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February 2012

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Well, I didn't get a Raspberry PI despite early-morning attempt. Oh well. Will console myself with cooked breakfast with @liannedemello.

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Podcast on Open Source, Open Access publishing

I did an interview at the weekend with Mark Carrigan on open source solutions for academic publishing and the potential future role of the library. You can find the piece over at Mark's site: Podcast with Martin Eve about Open Source Academic Publishing Featured image by themaccraic-david under a…

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Colleague/friend just told me she enjoys proofreading and that I should "send my thesis over". A good friend indeed.

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Ruthlessly culling and rewriting bits thesis. These bits tend to be moments where I was so absorbed in detail, I lost big picture. #phdchat

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. @BL_ref_services new catalogue seems to be keeling over; times out adding to reserve list. Tried multiple browsers. Does it dislike Hegel?

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My seminar group are getting "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" this week. Bit of provocative Eliot.

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Ace Skype chat with @mark_carrigan on scholarly publishing and the library as the Research Output Team (ROT); my acronym ;)

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Great Post-Apocalyptic fiction seminar with paper from @the_blochian, chaired by @arrroberts. Wish I could have stayed to chat longer!

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Changing one's mind is fine, but not just as a form of popularism. Labour: please get some integrity back. #clause4etc

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Pulling a crafty British Library session before the Senate House Post-Apocalyptic Fiction seminar this afternoon.

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Getting some good work done on my #UKSG presentation (with ultra-slick-snazzy Prezi) presentation. It's going to be a good 'un!

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Copyright and academia, particularly for Ph.Ds

Yesterday, Tuesday the 21st of February 2012, I participated in a discussion at the University of Sussex Researcher Hive on copyright and academia, with particular emphasis on doctoral researchers, joined by Sarah Robins-Hobden, Liz Thackray and others. This post will attempt to document some of…

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Oh no. The @BritishLibrary tannoy has just called the building manager to the front desk. This usually precedes a fire evacuation.

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Hmm. A not insubstantial amount of that exploding water bottle in my bag went through my laptop. Hoping it still boots! :/

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My students are getting feedback on their essay plans at 10.30 at night. #beyondthecallofduty #butIloveitwhentheyrekeen

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Teaching The Waste Land tomorrow. Fragments shored against ruins sounds a bit like thesis editing. #phdchat

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Note for posterity: L Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (NY: Routledge, 1988), pp. 66-67 contains best list of feminismS I've yet found

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Today I'm beginning what I believe will be my final read through of all Pynchon's novels prior to Ph.D submission. #InTheZone

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Somebody intimated to me the other day that REF 2014 will be the last such assessment. Can anybody confirm/deny this?

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Preparing my seminar on The Waste Land for next week. "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME [to get this over with]"

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Teaching undergraduates to use secondary sources

In response to the question of why we use secondary sources, one of the most overheard statements in my seminars has to be the perennial student response: "to back up your argument". Last week, I formulated a concise way of thinking about this that dispels this argument and also makes it clear…

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I have a note to myself that page 105 in this book contains something CRUCIAL to my thesis and must be cited. What it is, I now do not know.

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. @PlashingVole those civil servants earning over 100k must be these gold-plated deals I've heard about.

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I read some contemporaneous advertisement pamphlets for Vaucanson other projects at the British Library, on that note. V entertaining!

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#phdchat people: when printing whole thesis drafts, did you find it cheaper to do yourself w/ ink cartridges, or through commercial printer?

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Just seen a great paper by Julia Jordan reworking Pynchon's parallactic history through the autostereogram.

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Woman completely passed out on tube this morning. Number of people who helped her boosted my faith in humanity.

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In many cases, edited and reviewed by the same figures. As I said: smacks of preserving credentialism. That's the tradition being protected.

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Puts down online journals before they're out the door & assumes that commercial pubs will somehow have different review process.

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The @chronicle article on reforming hums. schol. is v. problematic: "more online journals are claiming to employ a peer-review process".

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Really looking forward to teaching The Picture of Dorian Gray this week; have lined up some great sessions on aesthetics, ethics and ipseity

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Feel very ignorant asking this, but can someone tell me: are there any upcoming protest marches against the NHS bill? #savethenhs

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The adverts for The Economist are great. They convince me there are two sides to every argument. And that one side IS WRONG.

