 Welcome back to another session of Domain's 21. I'm Jim Groom with Reclaim Hosting, and I have a special privilege of introducing to you two old dear friends who I spent time with in the trenches at the City University of New York, the Graduate Center, and they're here today to talk about some of their work linked to the City University of New York at the Graduate Center but also with Cast Iron Coating and this is Zach Davis from Cast Iron Coating and Matt Gold from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Welcome to you both. Thank you so much. We're here to talk about an application that you all have kind of worked together as a kind of university and a development house in Portland to build called Manifold. Can you tell us a little bit about the application Manifold and how it got started and why? Sure, maybe Zach, I'll take a shot at this. First of all, I want to say that our our third partner is the University of Minnesota Press and Manifold is a result of this collaboration between the University Press, Digital Humane Center at CUNY Grad Center, and Development Agency Cast Iron Coating. We really began, the story of Manifold kind of begins in 2012 when Debates in the Digital Humanities was published as a printed text with the University of Minnesota Press and at the time the press very generously agreed to publish a text open access and it was kind of unclear what that what it would look like when we publish it open access then at the time you know I had ambitions not just to you know put up a PDF and the press was willing to support that and they were excited about it and CUNY Grad Center was also excited about it and willing to support it so my team worked with with Zach at Cast Iron Coating to create an interactive website reading platform basically for the Debates book and it was cool when people liked it and used it and had you know thousands of annotations and comments on it and we would often get queries people asking like well can I publish my own book on it and unfortunately you know although it was open source it was not a platform that anyone could use there was no you know dashboard or no user interface that people could really explore and in I think 2015 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation put out a call to University Presses asking them for grant proposals related to the future of the digital scholarly monograph and at that time Minnesota and the CUNY Grad Center and Cast Iron Coating put in this proposal to create Manifold to turn that debate site into a platform and our initial thought was that we would really aim the platform towards academic publishers that was our one of the first things we did was sort of think about who's the audience for this who's going to use it and our answer primarily was was University Presses and publishers and we've had a really great kind of track record of success so far and getting publishers involved but one of the most interesting things over the course of the five or so years we've been developing Manifold is that it's expanded in many ways and in ways we didn't initially expect primarily recently through the growth of OER Publishing through Manifold which has brought a whole new set of kind of questions and issues to Manifold. You started very focused on University Presses and the idea of creating a monograph how did the actual applications start to kind of move beyond say the single monograph to an anthology using Manifold bringing in various texts into their English I think 302 course and so like how did it evolve from a single text for a publishing house to in some ways a reusable tool which obviously makes the jump to open educational resources. One of the kind of key concepts in the the grant proposal that we wrote for Mellon was this idea of the iterative monograph so we wanted to while we were building this platform for you know University Presses to publish books one of the things we wanted to accomplish was to make it so that an author could show kind of the process of authoring the book or potentially augment the book with additional content that couldn't make it into the print edition so like from the beginning we had this concept where at the or we had this idea where the heart of Manifold wasn't the book but the project or the book project itself and the project could have many texts and many resources and different kinds of content attached to it so because we had that kind of like show your work iterative idea built into Manifold I think it was pretty easy to make the transition to OER use cases where you know we already had this container of the project that could could include different different texts different kinds of content. You know if you if you think about the model of a University Press and the model the way we're using it at CUNY the way you're using Manifold at CUNY it's just very different for University Press they're focused on quality you know they have quality controls they're basically the people using the platform turns out to be the staff of the press because they want to make sure that what they're publishing on the press reflects the the standard of quality that they are publishing in their printed books and so you know it's a much more circumscribed kind of use of the platform and just a different kind of model whereas at CUNY when we created an instance of Manifold for CUNY we kind of threw the doors wide open to students and faculty and invited the kind of the the the mass of CUNY faculty and grad students to and undergrad students to start playing with it so that kind of in some ways changed the very model of what happens to the platform in part because we invited so many different people into the back end that it became more of a community platform and people started and one of the things that happens when you do that as you know you both know from working with open platforms is people start using it and they start surprising you with their use of it so you know we we kind of had expected I think the first