New features
Browse content
The transversal texts website has a clear structure with a blog, the webjournal transversal, and transversal books. But as the archive has grown and the number of webjournal issues has gone beyound 50, the number of books beyond 25, it might be useful to have additional ways to browse through the texts on the site. We have set the advanced search to function also as a tool for browsing through the website's content.
When you go to https://transversal.at/search/, you get a list of all (at the time of writing more than 1700) texts on the site. When you leave the SEARCH field empty (at 'Anything'), you can filter the content and for example get an alphabetical list of all texts in (one of) your preferred language(s). Using the drop-down at the AUTHOR field, you can browse through a list of all authors on the site. And when you leave all fields empty and just change the order to 'newer first', you see the most recent additions to the site, even if this might be a new translation of a text in a ten years old issue of the web journal.
Reading lists
A way to construct or make visible new connections between texts on the site, are reading lists. You can see the existing reading lists at https://transversal.at/curated-content/. You can also create your own lists (private or public) and/or suggest items to be added to existing public lists. For this you need to set up an account at https://transversal.at/login/, which takes just one minute, as you are only asked to enter a user-name and an e-mail address to verify the account.
When you log in, you start with a page, where you can create a new list (clicking the link on the top right hand side), and later you will see there all your lists as well as the suggestions you made to include items in other lists. When you click on the title of one of your lists, you can edit the list and also add external links to the list.
While you are logged in and browse through the transversal texts site, you see a field saying "+ ADD/SUGGEST THIS ITEM TO A LIST OF CURATED CONTENT" at the bottom of each page. When you click on the link you are forwarded to an 'Add item to list" page, where you can choose the list, to which you want to add the link; you can add a comment, which will be displayed together with the link, and if you are suggesting a link to be added to a list, which is owned by another user, it might be useful to add a message to the owner of the list who needs to approve your item to become part of the list. (In order to protect your privacy, your e-mail address is not automatically added to this message; if you want to give the other user a possibility to further discuss this question with you, please add your e-mail address or other contact info.)
We use reading lists ourselves, for example, when we now develop a new project, we can gather all our previous work related to the subject of the new project in such a list. We hope, that the feature can also be useful for reading groups, seminars, etc. The function is not limited to texts from the transversal texts site itself, but extermal links can also be included. If you have suggestions as to how we could improve this feature, please send us an e-mail: contact@eipcp.net.
Blog - thematic issues
The series of four blog posts about new social movements in Europe which developed as a response to the devastating impact of the financial crisis, that were written by Antonio Negri and Raúl Sánchez Cedillo in Spring 2015 is a good example for posts to be combined in an issue in order to render the context more visible. Another example is a Conversation between Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Peggy Piesche, with paintings by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, which was published in three parts and is now accessible under one link: https://transversal.at/tag/exclusionary-acts. We do not plan to just use this tool in retrospect, but think, that with thematic issues in the blog we have created a new format for future use.
When we set up transversal.at in 2014, we decided not to use tags in the blog, but now, as the number of posts has grown, we reconsidered. Tags now might be a good tool for example to keep older posts visible and not just let them disappear in the last pages of the listing. We have started to tag the existing posts, but still have some way to go to arrive at a useful overall vocabulary of tags.
Federated social web
The Federated social web is a decentralized form of online social networking and an alternative to monopolistic proprietary platforms (see for example: http://midstream.eipcp.net/escaping-facebook). As a first step to closer connect the transversal texts website to the federated social web we provide possibilites to post info to Mastodon and Diaspora*. On this website you will not find buttons linking to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram (not even in the 'soft version' which at least protects users who do not klick the buttons from surveillance), but for now two buttons linking to Mastodon and Diaspora*, with more decentralized networks to be added soon.
These new features have been created in the course of a technopolitical intervention by Ale González (wwb.cc; https://414c45.net/#/) as part of the project Midstream (http://midstream.eipcp.net).
