Re:Poste is one of 600 creative works...by new-media students and faculty members...described in the Pool, which also contains about 2,000 reviews of those works. Starting in June, the Pool will have a much wider reach, as people in general will be invited to add material to the site, rate others' projects, build on their ideas, and find collaborators for their own projects.
The Pool, as yet little known, could provide a new avenue for new-media scholars to do their jobs. Eventually it could play a role in their tenure and promotion as well....
Here's how the Pool works:
Titles of new-media projects are plotted on a two-dimensional graph. People log in and post the reviews of projects, rating their appearance, function, and concept on a scale from 1 to 10. As works garner more reviews, they move from left to right on the graph. If reviews become more positive, the works move toward the top.
Accordingly, the most highly regarded and widely reviewed works migrate to the upper right corner of the graph.
The program calculates the ratings and takes into account the credibility of the reviewers....
The Pool also allows visitors to bore deep into a project via hyperlinks, in many cases viewing its evolution from conception to finish. They can see its creator or creators and read how others rated the project. They can see the works that inspired it and the works it inspired. Basic information about a project is posted by the developers....
Even if the Pool won't be used for decisions on tenure and promotion, says [Jon Ippolito, associate professor of new media at the University of Maine at Orono and co-creator of The Pool], it will encourage collaboration among scholars. "Instead of people toiling away at their own lab bench or scholarly archive," he says, "people begin to share ideas and work from each other."
One feature of the Pool allows users to view scholarly connections schematically....
[Richard J. Rinehart, digital-media director and adjunct curator at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum] says he is considering using the Pool to develop an open-source museum of digital art....
The Pool is one of two projects to promote scholarly collaboration that Mr. Ippolito has created with colleagues at Still Water, a research arm of Maine's new-media department.
His other project, ThoughtMesh, was created with Craig Dietrich, a new-media researcher and artist who just earned a master's degree in "intermedia" at the University of Iowa.
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....
PS: For background, see my post on The Pool from December 2003, and my post on ThoughtMesh from October 2007.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/28/2008 09:34:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