use case we imagined was okay someone's gonna want to teach a class and ingest a text into Manifold and you know have students comment on it during the semester maybe they teach a public domain text or something like that and that was kind of what we expected and that's happening and that's been amazing we have examples of faculty collaborating across multiple institutions with their students kind of meeting in the in the text on a shared text and that's been great but we've also seen some use cases emerge that we didn't expect like faculty using Manifold as a kind of home for student-generated publications so maybe instead of writing a final paper for the course the students engage in a kind of collaborative publishing experiment and put that together as what ends up being a kind of final course project. I'll tell you one of the one of the examples of that that I saw yesterday that I was blown away by was Kathy Davidson's recipe book that students created recipes and then they built that as part of their experience. Okay so this is we eat a student-centered cookbook and this emerged from a class at the at the grad center and you can see that this is by the way what a Manifold project looks and this is this is one of the nice things about using Manifold for like a student publication is that you know this looks like a professional publication and it was really kind of a class project and it you can see here under the under the home hero section it can pull in tweets and other related content related to the project so really one aspect of Manifold is that it really embeds the text within the larger social media landscape and then you can kind of go through and you know read read the text and when you when you jump into the text you can you can see that this is a class offered by Kathy Davidson and Eduardo Viana and you know you can start annotating it so one of the nice things about Manifold is how interactive it is how easy it is to kind of change the way it looks and feels and you know this is all because we want the text to be responsive to the to the browser and what's just so cool for for students is that they're able to kind of pull something like this together where they're pulling together stories and ingredients and into a professional looking publication that that is can can involve sound files audio files and it's all kind of responsive in the in the browser I think this like you know Matt's point about trying things out at CUNY is a really good one because you get to kind of see it at scale how people use the platform and I and that's been hugely useful for thinking about Manifold as an OER platform I also just want to like kind of touch briefly on how generative this partnership like the tension in this partnership between like you know Matt's team and their kind of focus on OER and classroom use cases for Manifold and then this you know respected academic press you write a publisher and their focus on you know publisher use cases and just like I mean there's always this tension in this project because we're trying to build a tool for both of these audiences that don't always have the same motivations but I think it gets us to like a really kind of a special place like we end up building a publishing platform it kind of keeps us from turning it into like an LMS of some kind you know and puts the focus on like presenting you know coming up with like a beautiful presentation of student faculty work but it also like the OER side kind of keeps us on our feet and keeps us creative as a publishing platform like keeping things open and keeping things iterative I think that's a really special quality of this project I agree and interesting one of the things I really doing a deep dive into the interface because as you may or may not know you can install this app on Reclaim Cloud using a guide we have and I think that's a sign that it's an open source project it's freely available for folks to play with and one of the cool things I realize is just how many different how would we say objects almost you can so you do have the book as one and you have the annotation and then you start to have things like reading groups around that and that's super interesting I'd love to hear more about that but then you also have resources you know embeddable videos stuff linking out to LibriVox or other resources and so the actual the the book almost becomes a microsite of a relationship a group of people might have with a text and really captures that and I love the way in which it it it focuses on the book but then it brings the web in to almost surround that shared object of desire so talk a little bit about your thinking around that and then I'm because of who I am I'm very interested on the tech that got you there and how and actually you kind of enabled this to happen and what the development process has been like and where are you and where you're going yeah I mean you know we I think from my perspective as we kind of conceived and architected the system I tend to think about it in terms of of building blocks right so like we have the project as this content container and then we provide building blocks like content blocks or text or chapters of text different kinds of resources etc that that people can combine or users can combine in you know flexible and creative ways to to support a bunch of different kinds of projects so we try not to dictate what you can do on manifold so much as provide the pieces so people can be creative and so you know we've seen it used for anthologies or essentially like a class reader we've seen people put journals on it and sometimes we'll see cases where like the building blocks aren't quite sufficient I think journals is a good example they have some specific structure and metadata requirements so we'll we'll grow the platform to support that and you know also in terms that kind of concept of building blocks comes into play in terms of what you can ingest into manifold so you know while we started with the e-pub because