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March 2012

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First half of Master and Margarita: fantastic. What theatre should be. Second half didn't sustain the energy.

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Apparently some idiot from a band called Megadeth has endorsed some idiot from a party called the Republicans for President.

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For this "day of higher ed" thing, is it acceptable to just write, in advance: "scarcely have 2 minutes to blog what I'm doing"?

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V. productive yest: read 2 books + 1 article; submitted 2 book reviews & a magazine article. Hoping to submit journal article today.

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Until today, my supervisor loved a part of my thesis that I liked least. Today, I found the missing source & now I love it too! #phdchat

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When you time trains just right, they are amazing. 6 hours door to door from Glasgow to my home in (very) North London.

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Great term used by @gbilder: apps are the ultimate in non-portability. Crapplications. #uksglive

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Hmmm. Mabe is wrong on "no scooping" in English Lit. (I'd know as a lit researcher) People have the same ideas & rush to be first. #uksglive

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Mabe argues that intellectual property is a basic human desire (!) I disagree! Recognition, yes, but I want others to "copy" #uksglive

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Researchers then say they want the same because that's still all the choice they're offered. #uksglive

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I suspect that the reason for little change is that you can't plug a totally radical change into an extant system. #uksglive

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Mabe following up on @gbilder's arguments on digital inculabula. We are still in the infancy of digital publishing. #uksglive

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Warning of impending collapse of the monograph in the humanities by @CameronNeylon #uksglive

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When I need to find information, says @CameronNeylon, I would choose anything over a journal article. #uksglive

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Annotum for WordPress plugged by @CameronNeylon. Warns publishers that this is the worst that free competition will be. #uksglive

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Recognise journals when seen, but hard to define. Isn't this what a US Supreme Court judge said of pornography? #uksglive @CameronNeylon

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Poor show with no ceildh dancing from @bsms38 last night. Joanna Ball and I made up for it though. @jharvell @chriskeene #uksglive

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Greatly enjoyed meeting the UK LOCKSS alliance and looking forward to talking further about this. #uksglive

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Staffordshire university are contributing all their open source changes back to the community. Affero GPL no bar. #uksglive

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OSS integrated with the proliferation of backend tech within 3 months (ldap, portal, vale, repository, serials, catalogue etc) #uksglive

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Staffordshire implemented an open source library management system about a year ago #uksglive

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Now off to hear @daveparkes on "open source and one of solutions" in academic publishing #uksglive

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At MacWorld, 70% would buy a new Apple device for 1000usd. Didn't know what it was! Demand driven company or idiocy of crowds? #uksglive

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When mentioning salary cost of peer review, whose salary is that? It's not any of the academics *doing* the review (that I know) #uksglive

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11,800 authors invited to deposit to PEER project. 170 manuscripts actually deposited. Ouch. #uksglive

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Seems PEER project wasn't successful at getting authors to self deposit. Had to boost publisher contributions to get critical mass #uksglive

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About to hear about the PEER project in relation to Institutional Repositories and Green Open Access. #uksglive

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COUNTER developing forensics to look for automated attempts to artificially inflate UF. Want #InfoSec types to try to break! #uksglive

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Minimum UF threshold set, initially, at 100 downloads per item to prevent gaming. #uksglive

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Agree that fragmentation is a problem, but I still worry about future of innovation if cloud-only. #uksglive

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Is centralisation the right way to go, though? Decentralised systems more resilient/autonomous #uksglive

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Cloud computing & software as a service come with their own set of problems, though. #uksglive

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Very excited to hear from @oapenuk and hope to speak with them again. They are totally on my wavelength!

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#oapenuk focus groups (libraries & publishers) expressed concern over loss of royalties in OA for authors. Authors didn't care!! #uksglive

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#oapenuk took 60 matched titles, 30 in control group, 30 in OA (CC-BY) experimental group. Print/ebook version for sale. #uksglive

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#oapenuk is a 4 year research project to get data for informed move to OA in HSS monographs #uksglive

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Now off to #uksglive breakouts. I'm in @Graham_Stone and @carenmilloy's #oapenuk session.

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Be forewarned: I'll be tweeting about scholarly publishing from #uksglive for the next few days. That and the amazing hotel breakfasts.

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Approaching Glasgow - might not make the #uksglive tweetup tonight though; I'm on first thing tomorrow.

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Wonder if negative psychology works for bookings on TrainLine. Ask for a backwards facing seat, not at a table, far from power socket...

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Finishing a UK Ph.D. within 3 years

I've been asked, by Salma Patel and The Thesis Whisperer to write a post on finishing a Ph.D. under the UK system within 3 years. I have to confess, first off, to feeling slightly uneasy writing this. My thesis is yet to be examined. I will, however, have completed a work that both my supervisors…

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Oh damn. Looks like we're about to get a BL fire drill. "Would the building manager..."

