Skip to main content
The Knowledge Futures Group is home to projects which form an open, modern infrastructure for the world’s knowledge. New projects that fit into this ecosystem are encouraged to reach out!
PubPub is an open authoring and publishing platform initially developed as a Media Lab project. It socializes the process of knowledge creation by integrating conversation, annotation, and versioning into short and long-form digital publication. Among the books now on PubPub is Frankenbook, an interactive edition of Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds (MIT Press, 2017). Community contributed annotations on the platform live alongside multimedia elements and a series of essays; classrooms and reading groups are encouraged to create their own digital edition to host private discussions and manage assignments. Also on PubPub is the Journal of Design and Science (JoDS), which forges new connections between science and design and breaks down the barriers between traditional academic disciplines. We see JoDS as a node in a global network of online debate and discussion rooted in the Media Lab’s research and design ethos.
The Underlay is a planned protocol and set of tools to connect and archive publicly available knowledge, and its provenance. The Underlay provides mechanisms for distilling a knowledge graph from open publications, for instance making the data and content hosted on PubPub broadly archived and available to other platforms.
One of the first projects using the Underlay, the Prior Art Archive is a public archive of prior art with machine-readable metadata, hosted by MIT and indexed by Google Patents.
