In recent weeks the ThoughtMesh publishing platform has expanded to include videos of conference proceedings, reports on the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and book-length publications.
Critical Code Studies has launched a Mesh to publish proceedings of their 2010 conference, in conjunction with a HASTAC Scholars Forum on the same topic of software studies. The launch coincides with a major ThoughtMesh upgrade from Still Water Senior Researcher Craig Dietrich that enables videos and articles to coexist side-by-side. The videos include talks by keynote speaker Wendy Chun and a host of prominent scholars.
ThoughtMesh is a free publishing platform created by Still Water with sponsorship from USC’s Vectors journal. Once “meshed” with this software, any document is automatically linked via automatically generated tags to related documents across the Web.
While the CCS Mesh gathers together seventeen presentations from the conference, many authors use ThoughtMesh to publish one document at a time. Just last week Egyptian-American Laila Shereen Sakr published a call to action based on her hash tag analysis engine that mines Twitter to follow anti-government protests in Egypt.
As CCS’s Max Feinstein notes,
These proceedings, featuring text and videos, are the perfect way to get acquainted with the innovative work that laid the foundation for our conversation…You’ll notice that the proceedings were published on a unique platform called Thoughtmesh, which was developed by USC’s Vectors journal and presenter Craig Dietrich in particular. Thoughtmesh was chosen for its ability to present and connect publications in much the same way that you’d expect from a live conference. I’m particularly excited about the Peer Review feature, which allows users to create conversation in and around the papers on the site.
In yet another use of this unusual publishing software, Drew Davidson continues to publish full-length books in ThoughtMesh via Carnegie Mellon’s ETC Press. Many of these publications also focus on software studies, but with recurring emphasis on the cultural and behavioral analysis of gaming.