing that it gives you controls and is designed to be, have a lot of care around it I think. And I think that that is kind of a key quality characteristic of open tools, right? Is that you're thinking of bringing in community and you have the option to be, like you were saying earlier Jojo, you are thinking about ways to bring people in to get your workout in front of people and bring them in. And so doing it openly just feels natural in this type of environment seems. Well, it was definitely, I mean it was part of open scholarly monographs, what was it? I should know the title of the original grant but the idea of like making open access not just a sort of like add-on at the end but really thinking what does it mean to come from a place of open access and really thinking about the tool being built to be useful for the community but also sort of like grounded in a radically open way of thinking about how scholarship should work. There were all of these, there was sort of like a built in component about it always being open source and it was definitely like cast iron took it on the project because they wanted to do this sort of like this is sort of like their passion project. I don't think they would be upset that I say that but they are committed to sort of making it something usable for other people and trying to keep it designed forward too because there's so often a tendency to like really get bogged out in the details of getting like making it the most for the people that like for certain people and this is the sort of keeping it to a scale that like works well for people but works well for people, I don't know how to do it. There's the quote on the manifold app.org which is the marketing site that just sort of gives you the general information about manifold. It says academic software shouldn't have to hurt or something like that. And I do think that that was a big part of it where with all the sort of requests for different fiddly things that people ask for in academic settings where there were lots of requests that it become a learning management. They're like, so is manifold gonna be like integrated into a Blackboard. It was like all of these like certain routes that people wanted it to take because they want a tool that's gonna fix everything. And I think that manifold really did an amazing job of sticking to the purpose of making this readable interface instead of trying to solve all the different possible problems of the open publishing world. There it is, doesn't have to hurt. So I mean, this was part of the sort of intention around it and it is truly intentional. There have been so many people who have contributed in so many ways and when you meet anybody who has worked on the manifold project, I think that there is a general sort of sense of camaraderie and sort of team spirit that is really wonderful but it's because this sort of concept has been so clear and also that all of the people involved really see it as this sort of open space to keep things available without breaking the bank or promising, over promising. So yeah, absolutely. Taylor, was there anything else that you wanted to touch on about this before we dive into looking through the tool itself a little bit deeper? No, I think that's a good thing to move to. Yeah, let's dive in. Do you want me to demo more or do you want me to do some? Because I have slides that are an overview of different ways that people use the project and that's more of a like a tour through a bunch of different projects, but not very deep but I can also sort of like do a closer look at a project. Let's do a close look at a project. I think that would be great. Okay, let me choose. I'm gonna give me a second if I choose. Yeah, no worries. As always. I can also, you know what I'm gonna do because it is one of my projects that I care about a lot as we're gonna look at the Journal of Interactive Technology in Pedagogy. Oh, there you go. Awesome. All right, am I sharing my screen? Yep. Okay, so within journals, so JITP, the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy is an open publication. It's based at the CUNY Graduate Center but the collective is now, I don't know, I think it's a lot of different institutions and it spans a lot of different countries. But the exciting thing about this is that journal publications were not sort of the initial part of Manifold. It was built on these projects and there were ways that you could do different things but it's been exciting to see how you can organize a journal for this open publication. And I'll just sort of go up a layer for a second to show you the journal overall because we had previously been operating out of WordPress but keeping up with a collective of 30 plus people doing the sort of staging and publication production was getting to be quite difficult. And so we migrated all of our WordPress issues over to Manifold and so they're now all here and you can see all of the different issues as well as our short forms pieces which each have their own special issue. Which that structure even itself is really interesting to me and something that Manifold does really well is let you kind of have a concept of course of a journal and issues that it comes out with to do something like that in a more general purpose content management system, say WordPress, you would need to do a lot of design work yourself most likely which depending on what you're doing could be a good thing if you have like very specific needs but I think again, this kind of gets to that like, this tool thinks about publishing in a way that may align more with academic work, scholarship, research, whatever label you wanna use there in a way that I find really interesting. Well, since it was built with like academic presses initially as the sort of users, the potential users, there was a sort of a baseline