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ThoughtMesh is an unusual model for publishing and discovering scholarly papers online. It gives readers a tag-based navigation system that uses keywords to connect excerpts of essays published on different Web sites.

How to navigate essays

ThoughtMesh Essay Navigation View a demo of how to use tags to navigate in a single essay and across the mesh (opens in a new window).

How to tag an essay

Thoughtmesh Tag Generation View a demo of how to add your own writing to the mesh (opens in a new window).

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Recently meshed articles

Talking Cosmos: Influencing Ronald Johnson, Deriving Robert Duncan, Peter O'Leary

ThoughtMesh Fluid moves in Robert Duncan's favored sense of literary derivation, a word whose etymology indicates the channeling of influence into a new flow of water. Both derivation and influence signal a cosmic conception as well: our use of the word "influence" is neutralized from a specifically astrological meaning that signaled the ethereal fluid that streams from the heavenly bodies, "acting on the character and destiny of men," according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "and affecting sublunary things generally."When <continued>

Becoming Bernadette, Peter Baker

ThoughtMesh My operating premise here is that writing/producing texts and being an author are two different, though interrelated, things.  The decade of the seventies saw Bernadette Mayer at a height of experimental text production.  Beginning with the "performance" piece reproduced in its textual form as Memory (July 1971; published 1975), Mayer set herself an extraordinary set of writing situations, in this instance shooting one roll of color photos every day for a month and producing an accompanying eight-hour <continued>

Installing Lev Rubinstein's "Farther and Farther On": From Note Cards to Field Walks, by Philip Metres, Philip Metres

ThoughtMesh In the early 1970s, on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, and in complete ignorance of each other, Russian poet Lev Rubinstein and American poet Robert Grenier initiated a series of poetry raids on the fortress of the book: both began composing poems on small cards, a practice that would culminate in Grenier's Sentences (1978), a box of 500 such card-poems, and Rubinstein's own boxes of serial cards (beginning around 1974).    Rubinstein, born in 1947 in <continued>

The Restoration of 'China', Rob Halpern

ThoughtMesh Is there anything more to say about Bob Perelman's "China"? "China," of course, is best known for being Fredric Jameson's target poem in "Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism" (1984); but Jameson found the poem in the second issue of the San Francisco literary magazine Soup (1981), edited by Steve Abbott, opposite the title page of Bruce Boone's trenchant left critique of Language poetry, "The Pluses and Minuses of the New Formalism." My talk aims to presence the occluded relations between these <continued>

John Ashbery's Optional Apocalypse, Chris Nealon

ThoughtMesh This paper situates Ashbery in a certain New York 1970's, looking at the poems in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror through the lens of the uneasy tail end of the post-World War II Pax Americana. I read the poems in the book as an elaborate staging of the guilty conscience of a citizen of the global hegemon, both super-saturated with images and commodities, and at pains to keep off-stage the violence that sustains their flow. In order to resolve this contradiction between feeling party to hegemonic power and having <continued>

Bernadette Mayer and the Capitalization of Everyday Life, Jasper Bernes

ThoughtMesh Operating at the intersection of conceptual art, performance, documentary and experimental writing, Bernadette Mayer's challenging experiments of the 1970s—particularly Memory, Studying Hunger, and Midwinter Day—come out of her participation, evidenced by her magazine 0-9, in the broad welter of artistic invention of the late 1960s and early 1970s, understood variously as "the dematerialization of the art object," "interart," or "the expanded field," developments that, with respect <continued>

Clarity, or Late Modernism (A Photological Midrash), Patrick Pritchett

ThoughtMesh Abstract Clarity or, Late Modernism (A Photological Midrash) Patrick Pritchett Harvard University pritchpa@fas.harvard.edu     This paper looks at the prominent place Oppen assigns in his late work to clarity. Clarity recurs with such considerable frequency throughout the later poems and daybooks that it takes on the weight of a shibboleth, an apotropaic password invoked again and again against the failures of modernism. Oppen's resumption of <continued>