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Beckett yields marking feedback: "A pox on bad. Mere bad. Way for worse. Pending worse still. First worse. Mere worse. Pending worse still."

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Can't say I'm wholly convinced by EverNore over my existing systems. Any advocates who can persuade me otherwise?

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Worth pointing out that you don't *need* to use online storage for Zotero. Can just stick with client-side only. #gbtsussex

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“@SarahR_H: Various standard citation styles in Zotero.The brave can write their own styles #gbtsussex” < the *very* brave with CSL ;)

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Bit of live tweeting from me, too. Quick point: you don't need Firefox for Zotero any more; it's a standalone app. #gbtsussex @SarahR_H

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Thank you for the kind RTs & remarks on @GdnHigherEd piece. If you'd leave a comment to defend me from the hordes, that would also be great!

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Wordpress for Academics

Ok, so it could really be Wordpress for anybody, but here's the Prezi that I made for a true step-by-step, from the very beginning guide to setting up a new Wordpress-based website. We also covered the beginnings of the information you'd need to customize the site and the benefits of self-hosting.…

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Off to teach all things digital/research to staff and postgrads at Sussex today. Early start. Bitingly cold!

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2.) there was a pun on "astronomical" in the telescope sentence that has been lost! You poor readers!

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A couple of notes on that piece just retweeted. 1.) I'm not really querying open access as per subhead; I'm firmly pro-OA

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... and @SarahR_H is back on the live tweeting for "developing academic confidence" on the #cmsussex hashtag. Check it out, #phdchat.

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"we were not convinced* by his descriptions of the root causes of the obstacles to accessing universities" [*we did not like] #offaLesthejob

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All trains cancelled from Enfield Town. As a consumer, I really feel the new franchise has enhanced my rail experience.

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My exceptional first year undergraduate student asked me about postgraduate study today. Starting early, but excited for him!

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Some good stuff being tweeted by @SarahR_H on the #hksussex tag on being a balanced researcher. Work/life for those on #phdchat

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Listening to @Beathhigh on Front Row on coroners. "Would have cut down on my research if this had been on telly when I was writing"!

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Good day. Reread Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, read most of Mark Currie's Difference. Wrote more introduction. Moved 73 pages of fns inline.

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Doing a Ph.D using only free, open source software

Feeling confident of my current level of progress, I think it's worth pointing out that the entirety of my doctoral thesis work has been done using free, open source software. I wanted to write a quick overview of my system, explain where it falls down and give an honest appraisal of how it went.…

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You could use the Daily Fail article on how "Right-wingers have lower IQs" to teach recursion in computer science.

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Just assembled thesis into single document. Very pleasing. Now about to run Zotero's "refresh" option on my 1300 footnotes. #Imaybesometime

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Morning spent appraising grants for Arthritis Research UK. Now on with some admin, then literature work. #diversity #spice #life

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More thoughts on metrics, link-rot, canonical URLs

In my previous post, I flagged up a conversation about DOIs that I had with Geoffrey Bilder on Twitter. It was enlightening in many ways; I hadn't appreciated that one of the main challenges faceed by Crossref is a carrot and stick approach to ensure that DOIs really do combat link rot. A further…

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Anybody else experiencing unusable slowness on YouTube? My downstream works fine at high speed from other sources...

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To be honest, though, re. last RT, he's lucky to have received a rejection letter. Most academic posts just don't respond.

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DOIs: What you need to know

Sparked off by a comment on Document Object Identifiers and metrics by Ernesto Priego, I wrote up a brief proposal for the tech side of what I perceived as the function of DOIs. It turns out, there's a great deal more to it.

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Just had most generous, kind, unprompted email from senior US Prof suggesting presses where he is a reader for monograph proposal submission

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Project idea/request for comment: OpenDOI

Following a conversation (well, a complaint and a suggestion) with @ernestopriego on Twitter, the following came to light (and is certainly something I've experienced): DOI numbers are assigned by a central organization called CrossRef. For most quantitive metric computations on academic journal…

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My experience of teaching "kids" lit (false dichotomy perhaps) is limited. Ideas for Alice through Looking G for 1st year UGs most welcome.

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If legitimate reason, I'd be fine with that and v. gracious. Appealing to chivalry for selfish gain does nothing for sexual equality.

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Irritated by woman trying to jump the (enormous) cannulation queue at hospital quipping "ladies first". "Nice try", I said. Got dagger eyes.