Social Paper a networked writing environment that enables you to compose, manage, archive, and share all of your writing within a single digital work space. Instead of scattering your writings across a variety of platforms, Social Paper provides a durable networked space where you can develop your writing with helpful feedback from the community. This common space benefits not only you as an individual writer, but the cohesiveness of the academic community — as users browse, comment upon, and build off the work of their peers both within and outside their courses, disciplines, institutions and familiar communities.

Before you create a paper of your own, you may first want to browse through some of the papers created by members of the CUNY Academic Commons. All Social Papers are aggregated in the Social Paper Directory aka “Hub”, which is itself a network that takes advantage of the Commons and its connections to members and groups. When you browse the hub, papers are displayed according to their permission level. Clicking on the paper’s author will take you to their profile page where you can learn more about their academic interests and connection to CUNY. If a paper is associated with a group, clicking on the group name will take you to a list of all papers associated with that group.

In addition to the directory of all papers, the “hub” also includes a list of recently created papers and comments, recently used tags, and a featured paper of the day. If you want to find a paper on a particular topic, use the search bar within the directory to narrow your search. You can also click on a paper’s tag to search for additional papers that include the same tag. This may be especially helpful when trying to sort through multiple papers on the same topic. If your interested in searching topics from new papers, you browse through the recently used tags.

If a paper is public or an author gives you permission to access their paper you can go one step further and “Follow” the paper.  This will make it easier for you to find it again if you move away from the page. Following a paper also ensures that you will be notified when others make comments on the paper.

For more detailed instructions on how to use Social Paper as an author or a reader, see the following pages:

1. How to Create a Social Paper
2. How to Share and Follow Social Papers
3. How to Comment on Social Papers

Social Paper is made possible by The National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities and the City University of New York Advance Grant Program.