expectation of understanding of publishing which in open publishing is variable. It's like in the case of JITP, no one is, there's one employee, our managing editor but otherwise and it's a student fellowship. So the collective members are all volunteering and different people have different technical skill levels and so sort of the way that the WordPress site had worked, a lot of people were learning WordPress for the purposes of staging articles and it was a rather complex system that the managing editor had to coordinate and manifolds system for uploading texts ingesting which is the word for pulling them in and having manifold do its processing of whatever is sort of in the base documents was a departure and is a marked change but I think is one that the journal has really appreciated and so it sort of helped us bring it into a new, just like into a new format and with these sort of like re-purposing and sharing features built in so that you're not sort of working around WordPress to get the things you want out of it in terms of creating tag systems and enforcing those tag systems in sort of customized way that we were doing for the journal for quite a while and it worked very well for us but the updates across such a large group of people was a lot to sort of undertake and I think that having the journal on manifold is sort of an exciting new step but this is just to sort of show this as what a journal can look like. I said I would show off the different, some of the different controls of the reader so you have sort of options for highlights, annotations, adding resources. You can see that there are a lot of possible reading groups to join on the CUNY instance. You can also sort of make some basic changes to the appearance and you can see notes that exist on a particular resource if you're in a certain reading group. So that is an example of a journal but some other amazing projects on this instance just to sort of like point to some others that I think are really exciting. We've had various class projects so people have used it for that they are sharing. This was a professor at Lehman College whose students wrote memoirs and she really wanted to have these student memoirs pulled together in this collection. So she has it so it's available for PDF download but they also have this online version with these sort of themed pieces that they could each see their work reflected as a real publication and something that they could share with their families. So that's one instance of sort of like an edited collection of student writing. There are also students who've published their capstones and there's an amazing dissertation I have to get, I have to find it because this is the first dissertation published on Manifold and it is searching for Mami and Abolita, reimagining ethnic studies practice through women of color, feminism's art and archiving by Wendy Barales and she had pulled together so many things through her work on both like her research but also thinking about how to use what Manifold had to offer and also to sort of protect her contributors and keep what it's offline offline. And so just in terms of how she sort of went about creating this piece, she really worked with the platform to take advantage of what it allows and to make it something that people can highlight and contribute annotations to. So that is really astounding. It's just, it's so exciting to see only after I'm not an authorized user. Yeah, seeing those types of options as well. Right, and the parts of those are restricted. I'm really fascinated by using the tool to kind of inform the work in a way that I think ended up bringing more meaning to it or at least a different level of meaning to it. Doing a non-linear dissertation is so cool and I also think that Manifold's just, the way that it presents things like this is really elegant. Like I think it's probably the prettiest publication interface that I've seen and I have no people who are constantly like, oh, Manifold's just so gorgeous. It's just really well put together. Yeah, Layle Tyler is our designer and he's brilliant. And it's also, I think, it is to the credit of these authors who come and bring creativity to the form and to say like, you know, who really take advantage of what it can do because a tool is really only as good as its contents at the end of the day. And it is, I think to the credit of the Manifold team that it enables the work that it does and that it allows people who are maybe new to publishing to have something that does look like as polished as it does and also sort of like helps, it sort of helps people come to an understanding of which components of public, like to come to an understanding of digital publication because we often have people who've never encountered sort of semantic structuring like of the parts, the components of their publication. They're used to a WYSIWYG and sort of like word, Microsoft word like changing things by hand rather than even using the structures that these word processors take advantage of. And I think that there was a while that Manifold was not ever gonna get into the business of having any sort of authoring in the back end because it was committed to this idea that Manifold was for publication. Like it wasn't meant to be the place that you wrote the stuff. It's the place that you bring the stuff once you have properly edited it and pulled it into its structural correctness. The newest version that's being released this week does... This week I got work to do on my installer apparently. This week, the first it's been rolled out but there's gonna be an 8.1 or whatever to do a few like bug fixes in the coming days. But there is gonna be a back end editor which is gonna make it a lot easier for people to use it. And perhaps use it less well because it doesn't have quite the same