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.

Feature Overview

  • Overview of Manifest interface, with Manifest document and map visualization.
    Manifest Interface
  • Popup with clustered points on map visualization.
    Clustered Popups
  • Graph visualization showing connections within a Manifest document.
    Graph Visualization
  • Flow visualization showing connections and composition within a Manifest document.
    Flow Visualization
  • Chord visualization showing connections and composition within a Manifest document.
    Chord Visualization
  • List visualization for advanced sorting of nodes with a Manifest document.
    List Visualization
  • Manifest documents are represented as JSON files and can be downloaded at any time.
    Manifest JSON
  • Manifest documents with quantitative variables (like this one) can be visually scaled to compare values.
    Variable Scaling
  • Nodes in Manifest documents can be categorized to support quick filtering (here, only nodes with the category #inbound are shown).
    Category Filtering
  • Nodes can also be filtered by searching for arbitrary text matches (here, a search for "fuel").
    Manifest Search
  • Other layers can be loaded on top of Manifest documents. Here a layer showing current marine traffic has been loaded.
    Multiple Layers

Project Goals

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 other 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, we hope, is a system flexible enough to meaningfully support a variety of different projects advancing the critical study of logistics.

Design Principles

This flexibility is intended to allow someone using Manifest to map high level connections the same way they might catalogue fundamental details, or to include "materials" not normally present in an industrial logistics platform. It also means that Manifest should be as capable of producing rich supply chain narratives as it is facilitating supply chain analysis. 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 Manifest documents and other datasets, the primary workflow for creating and viewing documents happens in the browser, where the Manifest neither sees nor stores the data.
  • Supply chains in Manifest are not required to be complete, nor are they limited to discrete and self-contained accounts. Rather the interface was developed to support viewing multiple supply chains (or fragments of supply chains) in order to understand relationships between them.
  • Manifest data tends to be descriptive, rather than rigidly structured. To this end, the Manifest format is designed to be open and general enough to contain information across a range of different contexts, irrespective of the rendering of a particular supply chain or single piece of data.

The goal is a system that rejects the collected and complete in favor of the distributed, the partial, and the temporary.

Project Team

  • Matthew Hockenberry, Project Director, Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University
  • Colette Perold, Project Codirector, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Ingrid Burrington, Research Coordinator, University of Delaware
  • Lennox Anderson, Student Developer, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Karina Garcia, Research Assistant, Fordham University
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  • Project Alumni
  • Christian Kyle Madlansacay, Fordham University
  • Kimberly Ternan, Fordham University

Advisory Board

  • Nicole Starosielski, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
  • Shannon Mattern, Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies and Art History, University of Pennsylvania
  • Chris Csíkszentmihályi, Associate Professor of Information Science, Cornell University
  • Tamara Kneese, Project Director, AIM Lab, Data & Society
  • Grant Whytoff, Digital Humanities Strategiest, Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University

For some reflections on the origins of Manifest,see "Manifest / Manifesto: Toward Supply Chain Reconciliation." For updates, sign up for the Supply Studies mailing list. Manifest is provided free for noncommercial use, for any other uses, please get in touch.

The project is supported by a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as 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.

Except where noted, Manifest materials are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The Manifest database is made available under the Open Database License, with any rights in the individual contents of the database licensed under the Database Contents License. Manifest uses underlying map imagery © MapTiler / © OpenStreetMap contributors.