The 30 May issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education showcases several projects by UMaine’s Still Water lab designed to stimulate crosstalk between different projects. UC Berkeley was one of the earliest contributors to The Pool, an online environment for sharing art and code:

…the notion of sharing is what attracted Richard J. Rinehart, digital-media director and adjunct curator at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum, to the Pool. He and his Berkeley colleagues tested and helped to refine the Web site.

“You can share pieces of your own creation with other people,” he says. “That doesn’t work with sculpture. You can’t give a piece of it to someone else. With digital art forms, you can reuse the actual materials.”

Mr. Rinehart says he is considering using the Pool to develop an open-source museum of digital art. Visitors, he says, would download the software code for various projects and use it for teaching and research. They could use the site to archive digital art, too.

Now that The Pool is open to the public at large, writes Chronicle reporter Andrea Foster, academics are considering using its emergent trust metrics to recognize new media research.

[John Bell's] Re:Poste, a Web application that encourages academics to pick apart online articles from the mass media, is only in its infancy. But the program has already generated buzz on a social-networking Web site called the Pool….

Re:Poste is one of 600 creative works– games, art, and more — by new-media students and faculty members, most of them on the Orono campus, 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.

The numbers and influence of such scholars in academe are growing, and they are looking for new ways for their institutions to evaluate them. Books and journal articles alone are a flawed measure of their productivity, new-media professors say, because many of their accomplishments exist only as Web sites, interactive games, or multimedia presentations. The Pool, they suggest, can be one measure for judging their work.

The article also highlighted ThoughtMesh, an unusual publishing tool designed to reveal serendipitous connections among online essays:

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.

ThoughtMesh was built by Craig Dietrich and Jon Ippolito; The Pool was conceived by Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito, and Owen Smith and built by John Bell with Matt James, Jeremy Knope, Justin Russell, and Mike Scott.