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By ANDREA L. FOSTER

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.

"The way you have thought this through is impressive," writes Jon Ippolito in the Pool. He is an associate professor of new media at the University of Maine at Orono.

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.

"What we're trying to do is find alternative metrics," says Mr. Ippolito, who conceived of the Pool with Joline J. Blais, an associate professor of new media at Orono and Owen Smith, director of the program. "Sometimes it's not even the quality of
what you do, it's how much influence it has."

Still, many in academe are wary of using Web sites to measure scholars' performance. People often falsify their identities on the Web, posing as someone else in order to promote themselves or undercut competitors.

Graphical Performance

Here's how the Pool works:

Titles of new-media projects are plotted on a two-dimensional graph. People log in and post the reviews of projects, rating their appearance, function, and concept on a scale from 1 to 10. As works garner more reviews, they move from left to right
on the graph. If reviews become more positive, the works move toward the top.

Accordingly, the most highly regarded and widely reviewed works migrate to the upper right corner of the graph.

The program calculates the ratings and takes into account the credibility of the reviewers. If a reviewer receives a low appearance rating for his own projects, then his assessment of how others' projects look will not be given much weight.

The Pool also allows visitors to bore deep into a project via hyperlinks, in many cases viewing its evolution from conception to finish. They can see its creator or creators and read how others rated the project. They can see the works that inspired
it and the works it inspired. Basic information about a project is posted by the developers.

Mr. Ippolito and Ms. Blais plan to divide the site according to content. The current database is largely in the Art Pool. A Code Pool is for software code, and a Text Pool will be for written works.

The Pool has already had a positive effect on the careers of two professors: its creators.

Maine recently revised its criteria for evaluating new-media faculty members to take into account their use of technology. Among the scholarly activities that now can be considered for purposes of tenure and promotion: online exhibitions, online
literature, blogs and online citations of scholars' works. In April, Mr. Ippolito and Ms. Blais were awarded tenure, in part because of their creation of the Pool.

No college is yet using the site as a way to evaluate professors. But Gerard McKiernan, a science-and-technology librarian at Iowa State University, says the Pool, once open to the public, could be a good barometer of a scholar's influence.

"Five hundred heads is better than two in assessing the value of a work," says Mr. McKiernan, who runs the blog Scholarship 2.0, on alternative Web-based methods for scholarly publishing.

But Richard Chait, a research professor of higher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says online information is not always trustworthy. "I don't know how you authenticate the value of Web-site hits or what people say on Web
sites," he says.

Connecting With Colleagues

Even if the Pool won't be used for decisions on tenure and promotion, Mr. Ippolito says, it will encourage collaboration among scholars.

"Instead of people toiling away at their own lab bench or scholarly archive," he says, "people begin to share ideas and work from each other."

One feature of the Pool allows users to view scholarly connections schematically. By clicking on the name of one scholar, a visitor can view all of the people in the Pool with whom he or she has collaborated, their projects, and, in turn, all of
those with whom the collaborators have worked. The data are added by project developers.

The visual effect is a computer screen filled with a dizzying array of crisscrossing lines and scholars' names, which becomes difficult to follow as the number of connections multiply.

Mr. Ippolito, who is also an artist and a former curator at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York, is so passionate about sharing among scholars and students that he added to his curriculum vitae, "Taught students to cheat using the Internet."

His point is that for digital culture to thrive, artists and scholars must freely exchange their ideas, software code, and images. It is a philosophy that some academics believe permits the theft of intellectual property.

Even so, 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.

Tagged Papers

The Pool is one of two projects to promote scholarly collaboration that Mr. Ippolito has created with colleagues at Still Water, a research arm of Maine's new-media department.

His other project, ThoughtMesh, was created with Craig Dietrich, a new-media researcher and artist who just earned a master's degree in "intermedia" at the University of Iowa.

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.

Mr. Ippolito says the goal of ThoughtMesh is for scholars to get their work out quickly and identify others who might be able to help them in their research.

Meanwhile, the creator of Re:Poste, John P. Bell, says he plans to build a community of scholars who will be drawn to the Web application. Re:Poste was his capstone project at Orono. He earned a bachelor's degree last year and is now an adjunct
faculty member in new media at the university. He also helped build the Pool.

Mr. Bell is encouraged by Re:Poste's performance on the Pool. It is on the upper half of the graph. Eleven people have rated it.

"There was one review that tanked it," he says. "But the rest were pretty good."

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Section: The Faculty
Volume 54, Issue 38, Page A10