Coolidgean Ex-cavations, Paul Stephens

ThoughtMesh From at least Space (1970) to Smithsonian Depositions (1980), the poetry of Clark Coolidge demonstrates an obsession with landscape and with primal scenes of enclosure. In Own Face (1978), caves, cavers (Floyd Barrow), and cavemen (of the prehistoric variety) feature prominently. Quartz Hearts (1978) and Smithsonian Depositions (1980) also prominently feature caves. As in Plato's Republic, the cave in Coolidge is an archetypal site of epistemological crisis. I argue that Coolidge's caves also function as sites of <continued>

Meaning, Method, Motive, Bruce Andrews

ThoughtMesh A sketch of so-called Language Writing's development in the early 1970s.

Hannah Weiner and Basic English, Rodney Koeneke

ThoughtMesh      In this paper I'd like to suggest a new lens for understanding Weiner's work: the 20th-century fascination with constrained or invented languages. In particular, I'd like to link Weiner's interest in codes, signals, and the "clairvoyantly written" with the ideals and motivations behind Basic English, the simplified 850-word version of the language invented and promoted by Cambridge literary critic and Modernist "semiologist" I.A. Richards.      The continuum between <continued>

ThoughtMesh is an unusual model for publishing and discovering scholarly papers online. It gives readers a tag-based navigation system that uses keywords to connect excerpts of essays published on different Web sites.

Add your essay to the mesh, and ThoughtMesh gives you a traditional navigation menu plus a tag cloud that enables nonlinear access to text excerpts. You can navigate across excerpts both within the original essay and from related essays distributed across the mesh. More...

So let's say you are reading an essay on Modern art. You can pick a single word out of that essay's tag cloud- -say Picasso- -and view a list of all the sections from that essay that relate to Picasso. Or you can view a list of sections of other articles tagged with Picasso, and jump right to one of those sections. You can also combine tags to narrow your search, such as Picasso + Cubism + 1900.

As an author, you can choose to post your essay in a central repository hosted by the Vectors program at USC, the sponsor of this project. Or you can self-archive your essay on your own Web site. (That's the "distributed publication" part.)

  • Innovative search options
    • Use tags to find text blocks within the current article.
    • Use tags to find related blocks in outside articles.
    • Use search-as-you-type lookup to find words in current article.
  • Expandable navigation menu
    • Offers more traditional navigation.
    • Breaks long essays into easy-to-read screen-sized chunks.
    • Can be used interchangeable with tag-based navigation.
  • Automated tag and HTML generation
    • Paste in your essay sections and easy-to-use software generates a ThoughtMeshed version.
    • Software can auto-generate tags for each text block.
    • Or author can assign custom tags.
    • Overall tag cloud gives quick sense of article's themes.
  • Meshes (features for future releases)
    • Users can view a map of where the current article fits in the larger mesh.
    • Publications and groups of authors can define and administrate their own meshes.
    • Users can choose only lexias from current mesh, or from all meshes

For readers

  • Recommended browser

    • Firefox 2+ on Linux, OSX, or Windows

  • Other browsers

    • Internet Explorer 7+ on Windows should function correctly.

    Safari users will be able to use most of the features, but Safari's JavaScript engine does not support search-as-you-type or remote scripting for outside lexias.

For authors

  • An essay with sections and headings

    • Your essay should be divided into sections of (optimally) 2-5 paragraphs apiece, with headings.

    Subsections and subheadings are fine--ThoughtMesh's navigation menu can accommodate up to two levels of headings. You can have a top-level heading without text, and you can have one without any subsections.

    Essay title

    First heading

    This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section.

    This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section.

    Second heading

    This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section.

    This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section.

    Third heading

    This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section.

    This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section.

    This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section...

    OR

    Essay title

    First heading

    This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section. This is the text for the first section.

    Sub heading

    This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section.

    Another sub heading

    This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section.

