Tutorial

Welcome to Scintilla!

Scintilla collects data from hundreds of news outlets, scientific blogs, journals and databases and then makes it easy for you to organise, share and discover exactly the type of information that you're interested in.

For example, you can keep track of life science podcasts, or the latest papers on schizophrenia, DNA methylation or immunology. Interested in physics blogs? Scintilla can help.

Here's how you can get started:

Adding a source

Check out the links at the top of the page. These are shortcuts to the important parts of the site.

If you follow the 'Read' link you'll see something like this:

This is because Scintilla doesn't yet know what you're interested in. Let's tell it.

Follow the 'Search' link at the top of the screen: in the search box type 'avian flu', then hit the search button.

You should see a page of search results. Notice that a 'save this search' link has appeared - follow it now, then choose 'save' when prompted.

Now follow the 'Read' link at the top of the page again, to get to your personal Read page. Notice that the Read page is now full of items about avian flu. The Read page will automatically update itself with new, relevant information each time you log in.

Try the tabs ('all', 'blogs', 'multimedia' ...) at the top of your Read page. Items are grouped by type so that, for example, you'll find all of the items containing a video or podcast in the 'multimedia' tab and blog posts in the 'blogs' tab.

Read, rate and recommend

Underneath each item on the Read page is a five-star rating. You can give items a rating that represents how interesting they are to you: if you want to see more of a particular kind of item then give it a high rating, if you're not interested in it then give it a low rating.

Once you've given an item a rating then you'll be given two more options: to recommend it to your colleagues or groups (more on those later) and to see similar items. Rating items helps Scintilla recommend new items to you on the recommendations page, which you can get to by following the 'Recommendations' link at the top of the page.

Managing sources

When we saved the search above it was automatically added to our list of sources - sources of information that we're interested in. Sources can be saved searches ("anything containing the words 'avian flu'", for example) or actual content providers (such as News@Nature, CNN, a blog, etc...). The 'Manage my sources' page lets you choose which sources you want to receive content from.

Follow the 'Manage my sources' link in the box on the right hand side of the page.

You already know how to save searches and have new results appear on your 'Read' page. However, you can also choose to follow items from a particular source.

Try selecting from the tabs near the top of the page ('blogs', 'events', 'multimedia' ...). In each tab is a selection of sources. There's also a tag cloud which lets you filter those sources: for example, if you go to the 'blogs' tab and then select the 'neuroscience' tag you'll see a list of blogs about neuroscience. If you go to the 'multimedia' tab and select the 'astronomy' tag you'll see a list of podcasts about astronomy.

To subscribe to a source check the box beside its title. A message will show up telling you that you have successfully added it to your list of sources.

To unsubscribe from any source use the 'subscribed' tab in the 'Manage my sources' page and uncheck the sources that you don't want to see any more.

Join some groups

Scintilla allows you to create and join groups: sets of people sharing interesting links. After you rate an item you can recommend it to any of the groups that you are a member of.

To browse, join and create groups follow the 'Groups' link at the top of the page.

You could use groups to share items about an area of interest, like bioinformatics or climate change, or you could make a group for some people in particular: students in a class you're teaching, or members of your lab, for example.

Your groups page lists the groups that you are a member of, and also shows you items that other users have recommended to those groups.

Follow the 'Show all groups' link to browse the table of groups, or search all available groups.