With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the 2019-2020 Manifold Digital Services Pilot Program, Arte Público Press/Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage announced the launch of Arte Público Digital (APP Digital).

The Manifold platform displays iterative texts, powerful annotation tools, rich media, and robust community dialogue, transforming scholarly publications into interactive digital works. In 2019, Manifold selected the University of Houston’s (UH) Arte Público Press/Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage as one of ten groups to participate in the second round of its pilot program.

The first full manuscript published on APP Digital is Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, Volume I, edited by Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla. First published in 1993, this volume was the first anthology on recovered literature scholarship produced by the recovery program, laying the foundation for what would become the premier center for research on Latino documentary history in the United States.

Amid the move toward online instruction, this digital volume offers a virtual option for content and assignments. Educators and students can create free accounts on APP Digital, which gives them access to highlighting, annotating, and sharing capabilities. Educators can create a private reading group and share an automatically generated invitation code that students can use to create annotations visible only to the class. Students may interact with questions the educator pre-adds to the margins, annotate the text with their thoughts and questions in the margins, and respond to their classmates’ annotations. The “share” tool allows users to share a passage from the text on Twitter or generate a citation for the selected passage in APA, MLA, or Chicago styles. 

APP Digital is an extension of the US Latino Digital Humanities Program. In 2019, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded UH a grant to establish a first-of-its-kind US Latino Digital Humanities Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. The program will give scholars expanded access to a vast collection of written materials produced by Latinos and archived by the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage program and UH’s Arte Público Press, the nation’s largest publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by Hispanic authors from the United States.