MediaCommons: Social Networking Tools for Digital Scholarly Communication

New York University, working with the Institute for the Future of the Book, seeks Level II funding in order build a working prototype of a set of networking tools that will serve as the membership system for MediaCommons, an all-electronic scholarly publishing network in the digital humanities. This set of tools, which one might imagine as bringing together the functionalities of e-portfolio software, social networking systems, and electronic publishing platforms, will enable the users of MediaCommons to find one another, collaborate, and disseminate their work in new ways. Within this social network, scholars would be able to make available a wide range of their work, including published texts ranging from the monograph to the article, works-in-progress, blogs and other more informal online writing, and other activities that often go unnoticed as forms of scholarly production, such as reviews of other scholars' work, as well as syllabi and other teaching resources