Hello Sunshine!
We’re pleased to announce the launch of digress.it, a WordPress plugin that offers paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text. digress.it is based on the architecture of weblogs, but is geared toward in-depth discussions of longer documents: article, essay or even book-length.
Blogs aren’t bad for having conversations, but comments tend to get unwieldy, and can feel unmoored when the original post is long. To solve this, digress.it lets you run blog-style comment threads — digressions, if you will — off of individual paragraphs. To do this efficiently, we’ve re-jiggered the conventional post-discussion hierarchy of blogs, moving the comment area from beneath the post to beside it (floating to the right) — hearkening back to the age-old practice of scribbling in page margins. We see great possibilities for educators, literary groups, political or civic activists, legal scholars, and pretty much anyone who wants to do a communal close reading.
History
Some of you may be familiar with digress.it’s predecessor, CommentPress, a simpler tool which grew out of digital publishing experiments at the Institute for the Future of the Book. digress.it represents a complete rewrite of the original CommentPress code, turning it from a theme into a plugin and adding a great deal of power, flexibility and nuance. Out of the box, digress.it is designed to handle a self-contained document (rather than a continuous blog), but it could be tweaked to do just about anything, even running selectively for certain categories within a larger blog. Like we say, it’s flexible.
Funding
- JISC - the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) supports education and research in the use of information and communications.
- Cornell University – the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative (CeRI)
Press
In The Chronicle of Higher Education (PDF) »
In The Journal of Electronic Publishing. »
Tulane University: Tulane Digital Trends »
Team
Eddie A Tejeda (lead developer and organizer)
Eddie is a developer, technology strategist and lead organizer of digress.it. He lead the development of web projects at the Institute for the Future of the Book, where CommentPress/digress.it was first born. Eddie now a member of the The Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative (CeRI) research team and is involved various projects that are rethinking openness and transparency, including LittleSis, an involuntary social network that tracks key relationships of politicians, corporate executives, lobbyists, and affiliated organizations.
Ben Vershbow (scribe, editorial)
Ben is a web producer and theater actor/director in New York. For over three years, he worked at the Institute for the Future of the Book on a series of digital publishing experiments that eventually gave birth to CommentPress/digress.it. Ben currently works in the New York Public Library’s Digital Experience Group on social media, e-publishing and performing arts-related projects. He is also Associate Curator of IRT Theater in the West Village.
Jesse Wilbur (design)
Jesse is an interaction designer in New York, creating interfaces for the web and mobile devices. He helped develop the original interfaces for CommentPress/digress.it at the Institute for the Future of the Book. Jesse has recently developed an interest in urban design, the unintended fruits of urban planning, and the social construction of urban life.
Joss Winn (testing, outreach)
Joss works at the University of Lincoln, UK and is also Co-director of Public Platforms Limited, which runs WriteToReply, one of the first web platforms to use digress.it. He manages the JISCPress project, which has helped fund the development of digress.it.
Contact
For questions about the project contact – eddie@digress.it
Credits
jQuery – A very easy Javascript Library
Wordpress – The foundation of digress.it
kwout – For the screenshot capture technology on the community section