barrier to entry which it's always this trade off of like how much knowledge do you need to bring to a tool to get it to do the things you want it to do? Like where does the sort of onus lie when it comes to making sure things are well structured? And I think that that consciousness has served manifold well and it has made them be very deliberate about making, not making certain things too easy for the sake of like keeping people in the spirit of sort of like producing something that will work in other places. That makes sense. No, that makes total sense. I mean, and goes right back to what we discussed in our first session where when you're just talking about and considering open publishing a lot of it is ownership, right? And a lot of it is portability and something that you should be able to move your content where you want and have that freedom. And I think when I first encountered manifold as most of us, because this is so new, I knew of it as something that you could only import content into. And so I think that that really gave people the opportunity to explore how and consider how am I gonna author something that I can retain ownership of, but that is can be ported into these various tools. Well, and part of that discussion, so we've been like at Reclaim playing around with the idea of like self hosting manifold and how could we make that easier for folks? One of the things I really like about manifold from like a technical level is, and this is even in that this was on the manifold app.org site that we were looking at before the academic software doesn't have to be painful. Right under there, it's like it goes right into like from the design of it to like technical language around we distribute it as a OS package and a Docker container and there's fully managed hosting available and services around that. And I think that's really cool. And I'll just say, having, while I don't have a lot of expertise in like, running a journal say on manifold, I have played around quite a bit with the technical tools around hosting it. And it's pretty easy actually to on the right platform. It's pretty easy to get up and running and just mess around with. And the, at the time, Amanda and I were talking about kind of, but this is the domain it lives in. This is what it's good at. It's good at structuring these things or at least as far as we can tell. It's got these great annotation features, really cool. But you need an eco, we were talking about like, you need an ecosystem of other open tools maybe to feed things into manifold. Or you can, the nice thing about it is that it can ingest a lot of different formats, Google Docs, PDFs, Word and documents. Not PDFs, okay. Well, the whole thing was it was supposed to be not PDFs. This was like the whole thing. Because PDFs aren't great to read. When you make it, it was like, it was really like, truly the whole thing was like, what is, like, how do we do open scholarly monographs not PDFs? So I don't think there will ever be a PDF reader, like as any sort of component, even though you can have them there to like distribute. So you can ingest Word Docs, Google Docs, Markdown, HTML, CSS and EPUBs. And it really works in EPUBs and HTML because it is a browser tool. But I think the big thing I wanted to mention when you were saying how easy it is to install but that you need sort of like the ecosystem, the documentation is amazing. The technical documentation, the user documentation, like across the board, they've been so careful to make sure that the documentation is ready to go when things launch so that you can really see what's going on. And as a new tool, it's really critical that those things be documented and Terrence Meyer at the University of Minnesota has been doing so much of it and he's their digital projects editor and he's just incredible. And between him and the cast iron team that like puts out these incredible technical documentation, it is made for people to use. And I think that the part where the ecosystem comes into play is that it's best if it sort of has more people using it because a lot of the features have to do with these connected pieces of like you can share this, you can search across the entire instance. The part that is the most amazing to me is that if I am annotating things and I have like a few different books that I've loaded in and I'm reading for something that I'm researching, I can search for a term or a phrase and it does fuzzy search across not only the texts but also your annotations, like everything on the instance so that it's like, because sometimes I'm like, did I say that? Did the person I read say that? Wait, was it in this other book and it will search across all of that? So that's the part where I'm always like, we just need more in here because I just need to show off, this is like so amazing that it can look across these different components. But it's just like, oh, yes, I get so confused about where did I put that idea? Where did I find that idea? And so just to sort of bring it back to documentation though, having that clear understanding of what the different pieces are and having it be laid out in a way that really is like, this is what this does is just so amazing and is part of that commitment to the sort of like general community of users. Manifold also does community meetups on sort of like quarterly basis which often have sort of like publishers talking about how they're using it or libraries talking about how they're using it. There have been some just like really amazing projects that people talk about what has been working for them and what has been harder. And I think that that sort of like idea of sharing things and making it really transparent has been another driving force of just saying like, this is what, the roadmap has been up on GitHub the whole time where it's