Colin Kloecker from Works Progress has described ThoughtMesh as a “Tool for a Healthy Commons,” arguing that “a healthy commons needs tools that facilitate, connect, and nurture its inhabitants.” Colin’s post was in preparation for the kickoff event of the Walker Art Center’s “Open Field” initiative, which invites members of the online and local community to program the green space adjoining the museum.

ThoughtMesh is a tool for publishing online that began to materialize when Jon [Ippolito] and Craig Dietrich started thinking about what their ideal publishing software would look like, if they could build it from the ground up. What they came up with is a tool that allows published articles to live socially on the web, articles can be distributed and published on any website online. At the same time, every essay, article, and document are connected to each other. And of course, it’s easy to use, easy to share, and works as a non-linear presentation tool to boot!

Colin and his collaborator Shanai Matteson liked ThoughtMesh enough that they used it to organize the online version of the presenter’s talks.

Click on one of the keywords in the tag cloud to see which blog posts have been tagged similarly. If you click on “excerpts out,” you’re still searching with the same keywords, but now you’re searching through every single document in the ThoughtMesh database. This is a great way to connect to other articles and essays you might be interested in.

You can find more about the Walker’s Open Field initiative–over 100 events and counting–here.

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.

Come and see Vectors’ Erik Loyer (Creative Director) and Craig Dietrich (Info Design Director) present their work and collaborations at the IML’s Digital Studies Symposium. Topics will traverse design, programming, and scholarship. We’re sure there will be a lot of exciting projects shown.

Erik Loyer | Craig Dietrich
Thursday, February 11, 6 - 9 PM
Robert Zemeckis Center for the Digital Arts, Room 111
University of Southern California

Free and open to the public. For more information, please visit http://dss.usc.edu

Fellows from this summer’s Vectors-IML NEH Institute in Los Angeles speak about their collaborations and interests in an interactive media installation across the country in Maine.  Magic is presently installed at the at Without Borders VI: Conjunction gallery show on the University of Maine campus, and features video interview segments and theme-based navigation to explore the processes by which interactive media projects are produced.  Co-produced by Vectors staffer Craig Dietrich with U-Maine Intermedia graduate student John Bell, and L.A.-based installation artist Vanessa Vobis, the team created the installation as an early introduction to Magic, intending a full, Web-based release in 2010.

To see the installation on the Web, please visit http://magic.craigdietrich.com/WithoutBorders

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

Vectors’ fellow Kim Christen was recently interviewed on the BBC’s Digital Planet about her continued work developing innovative archives with indigenous peoples. 

Kim’s Vectors’ project, “Digital Dynamics Across Cultures” (in the Ephemera issue), was an early effort in this regard. She has gone on to receive numerous grants and to continue to work with Vectors’  team member, Craig Deitrich.

For more information please visit:
Learn more at Kim’s blog