Collaborating with Early America: Bringing Manifold Digital Publishing to Students
Paul Hebert, Christina Katopodis, Justin Rogers-Cooper, Krystyna Michael, Jason Nielsen, and Matthew K. Gold
Over the past several years, faculty from the City University of New York (CUNY) have begun a set of pedagogical experiments with Manifold, an open-source publishing platform designed for scholarly engagement, social annotation, and multimodal publication. Manifold—a collaboration between the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding that has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities—was initially built to help university presses publish digital monographs on the web. In recent years, it has expanded to focus on the publishing of open educational resources, with several features that foster student engagement. At CUNY, these engagements have taken many forms, including the projects we discuss in this presentation: CUNY Student Editions, which includes an edition of “The Great Lawsuit,” as published in The Dial by Margaret Fuller (1843); second, a new digital edition of Hubert Harrison’s The Negro and the Nation (1917) that was ammended and annotated by students.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced many classes online, the prolific digitization of early American print culture offered students an alternative to the sometimes costly scholarly editions their instructors requested. For early Americanist scholars, this unregulated archive may feel familiar because it shares many characteristics with early American publications: the stability of the text is relentlessly undermined with errata, variants, editions, and other issues.
While this is fertile ground for discussions of authenticity and provenance, in the classroom, however, there is a practical need for a stable text. There is also a need for a text to be accessible in terms of cost, format, language, and notes. Both of the projects presented here attempt to thread that needle of providing a common, stable text while at the same time accounting for the multiplicity of textual variants students may encounter, especially in public and low-resourced institutions, where students may find it more difficult to purchase class texts. In this paper and presentation, we will explore how we have conceived of, acted upon, and adapted what Matthew G. Kirchenbaum has called the “social contract” of publishing to create free-to-use, student-centered, collaboratively-authored teaching editions of American texts.
Each project offers a blueprint for enlisting students as co-collaborators in the production of accessible and open editions of important American texts, invites students to be curators in the digitized (but often difficult-to-use) archives of early American literature, encourages students to build layers of multimodal resources into texts, and reinforces the role of the student as part of a scholarly publishing ecosystem.
In the case of CUNY Student Editions, a publishing collective that works to produce free textbook quality editions of key early American texts and their under-circulated variants, we will discuss balancing the need to reproduce the bookishness of nineteenth-century material book culture with technological and pedagogical accessibility; and the use of social annotation as a peer-to-peer learning method, an archive of evolving reading practices, and an adaptable response to access issues.
The Negro and the Nation, a recovery project hosted on CUNY’s instance of Manifold, is an interactive, media-rich digital version of a long-neglected text. It was developed as a course-based, student-focused collaborative project through which students collected and embedded supplementary materials that frame this primary text in different approaches to American Studies. The Negro and the Nation brings an out-of-print text back into circulation by digitizing it and fosters student engagement in the editorial process. Because users can access images and download an ePub of the original, while also interacting with it on the web (or on their phones), it models how hybrid texts can revive out-of-print early American texts by pointing back to the original print version.
As shown by these examples, Manifold offers early American scholars opportunities to publish original texts alongside a variety of resources. Especially in the classroom, digital publishing platforms such as Manifold offer new ways to reach readers and to draw them into an interactive reading experience.
CUNY Student Editions
CUNY Student Editions is a team of CUNY instructors who began collaborating in 2019 with the aim of making accessible, open-source teaching materials to share. Together, the team publishes and updates free-to-use, open-source, digital editions of historical texts with notes and introductions.
The growing collection of CUNY Student Editions reflects the initial team’s specialization in nineteenth-century American literature; however, the tools, methods, and organizing principles we discuss here relate more broadly to anyone interested in recovering texts for teaching and for those interested in inviting their students to engage with scholarly editing practices and the print-culture that existed prior to the 20th-century.
First organized by Paul Hebert, with Christina Katopodis and Jason Nielsen, the team identified several problems we commonly faced when choosing materials for our 19th-century American literature classes. Collectively, we view these as issues of accessibility:
- While excellent scholarly editions of many historical texts exist in print, digital versions of the same editions are less consistently of such high quality and usability.
- To save money, most CUNY students choose digital editions of texts, sometimes at the suggestion of proprietary booksellers partnered with CUNY schools; further, many students substitute instructor-requested editions with free alternatives when they exist, particularly from Project Gutenberg.
- Many free-to-use archives assume a stability of text that does not reflect pre-19th-century printing practices or contemporary scholarly editing practices, resulting in a loss of important historical variants.
Our solution is to work towards digital-first, accessibly-designed editions of texts that are free-to-use, with a pedagogical apparatus that meets our students where they are and invites them to explore and contribute to a scholarly community.
Practically, we want e-texts that look good on all digital devices, especially mobile phones; that work for students who use accessibility tools like screen readers; and that provide the ability to add contextual notes students find valuable.
