Dr. Manning Marable, Professor of History and Political Science and founding director of both Columbia's Institute for Research on African-American Studies (IRAAS) and Center for Contemporary Black History (CCBH), is also one of the University's pioneers in the use of digital instructional technologies.

Working with the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL), he has been the key faculty collaborator and content supervisor for a series of increasingly ambitious electronic resources, beginning with the Multimedia Study Environment (MSE) for W.E.B. Du Bois's seminal book "The Souls of Black Folk" in 2000. A related project, the e-seminar W.E.B. DuBois and the Black Experience, appeared in 2001. Among the components of his ongoing Malcolm X Project, which includes the first major scholarly biography of the controversial American Muslim leader, Dr. Marable has collaborated with CCNMTL in building the e-seminar Malcolm X: Life After Death and the prototype for a large-scale MSE centered on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. His current activities include the Africana Criminal Justice Project, an exploration of the complex relations between the criminal justice system and the history of race in the United States; along with conferences and curricular work, he and CCNMTL have been exploring the possibility of building the Africana Criminal Justice Knowledge Community, an electronic infrastructure for scholarship, teaching, and public-interest communications about these challenging topics.