    Second heading

    This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section. This is the text for the second section.

    Third heading

    This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section. This is the text for the third section.

    Sub heading

    This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section.

    Another sub heading

    This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section. This is the text for a sub-section...

  • An abstract

    • By default, the initial view of your essay will include a paragraph summary. We recommend something on the order of 1-4 sentences.

  • Copy-paste or type

    • You can copy and paste sections of your essay from a word processor or existing Web page directly into ThoughtMesh. (You may want to check to see if the formatting migrated along with the text.)

    You can also type an essay directly into ThoughtMesh, but this is not recommended unless you are an ace writer or just editing.

  • Formatting

    • ThoughtMesh offers limited support for hyperlinks, italics, and other HTML markup.

  • Images

    • For now, ThoughtMesh does not support essay illustrations, but we hope to support them in a future release.

  • Word count

    • We are still working out the maximum size for a ThoughtMesh essay--for now, try whatever you want.

  • Tag count

    • You will be limited to 2-3 tags per lexia--ThoughtMesh will tell you when you have too many.

  • Open, distributed approach
    • DHTML, PHP, and MySQL.
    • Lightweight, extensible architecture.
    • Uses John Bell's Telamon software to pull tag data from outside the current page.
    • Uses Chirag Mehta's Tagline software to auto-generate tag data from essay sections.
  • Author workflow (as scalable pdf)



  • Reader workflow (as scalable pdf)



  • What's a tag cloud?

    • A bunch of keywords in a box. Click on one to see text excerpts related to that theme, or click on several to see excerpts tagged with all of those keywords.

  • What's a lexia?

    • A text excerpt from a longer essay or Web site--usually a couple of paragraphs.

  • Lots of blogs and newspapers have tag clouds. How is ThoughtMesh different?

    • Most of these sites are data-base driven collections of text blocks run off a single server. ThoughtMesh's tag registry (or mesh) can connect articles on different servers across the Internet.

  • Is this the "Semantic Web"?

    • Yes and no. Like the long-term vision of the Semantic Web, ThoughtMesh treats every page on the Web as a potential "database record" to be searched. Unlike the conventional XML-powered vision of the Semantic Web, however, ThoughtMesh's data are only minimally structured in the page itself; instead, a registry of tags housed on a remote host serves to connect all the individual pages. But it's still a model of distributed publication, since in principle the same pages can be navigated via independently operated registries.

  • So it's like del.icio.us?

    • Sort of. Del.icio.us's global folksonomy of tags is great, but it only indexes entire pages, which is less efficient for finding relevant passages in long academic papers. ThoughtMesh helps trace thematic connections between particular sections of online essays. And ThoughtMesh's tags (and the meshes that connect them) are determined (or at least validated) by the authors of the pages.

  • Is this "Web 2.0"?

    • ThoughtMesh exploits participatory media, remote scripting, and lateral navigation. So yeah, you can call it that.

  • How do I learn more about it?

    • Check out the demos at left, or contact Jon Ippolito at ude.eniam.timu@erutluc.loop.

It's no secret that today's academics are having trouble keeping up with networked media. The currency of academia remains the peer-reviewed print journal--not exactly the ideal medium for intellectual discourse in the fast-paced age of the Internet. The archaic criteria by which most universities award promotion and tenure mean that even academics who specialize in digital culture find it hard to justify writing about it in a digital vernacular. But if scholars don't want to drift ever further out of touch with the information Twittering and Flickring across the world's browsers and cell phones, they'd better find a way to tap into and redirect these information flows...

More...
  • Jon Ippolito

    • Conceptual architect, client-side designer, and client-side engineer.

  • Craig Dietrich

    • Designer and server-side engineer.

  • John Bell

    • Telamon.js author and remote scripting contributor.

  • Chirag Mehta

    • ThoughtMesh uses Mehta's Tagline software.

To learn more or get help using ThoughtMesh, contact Jon Ippolito at ude.eniam.timu@erutluc.loop.