Forging the Future, an alliance of museums, archives, and other organizations devoted to new strategies and tools for preserving new media, has just launched its own Mesh–a set of documents linked by ThoughtMesh software–on the topic of variable media and preservation. In addition to standalone documents, the Mesh includes seventeen essays from the book Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach, making this acclaimed publication accessible to even more readers, and automatically linking it to other texts on preservation published across the Web.

A co-publication of the Langlois Foundation and Guggenheim Museum, Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach is one of the first comprehensive books on the challenge of preserving artworks produced in the wide variety of media birthed in the last half-century. The book features a variety of perspectives, from former Guggenheim curator John Hanhart to emulation expert Jeff Rothenberg to science-fiction author Bruce Sterling, as well as case studies involving Web sites, film performances, and candy spills.

Permanence Through Change also introduced many artists and arts professionals to the variable media paradigm. Now all the contributions to Permanence Through Change have been republished in a richly connective way. Because they are part of a Mesh, Permanence Through Change can be navigated via keywords that relate each essay to others in the same volume or outside on the Web at large.

“New Criteria for New Media” topped the list of the most downloaded article from MIT’s Leonardo Journal with 798 downloads as of this writing.

This article by Joline Blais, Steve Evans, Jon Ippolito, Owen F. Smith, and Nathan Stormer proposes concrete new academic guidelines for evaluating scholarship in the digital age, and has garnered attention from university researchers and administrators alike. The criteria explicitly recommend that scholars experiment with digital formats for their research–like the projects produced by Vectors Fellows.

A pdf version can be downloaded from the MIT Press Web site. An interactive version of the article can be found at ThoughtMesh.net.

Featured in the last issue of MIT’s Leonardo magazine are guidelines designed to nudge the criteria for excellence in today’s universities into the 21st century. Originally adopted to evaluate new media faculty at the University of Maine, these criteria are released under a Creative Common license in the hopes that faculties at other universities and research institutes will take a broader view of scholarship in the digital age.

Among other recommendations, the Leonardo article argues for rewarding researchers who experiment with digital publication tools, such as ThoughtMesh, and innovative online journals, such as Vectors.

The documents are also available online, in the form of a white paper entitled “New Criteria for New Media” as well as detailed guidelines for promotion and tenure.

ThoughtMesh has begun a collaboration with Carnegie-Mellon University’s ETC Press, a publishing imprint dedicated to printing books across multiple media formats:

ETC Press publications will focus on issues revolving around entertainment technologies as they are applied across a variety of fields. We will accept submissions and publish work in a variety of media (textual, electronic, digital, etc.). We are interested in creating projects with Sophie, and all ETC Press publications will be released under…Creative Commons licenses.

The first book meshed from ETC, Stories In Between: Narratives and Mediums @ Play, is by CMU’s own Drew Davidson. Stories In Between considers the interplay of word and medium in recent mixed-medium texts such as Myst, the Sandman comic series, Ultima OnLine, and MitterNachtSpiel.

ThoughtMesh co-developers Craig Dietrich and John Bell have just launched a commenting system internal to the ThoughtMesh network with the provocative heading of “peer review.” Unlike the relatively uncontrolled comments at a site like YouTube, ThoughtMesh’s reviews are subject to a rigorous trust metric. Each reviewer must claim a level of expertise before rating an article, and the software holds them accountable in a way that differs from the traditional peer review of academic journals.

As might be expected, a review by someone claiming expertise will have more effect on the overall rating of the essay than by someone who claims none. However, those who claim expertise have to live up to it. If an academic makes exaggerated claims and is then trashed by her peers, her credibility will plummet faster than if she claimed no expertise in the first place.

Still Water’s John Bell and Jon Ippolito presented the Vectors project ThoughtMesh, co-produced with Craig Dietrich, in a talk given at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University last July. The topic was new tools for sharing the products of creative and academic research.

The Berkman Web site includes a video of the presentation as well as a text-based q&a with Bell and Ippolito on “crowdsourcing creativity.”

Over forty authors from the National Poetry Foundation’s conference on poetry of the seventies have published their work using ThoughtMesh, revealing connections among different peoples’ writing. Now poets and poetry scholars at other universities appear to be jumping on the bandwagon. Who knew that “1973″ and “John Ashbery” were on so many poets’ minds? ThoughtMesh did.

For more information please visit:
http://newmedia.umaine.edu/feature.php?id=905

An article in the March 30th Chronicle of Higher Education featured three projects developed at The University of Maine’s New Media Department including ThoughtMesh, created withVectors. Andrea Foster writes, “ThoughtMesh is a Web site that tags open-access scholarly papers with key words. Visitors can jump to passages in papers that contain those words. And they can see others’ papers, throughout academe, tagged with the same words. A “cloud” of tagged words hovers above each paper.”

For more information please visit:
New-Media Scholars’ Place in ‘the Pool’ Could Lead to Tenure
ThoughtMesh Vectors Project Page
University of Maine New Media Department