The Convergence site
What is it?
A convergence site is an academic site that compiles research or data into one place. However, nothing is strictly textual anymore, so there is a need for something to house multimodal projects, data that may be represented in a variety of formats, and to make it all searchable. It is similar to an interactive portfolio, with built in search capabilities.
The “engine”
A Google search engine can be custom tailored for a website and is commonly used on most wiki sites to search terms within the site itself. This site contains a wiki that is in a subdomain, meaning it is not part of the main website structure. A Google search engine pointing to that subdomain would allow the person to search the wiki without having to follow all the links to get to what they need.
“Driving” Research
By expanding the search engine to include Google scholar searches, a student’s or researcher’s wiki can then be linked to an infinite number of scholarly searches that would springboard off of your wiki topic. With a convergence engine, your personal research can be connected to thousands of scholars’ research with a simple addition of targeted search engines.
Unique Research
Each researcher has different needs. We may need to house podcasts, videos, interview recordings, 3-D models, lab data, etc. Your main website can serve as a repository for these things. Maybe you are tying it all together with weekly blogs or vlogs. If you are going to maintain a wiki you will likely want to use something like WikiMedia or dokuwiki, which is a very different type of webpage than what you are reading this on. A convergence engine site can help tie these disparate things together, as well as connecting with a much larger world of academic research.