My 2021 year in review

2021 was another pretty bad pandemic year, in many ways. For those of us with immune system compromise it was alarming to see a near-wholesale return to “normality” among the general population when our lives remained under extreme threat. In this whole year, I have scarcely been away from home, the exception being an unavoidable admission to the National Neurology Hospital, who got a bit further in identifying some of my neurological problems, which appear due to degenerative spinal damage from rheumatoid arthritis. Such is life.

There were some good things this year, though. For one, I was nominated by the Shaw Trust as one of their 100 most influential people with disabilities in the UK. OLH was also shortlisted, again, for the innovation award at the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. Adam Crymble very kindly named me as one of the people who has most influenced his work this year. All of my books are now also open access.

In spite of the ongoing pandemic and my continuing need to shield, I have also had another productive and enjoyable research year. In this time, I have published a new book Reading Peer Review (Cambridge University Press) and republished second, open-access editions of my books Password (Bloomsbury) and Pynchon and Philosophy (Palgrave).

I have completed or am involved in the production process on two books this year: The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies (Oxford University Press), which will be published in early 2022, and my book Warez (punctum books), which will be published any day now. I have reached 52,000 words of drafted material on my next book, Paper Thin: New Histories of Digital Text, which is under contract at Stanford University Press.

We also were the recipients of some generous funding from charitable Foundations. The Arcadia Trust, a charitable fund of Peter Baldwin and Lisbet Rausing, kindly gave £200,000 to the Open Library of Humanities. Meanwhile, Educopia gave $100,000 to Janeway as part of the Next Generation Library Publishing project. The COPIM project, funded by Research England, continues, as does my Philip Leverhulme Prize.

I was pleased that, just yesterday, my Ph.D. student, Bronaċ Ferran, passed her Ph.D. viva, the third of my doctoral students to do so in these pandemic times.

This year I have written seven journal articles and book chapters. These include ‘Reviewing the Reviewers: Training Neural Networks to Read Peer Review Reports’, in Archives, Access and Artificial Intelligence: Working with Born-Digital and Digitised Archival Collections ed. by Lise Jaillant (Bielefeld: Bielefeld University Press, 2021); ‘Open Access in the Humanities Disciplines’, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Digital Humanities, ed. by James O’Sullivan (Bloomsbury, 2022); ‘Open Access and Neoliberalism’, in The Social Production of Knowledge in a Neoliberal Age: Debating the Challenges Facing Higher Education, ed. by J. Collier and J. Cruickshank (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2022); ‘The Essay in the Career of the Contemporary English Novelist’, in The Cambridge History of the British Essay, ed. by Denise Gigante and Jason Childs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); ‘“Non”-Fiction’, in David Foster Wallace in Context, ed. by Clare Hayes-Brady (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); ‘Lessons from Library Genesis: Extreme Minimalist Scaling at Pirate Ebook Platforms’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 16.1 (2022); and ‘New Leaves: The Histories of Digital Pagination’, Book History, 25.1 (2022). This year, I have given 39 conference papers and talks so far.

So the world remains very uncertain and alarming. It is hard merely to tend, as Candide has it, simply to one’s own garden when the allotment is on fire. Nonetheless, I’m turning over a crop.