Last week, I attended the Manifold workshop with Robin Miller and Wendy Barrales. I was happy to see Bri in attendance too! Her summary below is a strong one and I will speak to a few key features that stuck with me from the presentation.

One of the themes running through the workshop was Manifold’s accessibility and flexibility. I saw this at the level of someone unfamiliar with the platform – it felt accessible in that it appears relatively easy to learn – and in the intentionality of design at a highly technical level. Manifold is accessible on a range of devices, including optimization for phones and screen readers; it maximizes opportunities for those with visual impairments. As an open-source publishing platform, Manifold is also an incredibly powerful tool in the context of “ZTC” (Zero Textbook Cost) courses. It is free to use from both sides. In addition to basic access to texts, it allows the class to all work from the same edition – another simple but profoundly equalizing feature valuable for both students and teachers in the classroom. Robin also stressed that they are constantly working on Manifold – the site is still buildable and integrating ideas recommended by the user community.

Another key feature of Manifold is the social media and multimedia integration. Connecting Twitter and Instagram accounts that automatically feed recent activity appears remarkably easy. It also makes it possible for authors (or teachers) to embed multimedia (audio, video, and more) into the texts to make them more engaging or interactive, and to link to other archives. From the student/reader side, the text is easy to annotate and interact with at a personal level. The platform makes clear the potential of a digitized text that is not simply another version of a hard copy book. This is all in the context of one key point that Robin stressed repeatedly: Manifold is a publishing platform, not an authoring/writing platform, and that is its true power. They are also looking at building out other language tabs, as most are currently in English.

After the workshop, I searched Manifold on Twitter (@ManifoldScholar) and found this one line description to be a rather perfect declaration of what Manifold is all about: Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works. That says it.