We’ve opted to collectively work towards this goal by creating and sharing our own edited editions of texts, often from poorly digitized copies or variants we have obtained through archival visits. Finally, we have always hoped to publish the texts we want to teach but for which we had found no accessible editions.
What follows is a discussion of our process for publication: the tools we use, along with a presentation of some of the texts we have created. We offer the texts as resources you can use in your own classroom, and we offer our method as a model that you can adapt at your own institution. Early in our experiments, we realized that our students were some of our best resources and so this may also be an inspiration for inviting your students to recover texts in guided projects as part of a class.
Process
Our team formed as CUNY had just begun to develop its instance of Manifold. It was an easy technological platform to adopt. Designed for publishers, it has an easy-to-use back-end that converts a wide variety of document formats for an accessible web-viewer. With no more knowledge than required for a Google document, you can create well-structured, accessible texts. By sharing with each other minimal knowledge of HTML, we can create fully customizable texts.
One drawback of Manifold is that you must be connected to the internet to load new sections of a text. For most people, this isn’t a problem. In New York City, where people spend hours below ground, pinging in and out of reception at subway stops, it is an issue. So we recognized Manifold as a publishing platform for which we design, but it’s also been important for us to release the same .epub file we import into Manifold. Epubs are nearly universally accepted by devices and conform to the standards set by the International Digital Publishing Forum. Students who download the file can access the complete text at any time. Because Manifold is, at its heart, an e-reader, it makes it very easy to download the .epub file we design for it. It’s an incredibly powerful platform because it accepts files other an epub, though. This is something important to note for instructors who may not want to teach their students XHTML markup. A well-structured Google document, which most students are familiar with, is all you need to begin a Manifold publication.
The aspect of Manifold that has proven pivotal to the development of CUNY Student Editions is the ability to publicly annotate texts. As Christina Katopodis describes below, student generated notes on texts don’t mar the margin; instead they offer glimpses into ways our students enter these texts. We’ve embraced a model in which student-generated content is useful content, and (with permission) make student contributions, such as notes and annotations, part of updates to texts. As faculty, we value the diverse set of experiences, concerns, and insights that students can offer to the text.
An .epub file is similar to a web page — it contains HTML files for each section of a text and any related resources (images, diagrams, sounds, etc.). We’ve chosen to publish our files on GitHub, a free online code repository and change-tracker, in addition to Manifold. If Manifold is where we publish finished texts, GitHub is where we build them. Changes to code are tracked, so we can easily update current editions. The public can also download the files to customize their own editions.
Most editions begin with transcribing a text from an original source. These transcriptions are then turned into HTML code. Each edition presents challenges--the Greek and Latin that Katopodis describes below, or the grave stone in Hebert’s version of The Coquette. Good style requires both that these items appear visually as they do in their print form, but also labeled in the code so that screen readers can navigate them. This highlights that coding is an editorial and interpretive process. Something as simple as blank space on the page needs to be labeled. In this way, coding a text also requires analyzing the structure of a text. In situations in which students have been recruited to help recover texts, such as this collection of short stories from nineteenth-century periodicals, made by one of Hebert’s American Literature classes, this structural analysis results in productive discussions. Making our code available on GitHub allows the public to see these normally hidden decisions.
We’ve intentionally used the phrase “free-to-use” rather than simply “free” because that term does not obscure the labor required to produce these texts. The people who make up CUNY Student Editions came together to solve problems in our own classes, and many of the texts that exist are because one of us wanted to teach them. The best editions, however, like Katopodis’ “The Great Lawsuit”, are the result of both a teaching need and a generous grant from Manifold that allowed the editor to dedicate her time to the edition.
Case Study: “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women”, edited with notes and introduction by Christina Katopodis
Figure 1: Citation information
I chose this text because it’s the most common choice when teaching Margaret Fuller. It’s shorter than Woman in the Nineteenth Century and featured in several print anthologies like the Norton Anthology of American Literature. I prepared the text based on the first publication, in the July 1843 issue of The Dial (volume 4, number 1). Original emphases, spellings, and curly quotation marks have been kept. Formatting has been maintained where possible. The majority of notes are Fuller’s own and marked as such to distinguish between her notes and mine. The translations are Fuller’s own. As many at this conference may know, Fuller could translate several languages into English, including Italian, French, German, and Latin, and maintaining her editorial choices was a major priority of mine.
Figure 2: Project homepage
Within the text itself you’ll find any annotations made public by users. Here (see fig. 3) is an example annotation on the word “harmony,” which is mentioned in my introduction where I talk about the harmony of the spheres. I am a sound studies scholar, so this is my forte, so to speak.
Some may fear that students, yet untrained in scholarly citation or annotation practices, might “ruin” the reading experience for others, or otherwise object to students making public notations. While Manifold provides readers with the ability to hide annotations from others, the collaborative nature of reading, commenting, and correcting course together makes this a deep and meaningful communal process of peer-to-peer learning. Moreover, we have the novel opportunity to witness the creation of a public record, and track how readings of different texts evolve and respond to changes in culture and society. That, too, is valuable. Early American texts were typically read aloud and vibrantly socialized, and this communal form of annotation mimics the sociality of reading, albeit asynchronously, and creates a digital record of that social history.