we thought we were building this you know publishing platform primarily for academic presses who all had e-pubs and in fact we found out many of them don't you know that that led us to like build new ingestion strategies to ingest other kinds of content so you know mark down or google docs or word docs or html or different combinations of these things and so you know we just keep trying to stay in a place I think where we're not dictating the shape of the content too much that people put on manifold and just to talk a little bit about reading groups I think that's one of the most exciting features that we've added you know it kind of allows a group of people to have a collective reading experience that can be public or private and it sort of you know it shows the evolution of the platform as well you know we recently received a grant from the national endowment for the humanities office of digital humanities which is enabling us to add all sorts of new OER related features and one of the things that we're doing there is kind of creating a space within manifold that allows people to build a kind of course space where it's built through the kind of reading group interface so you you invite a collection a collection of people to the reading group and then you kind of add text to it that may be present on the platform and then the students can kind of read with each other and stuff like that so one of the things too as you're talking about that that I'm pretty interested in around manifold is that ingestion process like one of the things is I saw yesterday I was looking at some of the beautiful EPUBs that were on the site that was called standard standard ebooks standard ebooks right which where they came in and they really did look like a penguin edition where you would pull it in and it was just but then also that it can grab all the Gutenberg texts right like so if you go to the old school uva site I think that's where it began it's kind of one of the earliest kind of moments of open education which I like about that and links back to them and I'm sure it has issues given its its age but the fact is you can pull in like Melville's Bartleby or Benito Serino or if you're doing an early American lit class a lot of those texts can really be pulled together pretty seamlessly as an anthology and kind of shown that like your students are doing a lot of the work on the actual text site or the microsite as manifold and so do you have universities using that to kind of start imagining like here's one platform for teaching and rather than saying it has to be within the LMS or we're going to embed it within the LMS like I can imagine manifold be a place where a whole class might teach a whole literature class for example might teach their work. Yeah I mean we've it's been one of the coolest things about manifold I think is that it opens up this possibility of kind of collective reading experiences so one of the things that has happened at CUNY and also at the University of Washington is that you know at CUNY we have something called CUNY student additions which is a graduate student created project created by Paul Hebert Jason Nielsen and Christina Catapodis where what they've done is they've taken standard ebooks and then edited them and sort of created rich editions of these texts and then shared them on the CUNY instance so that multiple classes can can use them so we definitely have faculty across the system pulling in existing e-pubs and existing creative commons license texts and teaching them openly but we also have people doing kind of interesting creating basically critical editions so you know edited and commented editions that can be used across classes. You don't necessarily like have to start with an e-pub too I mean I suspect for example that cookbook probably was like a collection of Google Docs or Word Docs that where you know the someone in the class made a YAML manifest file which is essentially like a YAML table of contents that pulls in all these documents that people are editing as individuals into this like you know whole anthology that can be published on manifold so we tried to give like low technical entry points into manifold too. One of the things you're pointing to there is everybody does their own work on Google Docs which you know is accessible to most folks this isn't a tool you have to learn or teach too much you learn you do it there you come up with a list that someone edits right well you know call it a YAML file call it just a table of contents pull it in yeah and then there you have your anthology and I would be really blown away about the way that manifold actually imports ingests as you call it. Yeah it's one of the parts of manifold that I'm kind of proudest of from a development standpoint I mean there's a whole like I won't go into too much technical detail but there it's got this ingestion service in it and we've created what we call strategies for ingestion and so it's kind of this extensible foundation in manifold and you know we write a strategy for EPUBs or for the manifest file or whatever and we could you know anybody who wants to kind of like get get into manifold and contribute could also write additional strategies so we've looked at like you know can we or how much would it take to ingest you know like a TEI document or latex or some of these other formats that that scholars are working in and like we have we have such a good foundation to add those additional strategies to manifold and then essentially what manifold does is it takes that content and puts it through the strategy and then normalizes it and stores it locally so it can be presented in the manifold reader and annotated and importantly so that it can be output as an EPUB on the other side so whatever format it comes in it all gets normalized in manifold and then can be written to EPUB. Yeah and one thing I love is like when you have that situation that you described Jim where it's like you know a bunch of Google docs or you could mix up you