New features on thenextlayer.org
Dear Subscribers,
first of all a belated happy new year. It has been fairly quiet for a while as thenextlayer.org went through a phase of restructuring. Thanks to the great in-kind support of lo-res.org TNL has now a new web home, a dedicated virtual machine. Since then, response speed of pages has been greatly improved and the site has run stable.
Following the successful taxi-to-praxi research seminar last year in April, a range of new features have been implemented.Some of these features are documented on the How-to page: http://www.thenextlayer.org/howto
The implementation of 'footnotes' and 'biblio' allows to have automatically and linked footnotes in the text. If you enter your bibliographic references by using content type 'biblio' you can also link from a text to the entry in the references database. This means that the content type 'book' can be used to create structured documents with hierarchic chapter structures.
Biblio also gives researchers an edge who want to push their published papers and books up in the reference chain. By entering your publications under biblio you now have an added tab on your user profile page which, when clicked, lists all your publications. Thus, people can find out easily about each others published works and those works will also be found and referenced by search engines. Beat the closed world of academic journals by being open!
TNL however, is not only a platform for the publication of finished papers but hopes to encourage collaborative processes around works at a much earlier stage. For this purpose, closed working groups have been implemented. There, away from the public eye, you can post draft texts, abstracts, ideas, and discuss it with others, without those communications being viewable by the public. Over the past months this feature has been used by the Node.London Reader 2008 working group. Finished results will become public in a few weeks time.
Another group, PACT, is aimed at PhD's under construction. This group offers the possibility of "Peer Preview", a new concept which gets explored as work-in-progress. Rather than reviewing polished papers, work at a much earlier stage can be posted there and discussed openly and frankly. Once you are satisfied that the work is advanced enough, you can also publish it for general viewing. New groups can be created and opened according to demand.
TNL offers possibilities for comments and discussions, posting of images, audio and video (please do host large files externally, for instance on vimeo.com which has better quality than YouTube).
As the technical faclities have been improved, I hope that you will come back more often and use the site more. Push yourself up the citation chain, create books, announce your events, use TNL ...
Looking forward to seeing you here
Armin Medosch
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