like, you can see what the issues are that the team is tackling. You can see all of the commits that have been done towards accessibility. Like you can see it, it's all visible. And I think that that's been a big part of it is just to make it as clear to everybody as possible where everything's coming from. The Manifold team will come and talk to people because they're like, yeah, it's not a huge project. It's not a ton of people. And it's interesting when you sort of like bring it out in an institutional setting where there are other tools that are proprietary around and people because it looks so nice expected to be like, Microsoft Word and you're like, it's, we're not at that scale, but you know, there is, it's like both an advantage and a disadvantage that it just, it does look as nice as it does. But having that sort of like openness also about how things are going, I think has been a key to sort of keeping things moving forward. Yeah, that's, so I just, just for full transparency for you and everyone watching this, I quickly wanted to see, does my installer even still work on version eight? It does, so that's good to know. But one thing that we've been interested in kind of somewhat as just sort of a neat demo with throughout this course is taking something we made and just kind of how does it present in each tool basically? And so if you don't mind, I'm gonna take like one minute and I'm gonna show just ingesting a markdown file that we, one of the things that we looked at during the first week in Hedge Dock. So this isn't a particularly complicated thing. It's also very much worth pointing out that like I don't think you would realistically use Manifold to publish like one single page thing that's kind of ridiculous, like you can. We both have, you know. But you know what I mean? Like this is not a journal, it just isn't, right? So, but we're just gonna kind of walk through that really quickly here. I'm so excited. And we're gonna see how this goes. So I, again, for full transparency, I did already test this, but of course that was not on this version. So we're gonna go and just see how this goes. But I made a project already and I just realized I didn't log into, I'm sharing the wrong window is what's going on here. So that's cool. I liked it. This is great. I didn't demo any of the backend, which I could also do because it's got so much great stuff for authors and editors. It's like, it's got a really impressive admin dashboard in my opinion. Thank you. I'm gonna, it took a lot of conversation to get to that admin dashboard. Yeah, I bet, because this is honestly this type of interface is, man, there's a million conversations you can have around it, right, in terms of what it should do and how it should be organized. Even like the idea of records is sort of like meta information about manifold, right? Sort of who has users and who can make things, that kind of stuff. Oh my gosh. I just, I really want to, before we go just show my one slide of like the team members because I, you know, developers who are working on this are so, like I keep saying cast iron, but like these individual people are so incredible and their ability to like assign those values and like organize the nonsense that comes at them from the academic and publishing conversations or it's like, we need this. And they're like, but that needs to be defined according to computer terms, not just human terms. There's like a million layers of that translation, right? Because sometimes you can be listening to someone say, I want a tool that could solve this problem for me. And that's one thing. But sometimes you're having a conversation around, I don't like X or Y. It's not even, this is what we need to do, but you know, it's design. Design challenges are challenging. Unbelievable. And it seems like sometimes you're like, this is like the silliest thing to be having this like question about, but you're like, even just like deciding the terms around, what does an author mean in this versus what is an editor versus what is a project creator? Like there are just the degrees of complexity of even just like what seems like the simplest things is amazing and it has been very carefully worked out to be as seamless as possible. But yeah, are you gonna, I wanna see the upload. I'm sorry I keep talking, but I'm like, I do wanna see your markdown file. No worries. I realize that I'm just making sure I even have it available to me as I do. Okay, cool. So I'm gonna make just a new project here. This is not, this is gonna be called test project. It's all right. Actually, you know what? This is all around domains camp work. We did purchase, we'll call it domains camp. Those are all just little templating things to help guide you on of those questions. Yeah, I mean, I would not recommend using manifold this way by flying through the interface. This is all greatly worded stuff that you should look at and consider. So I've got a markdown file. Should I go to text? Is that? Okay, so I'll ingest a new text. And I just realized the way I'm sharing my screen here, you're not gonna see it, but there's a little upload window that's just from the browser, just like uploading anything. So I selected my markdown file and but you can also grab something from a URL. And we're gonna hit continue. This is where I need to do some testing. Okay, so we're gonna go to backup mode. This is, I got two ahead of myself with that version eight is out. It just might take a second. Sometimes it's like, especially if you just that reboot. Yeah, I think this is where I will go to, we're gonna cooking show this a little bit. Yes, thank you for being Julia Child. That's okay. I did this already on version seven. And I did this like yesterday. So I was like, yeah, you know, but anyway, I'll look at our installer and make sure it's polished up. But... It's