ThoughtMesh Author's Statement - The Diigo Meta page

• 19 Feb 09
  

  Paul Arthur
• 28 May 08
  

  Lisa Spiro

  When Craig Dietrich and I set out to build ThoughtMesh, we asked ourselves how an ideal publishing tool for scholars would behave. We decided that we wanted a system that was distributed--not siloed away in a single database, but able to be published on any Web site anywhere. We also wanted all the essays to be connected to each other, by something less random than search returns, but more serendipitous than intentional hyperlinks.
  
  To accomplish these ends, we built ThoughtMesh to:
  
  * Allow navigation by tags as well as essay sections.
  
  Tag clouds are new organizational structures emerging in today's distributed publication communities, most famously in popular social networking sites like del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr. In a typical tag cloud, clickable words corresponding to user-defined categories mill or float about on a page, their position and prominence determined by an emergent count of the number of times they have been used rather than by some top-down authorial decision. Clouds allow for overlapping, not dichotomous categories. They visualize relevance as a swarming or bubbling rather than a roll-call or rank.
  
  * Allow dynamic re-organization.

  publishing tagging visualization scholarly_communication digital_scholarship

• 27 Apr 08
  

  Trudy Lane

  knowledge sharing thoughtmesh research_publishing

  • we wanted a system that was distributed-
  • Tag clouds are new organizational structures emerging in today's distributed publication communities, most famously in popular social networking sites like del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr. In a typical tag cloud, clickable words corresponding to user-defined categories mill or float about on a page, their position and prominence determined by an emergent count of the number of times they have been used rather than by some top-down authorial decision. Clouds allow for overlapping, not dichotomous categories. They visualize relevance as a swarming or bubbling rather than a roll-call or rank.
  • signal-to-noise
  • This would prevent the circular "rich get richer" bias of many interfaces,
  • as I've argued elsewhere, clouds of influence are a much more nuanced way to recognize achievement in academic networks than journal "impact factors." Giving an essay's connections visual form could help evaluators understand the Big Picture of that author's influence within an academic subculture and the broader online community.

  3 more annotations...

Would you like to comment?

Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.