Manifold Mini #4

Resources in Manifold

This Manifold Mini was held April 28, 2020. I demonstrated Resources in Manifold, previewing several projects that leverage Manifold’s capacity to present many different resource types. I showed how Resources can be anchored in the text or viewed from the Resource page and can be organized in collections.

Resources

RECAP

To get started, I described Manifold’s initial motivation to create a digital book that would expand scholar’s capacity to share the vast collections of resources that come with writing a scholarly monograph. When Matt Gold and The University of Minnesota Press first teamed up with Cast Iron Coding to create a digital edition of Debates in Digital Humanities, the idea was to take advantage of the ways the internet works within scholarly networks. Sharing the resources that authors painstakingly assemble was important from the very beginning.

First in the demo, I took participants to the Manifold Documentation about Exploring and Placing Resources. While showing the helpful sections complete with screenshots and references, I described how Resources can be “placed” within a text (by the Project Creator and Editors) for all readers to see and comment on.

We looked at Metagaming on The University of Minnesota Press’s instance of Manifold to see how Resources appear (small cube icons with thumbnails in the margin that link to the Resource page).

• I used Metagaming to demonstrate the difference between Resources and inline images coded into an EPUB (which would hold true for images pasted into a Google Doc).
• I pointed out how resources can be viewed from the reader or from a Resources content block on a project home page.
• I showed how Resources can be organized in Collections
• I showed how Resource Collections appear in larger blocks on the project home page
• Resource Collections may also be placed in the text with the cube icon

I mentioned two other projects, Using Primary Sources from Liverpool University Press, and Selections from Petrarch’s Canzoniere, which take advantage of Manifold’s ability to display visual and audio resources. In general, the goal of the Resources is to have them available as supplements (readers can choose to have Resources invisible while reading) and accessible within the Manifold project.

Before I ended the session, I briefly showed what it looks like to add resources in the back end. For Project Creators, I recommend looking at Projects, Resources in Manifold documentation, and following the Quick Guide on Adding and Embedding Resources on the Learn page of cuny.manifoldapp.org.

QUESTIONS

Could a reader comment on a resource with a link, therefore sort of adding a resource?

A reader can add a link in an annotation that does become live. This is a great way for students to link to other resources without needing Project Creator permissions. Control of the project resources remains with the authors of the project.

What are the types of resources? Are they limited by format (video/audio/.doc/PDF/etc)?

The ten resource types (image, video, audio, file, link, pdf, document, spreadsheet, presentation, interactive) each have different specifications which are described more fully in the documentation (Resources). Images and videos are viewable within the Manifold interface whereas some of the other resource types are made available as downloads.

Can you ever have a link that goes external-outside of Manifold?

The link resource type provides a page with metadata about an external resource. The resource page allows readers to comment on relevant resources within Manifold, even if they are exiting Manifold to view those resources.

How do you embed a resource in the text itself? How do you create a hyperlink that takes you to this resource?

To place resources, users with necessary permissions (see documentation) highlight text within the reader and then select “resource” from the dropdown menu. Once a resource is “placed” or “anchored”, Manifold will display an icon within the text and thumbnail in the margin. These are linked to the resource page.For inline images or other resources, you need to follow the requirements of the type of file you are ingesting. To see what file types support which resources, visit the documentation on Texts.