Future of World Capitalism

A 'text', on this site, is in brief anything citable - anything that might figure in a bibliographic reference in another text. This might be a book, a chapter in a book, a blog, a newspaper article or simply a mimeo document.

Texts are associated with 'authors' and with 'commentaries' (see later in this menu item). The details of the author are standardised to make the author 'citable'. If the author is already present on this site, you can use the existing citable author. Otherwise, first create an entry for the author.

The two defining feature of a 'text' are permanence and accessibility. If somebody wants to track this text down they should be able to find the original. If a bank clerk says over the counter that the bank is about to go bankrupt, that's not a text. If you write a blog saying 'This clerk told me my bank was about to go bankrupt', that's a text. If the TV interviews the manager who says 'we are about to go bankrupt' and puts it on UTube, that's a text. And if they don't put it on Utube and they lose the recording, it's no longer a text, because you can't retrieve it.

We've tried to be as fluid as possible about what a text might be and how you can describe it, but some fields are mandatory and others are standards. The mandatory fields have to be filled in or you can't create the entry. The standards fields (see Metadata) are preferred but you can create an entry without them. The more information you provide, the more useful it will be to other site users.

Title

To create a text, you need to say what it's going to be called on this site. Hence it needs a title - which would normally be its 'public title'. Eg Keynes's book 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money' would be referred to as 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. However some items, particularly blogs, don't have very memorable names - for example "http://debtonation.org/2009/02/debt-detox-purging-and-parasite-cleansing/". In that case, create a title for it - ideally, one that helps cite it, in this case Debt detox, purging and parasite cleansing, which is the title this particular item has on the blog.

Type and subject

One of the big advances that has come with social networking sites is the ability to say extra things about items of interest like films, music and so on by adding keywords, sometimes called tags - for example for music, to say if it's classical, jazz, rock, and so on.

To make this site usable, we want our users to help provide a taxonomy. The website system we use is very flexible in this way. It's pretty intuitive but basically, you can start from the built in 'spine' system called a taxonomy, which we (the site editors) define, and then you add to that with a more flexible system that allows you to add extra categories yourself. These extra categories will be crucial to other users that want to make selections of particular kinds of texts - reading lists, bibliographies, study guides, and so on. So, for example, if your text is about 'Comparative Politics' then you want to flag this up so that any user that is interested in Comparative Politics can narrow her search down to texts like yours. There's more to be said about taxonomies, but we'll create a separate page for that, so that's enough for now.

Our taxonomy is still under development because of time constraints. We have created some rudimentary criteria such as 'History of Economic Thought' or 'World Systems Theory' and we'll add to these as time goes on. For now, it's a test feature. It's in an early stage and, eventually, users will be able to add to it themselves. At present, there are only a fiew taxonomy terms available. Choose one of them - and if you have ideas for others, let us know.

Texts are classified in two ways:

• the 'type' of the text - whether it is a book, newspaper article, report, etc. This is a fixed taxomon that's not likely to evolve or change much
• the 'subject' - Economic History, Philosophy, etc. This will expand as time goes on

Enter both classifications

Authors

'Authors' are also defined on this site and you, the user, need to create the entries for your author. Someone may have done that - for example Marx and Keynes are already on the site. In that case, the 'citable author' is simply the existing entry. If there is no entry for an author, you can do one or both of two things

• You can enter the author's name in plain text, without creating a citable author entry
• better, you can create an entry for the author (for how to do this, see later on). If you do that, try to tell us as much about the author as you can. Check out the net for URLs that provide more information, and paste entries to them into the 'find out more' fields.

It's best to create the author entry first, but you can, instead, create the text entry using plain text for the author, and then, when you have created the author's citable entry, go back and edit your text to put it in there.

Where to find it

These days, a lot of texts are available in different versions and in different places. For example you may find an Amazon entry, an open access archive, a Library of Congress entry, and ISBN, etc. You can create multiple fields. Remember the principle is to provide as much help as you can to a user who wants locate this text. The user may want to buy it, find it in a library, download it, or all three. If you can, provide all this information

Other mandatory stuff

The other mandatory fields are the usual suspects - the year it was 'published' (made accessible), the publisher (for a website, the owner of the site), etc. But if there's anything you don't understand, or think should be added, let us know.

Abstracts, commentaries, reviews, etc

A big feature of this site is the ability to make commentaries about texts. That means, as the site evolves, users will be able to find out more about a text by looking at what other users have said. We hope that they will eventually be able to use this to construct study guides, readings lists, or simply to take notes for their own benefit to supplement their reading. What we've tried to do is group together, in this category, all the different types of information you might want to add about a text. There's a page on this site to tell you more: see [TBA]

Mechanics

Only an authenticated user can create a text. That means you must apply to become one from the 'User Login' menu, usually on the lefthand side of the page. We will then process your application, and provide you with a login. At that point you can start adding stuff. Before that you are welcome to browse and look at it, or send us suggestions from the contact page.

When you are logged in, on  the lefthand side of the page (where the login menu sits, if you haven't logged in) you'll see a menu that provides options to create texts, and edit them.

At present, we have only enabled you to edit your own texts. As the system progresses, we'll try to make that more flexible, and delegate as much as we can to site users. We have to be careful about this, because otherwise, you might accidentally undo somebody else's good work.