not like a good demo unless you get something terribly wrong. Yeah, people will think this is heavily edited or something, so what, you know, this is what we do. But this is roughly what it looked like. This is what I did on the last version of Manifold and that ingest thing, you know, it worked and I marked the project as not a draft anymore and then it's public. And so this is what it came through like, you know, it's not a particularly complicated in terms of structure, right? It's just the one item, but it does actually grab, which I think is kind of cool. It grabs the headings and puts them in this context bar automatically. I can, you know, use the annotation features and it pulled images through. I didn't do anything with it other than hit upload. So... And that's awesome that like right away you can start using all of the kind of built-in features that Manifold has. You can start annotating right away and just... And it's just so seamless. And the thing that I would also say is that if you have it and it's live, but you've discovered that something's wrong and you re-ingest in the same spot, Manifold will place the annotations roughly where they were. Even if you remove stuff, it will like, it's like pretty intelligent about like putting it in a nearby section. So it is really meant to be this sort of publication space that is the final sort of like, this is the publication. And so if you re-ingest after the fact, those things will still be where they are. That's actually amazing. It's insane. Like, it's pretty wild. It's one of those things that's from like a technical perspective, you'd expect to say like, yeah, you know, we'll re-ingest, we'll obviously lose all annotations. Like that's a given. It's like, nope, no, it's gonna try to make sense of those. So that's super cool. So that's my, I got, you know, I got a little bit overconfident. I can't believe you were like, let me just install version eight right now. I don't know. I have no shame, right? I like that. I like that. Whether things are gonna work or not work. Well, and partially this is, you know, we are just a small hosting company. And like, I'll fix the installer issue. By the time this is public, probably it'll be working just fine. And if it's not, I'll mention it in the Discord. But, you know, this, I like to kind of take opportunities to sort of be like, this stuff is changing all the time, right? That's how it works. You know, one of the great things I think about Manifold, I've already kind of said this, I won't rehash it too much, but that it is pretty easy to get started. But there's also, you know, there's also managed hosting available for it. And actually kind of an array of services in terms of not just hosting, but also training stuff too, which is I think really cool and kind of unique. I haven't seen that a lot from other open source projects. So. Well, it's the, it's that whole thing about like the platform works best if you have a number of contributors, which can be like a single editor, but a lot of texts, it can be like there are lots of situations where people are putting sort of like back catalogs up where they're like, we have this like stuff that we, that's not being printed, but we could put it up open. Verso books did a whole thing where they're using Manifold and behind the scenes and their stuff to have sort of a subscription model for sort of previous publications. And you have sort of these different ways that people are using it, but it works better if there are a bunch. And for a single instance, so much of what it takes to sort of get it to a place of being really sort of expressing its value has to do with the sort of social infrastructure of getting publications ready for publication. And so a lot of the training, I think supports that in terms of understanding how to work through which components are most important for your institutional setting because it has the full sort of like spectrum of publication possibilities that sort of meant for the formal publications out of university presses, but in these sort of community instances like the CUNY publications, you just have more users using it at a, it's not a lower level, but like a less complex level. And so I think that having those different options around sort of like getting yourself set up and figuring out how to set up trainings to get your authors up to speed for the particular context that your instance of Manifold lives in is a real boon and makes it just that much better. There's gonna be an open publishing workshop. NEH was doing, they funded Manifold and I wanna say because Brown Digital Publications did a publishing institute last year maybe and CUNY's doing one this year and the two are sort of like working together in terms of training people about digital publishing. So those are coming next year and I don't know exactly who all can get involved like if they're just at the local institutions but they might be broader than that, I should know. I just didn't read the actual grant, so. Well, that is awesome. We are at the end of our time. So thank you again so much, Jojo. This was really exciting to be able to take a deep dive into Manifold and what it does and just I think it sets the stage very beautifully for the rest of the tools that we're gonna explore throughout the rest of this flex course. So thank you again for joining us and. Thank you so much for having me and yeah, just like major shout out to the whole Manifold team, like I hope that they watch this and they're like, oh, you represented us well. But yeah, Matt Gold, Doug Armato, whoops, we lost Amanda. I'm like, I'm gonna say Zach Davis, Susan Dore, Terrence Meyer, Robin Miller, Krisha Michael, I'm like, I wanna say everybody's names. But yeah, it's a great, great group and it's a great, great tool. Thanks so much. Thank you.