know Google docs and Word files or whatever manifold just like nits everything together and it winds up looking you know like just a beautiful publication with a nice table of contents and that could immediately be annotated and and have resources added to it so Zach has done an incredible job and one of the things I love about the ingestion is that when it sort of shows the processes running so like when you ingest an EPUB you're watching for like you know 10 seconds as like it runs all the events and then bam you've got you've got a publication out there on the web so it's super quick and easy to go from like an EPUB file or Google doc into a manifold publication. No I was I haven't read are you taking recommendations because I have one. He's really cool given the whole ingestion thing if you like you had a like a visualization of the text going into someone's mouth and the text made it going down into the esophagus and then the stomach everything's happening but we won't finish that. I often don't associate the OER with a certain amount of kind of like consistency of aesthetic and like really that sense that you know a lot of us who kind of you know we're born on the book right have that sense of the type setting have that sense of the aesthetic and one of the things I really did about manifold is it kind of brings that back and I guess that has a lot to do with you both starting out as a pub with publishing houses and then moving to more general academic course based or let's say reader group based and then OER that kind of almost helped you because the aesthetic came first and now the functionality can be built on for just about any group of community is that is that fair? It's kind of I mean yeah I think it's more our process for development here than than the fact that we started with you know press publication use cases I mean the the problem I mean this I'm gonna not rant here so the the issue is that a lot of academic software projects in my view don't take design both user experience design and visual design and marketing and branding as as seriously as they ought to so on manifold we like we threw real resources at this part of the project and we're you know from day one we were doing you know like thinking about like what's our elevator pitch for manifold like how do we get this down to a sentence what's our brand look like you know what what is like how do we design a reading experience it's going to make people want to actually read something on the web you know we're competing with like the the physical book this wonderful artifact that that is a pleasure to interact with like how do we get as close to that as we can in the browser and so we spend a lot of money on on UX design and visual design and we do at every point like design kind of leads the whole process before we start developing a feature you know we're not just like shoehorning it into what we already have in manifold we're doing you know three to five rounds of of design and review and feedback cycles with stakeholders yeah I mean I I feel so lucky to be working with both the University of Minnesota Press and with with cast iron coating on this project Zach's team does incredible work you know Lail Tyler our lead designer does incredible design for us and you know it's as Zach says we take it seriously from the beginning and you know the aesthetics of the platform I do think kind of set it apart and the other thing is that we're we're focused on the aesthetics but we're also thinking about say you know issues of accessibility we've been working very closely with the University of Washington on their accessible with their library and accessible IT groups to test manifold both manual testing and then automated testing that cast iron does in its design process so it's it's there are many stages to our work and you know we've really in addition to the design process that Zach stated you know we've also been trying to be open about our development process all the way through so you know we're we're constantly you know posting stuff to GitHub where we're trying increasingly to do our work and share designs at earlier and earlier stages and you know I do I do feel really gratified that the the platform kind of looks good and that because you want you want it to look good if people are gonna want to read books on a platform it has to kind of look and feel nice to use mission accomplished I really do I think it's a gorgeous platform and I really do hope other folks play with it I'm gonna include a link here before we go just so people go to the site I heard and I don't know if this is true or if I'm giving anything away but I heard there's a redesign of the site coming so yeah looking forward to that I might have even gotten a sneak peek and I was so listen I want to thank you both for coming to domains 21 and to sharing with us your work with me which I think is inspirational and just I look forward to the reading rooms I think something really hit for me when you started to think about it not trying to reproduce the LMS the course-based idea but the idea of the shared experience around the text where that leads I think it's it's a nice distinction yeah well that's that's to be honest that's a lesson I learned from you Jim you know early on I mean the we started the CUNY Academic Commons at the grad center based in part on the work you were doing at UMW on UMW blogs and you know the thing I noticed about and this goes back to the time the three of us were kind of all together as grad students it's like thinking about these spaces not just as you know publishing platforms but as community spaces these are these are places where people gather whether it's to read whether it's to share to publish and you have to think about like the people there and that's you know that's a lesson kind of CUNY has taught me and also that you know I've learned from you as well. Words of wisdom Lloyd. Words of wisdom and with that we have to stop. Bye bye everybody. Thanks Jim. Bye thank you.