The Ph.D. Program in History

at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

GC Events

January 21 – Workshop: Creating an Open, Digital Course Text on Manifold

Workshop: Creating an Open, Digital Course Text on Manifold
1/21 at 2-4 pm
Register Now (Please register by 1/19) [docs.google.com]

The Manifold team invites teachers across all CUNY campuses to attend this 2-hour workshop in order to build open digital course texts, readers, and assignments you can use right away in your course. This workshop is for instructors who are planning to teach public domain or open access texts that they would like to use to build a Manifold digital version.

Manifold [manifoldapp.org] is a digital publishing platform in development at the CUNY Graduate Center in collaboration with the University of Minnesota Press and Cast Iron Coding. It allows instructors to build custom digital course readers with optional embedded multimedia resources and a robust annotation and commenting feature so instructors and students can “meet” in the margins of texts. The platform is elegantly designed and mobile friendly, and it is currently being used by over twenty university presses and academic centers, including Brown University [digitalpublications.brown.edu], the University of Arizona Press [open.uapress.arizona.edu]Cornell University Press [cornellpress.manifoldapp.org]Lapham’s Quarterly, [annotated.laphamsquarterly.org] and Affordable Learning Georgia [alg.manifoldapp.org] to publish open access books. CUNY faculty and students have free access to the CUNY instance of Manifold [cuny.manifoldapp.org] via OER funding provided by the CUNY Office of Library Services and the State of New York.

Participants will come to the workshop with a public domain or open access text they are planning to teach. In the workshop, we will provide a short introduction to Manifold and walk through the steps of building a Manifold version of the text that can be customized with multimedia resources and collaboratively annotated by students.

Everyone is welcome, no experience with Manifold necessary. In order to participate, please fill out the registration form and include a text or a list of texts you’d like to use to create your course project, and/ or a link to their files. For this purpose, you can explore the ePubs available on Standard eBooks [standardebooks.org] and Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] in order to locate the text. Manifold texts can also be created with Google and Word docs, as well as in Markdown, if you have the text in those formats.

In the meantime, explore CUNY’s instance of Manifold [cuny.manifoldapp.org], where you can find examples of Manifold in the classroom, and a Learn page [cuny.manifoldapp.org] with an overview of the platform and quick guides to get you started.

When: 1/21 at 2 pm
Where: Zoom link will be provided
Who: Faculty across CUNY teaching public domain or open access texts
Registration form: Please RSVP by filling out this form 1/19 [docs.google.com]

If you have any questions, or are interested but cannot attend, please email Krystyna Michael (kmichael@hostos.cuny.edu) or Robin Miller (rmiller2@gc.cuny.edu) and sign up for the Manifold mailing list [manifoldapp.us14.list-manage.com]. You can also follow @manifoldscholar on Twitter [twitter.com], join the community Slack channel [manifold-slackin.herokuapp.com], and see updates on Github [github.com] .