Figure 3: sample student annotation
Recoving The Negro and the Nation with Student Editors by Justin Rogers-Cooper and Krystyna Michael
Paul and Christina have just shared how Manifold textual annotation can contribute to a range of classroom reading and writing practices that encourage and capture student engagement. Krystyna and I collaborated on a similar kind of assignment involving Hubert Harrison’s 1917 text The Negro and the Nation. While Harrison’s short book isn’t an early American text per se, we think it represents the kind of out of print text that makes Manifold especially suited for scholars of early American studies. Harrison’s text was and remains available on Archive.org, but our intent to recover The Negro and the Nation through the scholarly and interactive Manifold platform was motivated by the concerns about digital accessibility this presentation has already spoken to, and also by concerns familiar to scholars recovering texts by marginalized black authors. Harrison was a West Indian immigrant from a working-class family, arriving in New York in 1900 at age 17. He was a prolific intellectual and moved in circles that included Arthur Schomburg. He was a significant voice of the “New Negro Movement,” founding The Liberty League and the newspaper The Voice. Jeffrey B. Perry, the Harrison scholar to whom this project is indebted, further contends that Harrison influenced Marcus Garvey and A. Phillip Randolph. In particular, Harrison’s formulation of black socialism, and his emphasis on the setting of Jim Crow within a post-emancipation, transnational racial capitalism, gives The Negro and the Nation a cast of urgency and relevance in the era of Obama, Trump, and Biden.
Krystyna prepared the text for this project by converting from plain text the document created through optimal character recognition (OCR) of Archive.org’s scanned images of the original print version into Markdown. She fixed errors and followed the emphases and formatting of the original print version by comparing it to the OCR’ed version. This allowed students to engage with the text in a way that maintained some of its original design features in its new digital habitat.
In terms of digital pedagogy, the aim of the Manifold Harrison coincided with many of the aims already communicated by our colleagues here. We sought to create a dynamic, media-rich digital edition of Hubert Harrison’s neglected The Negro and the Nation (1917) to create a customized, publicly accessible digital textbook with media resources and annotations in the form of citations, questions, and observations developed from class readings and discussions. As part of the program’s American studies, we further intended to explore Manifold’s potential as a scholarly platform compared with more traditional forms of academic labor. As an interdisciplinary field, American studies utilizes a combination of methods and practices to create new kinds of scholarly inquiry; it’s a method of approach, not just an interdisciplinary framework, and as such we found Manifold especially suited to this ethos of collective creation.
To accomplish this, we read Harrison’s text first thing in the semester. Over the course of the term, students provided different kinds of media resources and annotations that represented the various American studies frameworks students were learning in class. We reflected on the process several times during the semester. Each student made four different contributions to the project by embedding media resources and annotations into specific locations in the text. Wherever we linked to other media sources, we added an academic citation to our working bibliography in Chicago style (17th edition). Student annotations were around 100 words. We aimed to use the annotations to connect Harrison’s text to how another course reading supported or complicated an idea, word, or passage. Annotations ranged from a brief citation to an exploratory question or comment.
I’d like to highlight three brief reflections on the experience that might texture what Christina, Paul, and others have already so eloquently shared. First, I wasn’t prepared for the intimidation some students felt with the project, nor was I necessarily prepared for some of their reluctance to become permanent contributors to a project whose lifespan would extend far longer than a Tweet. Second, I happily observed an emergent pleasure students took in their contributions as the project and semester evolved; many of the students who expressed initial reluctance became more encouraged as I continuously facilitated the ways their class comments might become annotations. Finally, their annotations in fact helped to produce conversation and understanding among my urban studies students at LaGuardia Community College, who were assigned to read chapters from Harrison’s text as part of an assignment.
These experiences represent much of what we find gratifying about teaching with Manifold. It allows us to bring students in as not only participants but also creators of public-facing projects. The publicity of these projects lends real-world stakes to course work and demonstrates that students make important contributions to scholarly conversations that can often feel lofty and remote, especially to students who are the first in their families to go to college or are from otherwise underrepresented communities. Student-centered public-facing projects also present the opportunity to incorporate the multiple perspectives our students bring to our classrooms into course material going forward, and thereby disrupt the often white and male perspective from which traditional critical editions tend to have come. While some faculty may want to start each semester with a “clean” version of their course texts for each section to annotate, there are benefits to allowing student annotations to accumulate. Students are able to learn from each other across section, semester, and institutional boundaries, and benefit from approaching the text with a scholarly conversation between former and remote students already in progress. There is also an issue of intellectual property to consider in deleting student comments.
Note: a version of this presentation will be published on the CUNY Manifold site before the conference