Back to ThoughtMesh
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.
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.)
You can register by clicking on Sign up or Sign In on the home page. You'll be sent a login and password via email.
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The menu options at the ThoughtMesh home page offer more information, but you can also contact us at ude.eniam.timu@erutluc.loop.
The home page offers a global tag cloud that you can click on to find articles by subject. There's also a Search articles option at left.
Once you've found an article you want to read, ThoughtMesh offers three options for navigating it:
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.
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.
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.
Sure. The ThoughtMesh home offers a screencast on how to navigate essays.
Signing in takes you to your Author Home, where you can click on the Create New Document button.
You only need two things:
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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By default, the initial view of your essay will include a paragraph summary. We recommend something on the order of 1-4 sentences. If you're meshing an article you've already published elsewhere, you can include a citation or link back to the original.
You can copy and paste sections of your essay from a word processor or existing Web page directly into ThoughtMesh. You can also type an essay directly into ThoughtMesh, but this is not recommended unless you are an ace writer or just editing.
Pretty much. ThoughtMesh tries to preserve font characteristics, links, and even images. But these characteristics vary by browser and word processor, so you should check the results to be sure.
We are still working out the maximum size for a ThoughtMesh essay--for now, try whatever you want.
If your article is longer than a few paragraphs, then sections will make it easier for your readers to navigate directly to excerpts that interest them. Sections also serve as "screen bites" that can be easily navigated via the left-hand menu rather than tedious scrolling up and down a long page.
If your article doesn't already have sections, you can just add them directly in the ThoughtMesh editor. Just come up with headings on the fly--even generic ones like Introduction, Part I, Part II, and Conclusion--and paste the relevant excerpts under these in the editor.
Just add a new section title to the text field in the utility panel at left.
When you first create a new section, you can choose its placement via the pull-down menu at left. By default the new section will drop to the bottom of the others, but you can also choose to insert in higher in the stack, or as a child of another "parent" section.
If you choose to make it a child, then its menu item will remain hidden until your reader clicks on its parent to expand that part of the navigation menu.
If you've already created the sections, don't worry: at the top of each section box are options to move the section.
ThoughtMesh supports essay illustrations in Firefox and Safari; we are working to include support for Internet Explorer in a future release.
Once you save each section, ThoughtMesh's own software, based on Chirag Mehta's Tagline code, reads through your sections and suggests the most common words as tags.
No biggie. Just click edit tags at the upper right of each section box and add your own.
We recommend using a tag from the lookup list, but if you feel it's important to add a new one, you can do so using the field at the bottom of the edit tag dialogue box.
It's a good idea to aim for 3-8 tags per excerpt--ThoughtMesh will tell you when you have too many.
Sure. The ThoughtMesh home offers a screencast on How to mesh an article.
No--that's the cool thing about distributed publication. Just choose Download HTML from your Author Home or the article editor, and you can host your article on your own domain, or your school's--anywhere. And as long as you access it with an active Internet connection, the article's tags will still link to other meshed articles across the Web.
Click on the "review" tab. Make sure you're logged in (you'll be prompted if you aren't), then choose one expertise icon from the first row, a rating icon from the second row, and check off any subjects for which you have expertise.
Then click submit, and add a review describing your reaction to the article or reasons for rating it as you did.
If you haven't got a login yet, just register for one on the home page.
ThoughtMesh's rating system is based on expertise. If you know a lot about the subjects discussed in the article, choose an icon further to the right (ie, the ones wearing a graduation gown). If you know little about the subject but want to give your opinion anyway, choose an icon further to the left.
But choose carefully. This rating system is based on John Bell's Re:Poste software, which rewards expertise when it is highly rated but punishes self-proclaimed experts who are rated low by other users.
So if you claim to be an expert in climate change, but every other expert in climate change devalues your review, your credibility will suffer more than if you never claimed to be more than an dilettante in the subject.
Up and green is good; down and red is bad. Click a button that best represents your opinion of the strength or weakness of the overall article.
Check off any subjects for which you claim expertise. Don't be surprised if some of the phrases don't seem like Library of Congress categories--they are drawn from the tag cloud for this article.
Reviews are written responses to the article, and can be rated by other users. Each review is followed by a discussion, in which authors and reviewers can clarify or debate points made in each review.
Reviews are usually longer than discussion points. Discussion points are not rated.
The colors correspond to the current rating by the ThoughtMesh community: greener is better, redder worse.
The background color of the bubble at top represents the rating of the article. The background color of the bubble surrounding each reviewer represents the rating of that review.
To prevent users from gaming the system by rating each other poorly, the reviewing system enforces a "cooling off" period after which the latest ratings are recalculated and represented in the interface.
Come back later and you'll see the ratings have taken effect.
A Mesh is a collection of essays, like a journal, controlled by a particular institution or person. ThoughtMesh is the system as a whole, and includes essays from every Mesh as well as essays that aren't part of a Mesh.
Log in and go to your Author's Home. Next to each of your essays you'll see an option to "request link to a user-created mesh."
Nope. Just click the button in your Author's Home.
Log into ThoughtMesh and click the button from your Author Home. The "Manage Mesh" page will ask you for the following:
Up to 40 characters. Examples:
"National Poetry Foundation"
"CRASSH (University of Cambridge)"
Up to 200 characters; may include a link.
"A Mesh dedicated to the NPF's 2008 Conference on The Poetry of the 1970s."
"This Mesh was founded by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of Cambridge."
80 pixels high, and up to 400 pixels wide. Once you upload this, it will be converted to a PNG; it may include transparency.
110 pixels high and up to 500 pixels wide. This will be converted to a JPG; no transparency permitted.
This option lets you pick one of the default article styles as your preferred Mesh style.
NPF uses Khaki.
CRASSH uses Spearmint.
Once you've added these, you can invite documents to join your Mesh. Click "Save Mesh," and you're done.
A Mesh gets you the following features:
A text excerpt from a longer essay or Web site--usually a couple of paragraphs.
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.
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.
ThoughtMesh exploits participatory media, remote scripting, and lateral navigation. So yeah, you can call it that.
ThoughtMesh is based on a philosophy of sharing rather than hoarding. You retain the copyright to your writing, assuming you haven't already given it away to another publisher.
Even if you have already published your essay under an exclusive licensing agreement, you probably still retain the right to archive your own version. For more on the legal status of self-archiving, see the Budapest Open Access Initiative.