About Manifest

Manifest is an investigative toolkit intended for researchers, journalists, students, and scholars interested in visualizing, analyzing, and documenting supply chains, production lines, and trade networks.

Professional logistics platforms developed by companies like SAP, Oracle, and IBM are incredibly complex, suited to global networks with hundreds of suppliers in dozens of countries. These systems interface with numerous data sources, with powerful capabilities for controlling the world's material distribution in the name of "supply chain management." Manifest is not one of these. Similarly, there are many tools available for detailed statistical evaluation, graph analysis, and geospatial modeling. And while Manifest can work in concert with these tools, its primary purpose is to:

• Provide common data standards for describing and sharing supply chains or similar material networks, along with a simple editor modeled on these standards.
• Develop a flexible geospatial viewer for supply chain data that is transparent, interactive, and simple to understand, with support for specialized data views (graph relationships, etc.).
• Support basic analytic tools for evaluating and comparing critical supply chain measures.

The result is (hopefully) a system that is more flexible--someone using Manifest might find it valuable to map very high level connection, or to include "materials" not normally present in an industrial logistics platform. In pursuit of these goals, Manifest has been developed with a number of core design principles:

• Manifest is not a database. While we can host datasets, the primary workflow for creating and viewing data happens in the browser, where the system neither sees nor stores the data.
• Supply chains in Manifest were not designed to be discrete "documents." The interface was developed for multiple supply chains (or partial supply chains) in order to understand relationships between them.
• Manifest data tends to be descriptive, rather than rigidly structured. The Manifest format is designed to be open and general enough to contain information across a range of different contexts, irrespective of the rendering for a particular supply chain or single piece of data.

For some reflections on the origins of Manifest, please read this brief essay, Manifest / Manifesto: Toward Supply Chain Reconciliation, on Supply Studies. For updates, sign up for the Supply Studies mailing list. Manifest is provided free for noncommercial use, if you'd like to talk about something else, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

The project is supported by Fordham University's Office of Research and Department of Communication and Media Studies. It was previously supported by the Media, Culture, and Communication department of New York University. It is based on technologies originally developed as part of the Sourcemap project, which was created at the MIT Media Lab in 2007 as a collaboration between the MIT Center for Civic Media and the Tangible Media Group.

Contributors: Matthew Hockenberry, Christian Kyle Madlansacay, Kimberly Ternan.