In collaboration with our colleagues at UMaine's Still Water Lab, the NPF has developed a ThoughtMesh space specifically devoted to archiving, tagging, and interlinking the papers and presentations at the upcoming conference on The Poetry of the 1970s.

ThoughtMesh is an innovative interface aimed at bring Web 2.0 features to scholarly publishing. We're glad to be serving as "early adopters" for the program and hope that conference participants will help out by contributing to the site.

A nice thing about using ThoughtMesh is that it compensates for the constraints of the real-time conference, where attending one panel means missing another. Its "lexia"-based tagging system also helps identify connections between presentations that might otherwise be overlooked

To get started, we're asking that conference participants upload their presentation titles and abstracts. Those comfortable with posting full presentation texts prior to the conference are welcome to do so. We'll be encouraging everyone to post their texts after making their presentations—either at the Conference or in the days immediately following.

Once posted to ThoughtMesh, content will be "integrated" into the NPF-specific "submesh." (That entails a separate step, done by a site administrator on our side, so please note that posts will not immediately display in the proper format.) Here's a look at the mesh so far.

And here are a few links to ThoughtMesh resources to help you get started:

ThoughtMesh welcome & sign-up page

ThoughtMesh co-creater Jon Ippolito narrates a brief tutorial here

You can read more about ThoughtMesh here

Read a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article on several Stillwater projects here

Posted by Steve Evans on Saturday, June 7 2008 in Announcements