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Somebody's computer has just made a very loud startup sound in the BL. I'll forgive them: they use Ubuntu Linux.

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Spellcheck re-does Romanticism and Wordsworth for the 21st Century. "Did you mean 'Intern Abbey'"?

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I've spent nine hours on bibliography and footnotes today. To appropriate Beckett: "Time he stopped. Close of a long day."

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Overwhelming temptation to abbreviate Wittgenstein's "Remarks on the Foudations of Mathematics" to RTFM in my thesis. #geekjoke

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Right, my #uksglive presentation is ready and I'm pleased with it! Looking forward to meeting people next week.

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Becoming happy with my thesis now. Only 1000 words left to be within word limit, too. #phdchat

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Dear @BioOneNews, it is bad practice to send unsolicited mass emails to speakers at a conference. I'm neither a biologist nor a librarian.

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Wikipedia Stats Visualized

I have been asked, by an EdTech researcher called Jen Rhee, to share this graphic, which comes courtesy of Open-Site under a CC-BY-ND license, in order to solicit further comments. Aside from the pedantic tic that I had when reading "amount of books", the graphic is pretty interesting. Wikipedia…

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Best part of seeing The Muppets was when the couple on our row left, 30 mins in, asking me on way out: "is 'This Means War' in this screen?"

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Damn. Waking up on Saturday morning to a security vuln in OJS and having to patch my installations. No fun. Bad timing for release, too.

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Bitten the bullet and booked tickets to Elevator Repair Service's "Gatz". 8 hours. Worrying about the seat comfort already.

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There is virtually nothing Simon Jenkins writes with which I agree and I won't even link to his piece on universities today.

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Apologies for morbidity of req, but does anybody have access to/a digital image of Le Monde, June 26th 1984. "Foucault est mort" front page?

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Argh. Someone advise, please! Off-peak open return to Glasgow from Euston. What time trains can I get *back* to Euston? @jennifermjones

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Had a nightmare about a section of thesis I needed to remove. Turns out I had already done so.

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. @CAPittard hmm, how to put this. I enjoyed the process of reading it more than its resolution.

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Teaching Gatsby shortly. Any further thematic suggestions welcome; it's not my fave, but appreciate canonicity.

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Dear Labour, you can also help #dropthebill by not turning it into your own spin win, a fear of the LDs.

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I have once again had to bail from HE tweetup. Headache from hell and 5am start for Sussex teaching tomorrow :/

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Talawa's Waiting for Godot

Yesterday I had the extremely good fortune to see Talawa's production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Albany Theatre in Deptford. It had been hyped in the media as the first British all-Black Godot. While the ethnicity of the performers is integral to the performance and the skills,…

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Jake Wilson: "All's Well". Website and Music up!

My incredibly talented friend, Jake Wilson, has composed a series of Folk-Rock songs based on the diary entries of Robert Scott on his ill-fated expedition to the Pole. I thought it worth pointing out that the website for this is now up. Opportunities to purchase the album to be added in the near…

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Wow. @LeftfieldTour seem to have roped in Afrika Bambaata for a guest appearance at their War Child gig, also feat. @JessMillsMusic.

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For ATTN: David Cameron and Andrew Lansley

Seriously, just what in God's name do you think you are doing? I am referring, in this bombastic introduction, to the Department of Health's decision to continue to defy the democratic right of the population to see the transition risk register for the proposed NHS shakeup. Let me tell you a few…

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Advice from a senior professor on copyright; he goes out of his way to avoid using Faber books because they're so restrictive.

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Switching from Chicago (full note) to Chicago (note) saves me 4000 words. #thesisjoy

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Doctoral Thesis Editing: Cutting Words

A quick tip that I think it's worth raising, as it's just come to the fore in my life(!), is that the citation style you employ can have a large impact on the number of words over the course of an 80,000 word thesis. I have been using, until today, the Chicago style with a full note on every page.…

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Pynchonites: when you have a sentence ending in "V.", do you double full stop ("... seen in the earlier V..") or not?

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Ace evening with @liannedemello. Now off to teach WordPress to academics at @SussexUni.

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V. and Lot 49 down. Now off into The Zone of Gravity's Rainbow. A screaming comes across the sky...

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If you ever need to recommend a book on Wittgenstein to UGs, make it: Tejedor, Chon. Starting with Wittgenstein. London: Continuum, 2011.

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“@paddyrex: @Tannice_ that is one of the best chat up lines I've read in years ;)”

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“@Tannice_: @kashfarooq I'm looking into homeopathic contraception in the next few days, if you'd be interested?”

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Sampling the delights of Leftfield's new live album, Tourism, released today. Their April gig in support of War Child is going to be immense

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Phew. #UKSG paper/presentation first draft done. Very fine it is too. Now Mina Loy teaching preparation. #FridayNightIsWildForAcademics

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I'm all for friendliness, but I wish people in chemists wouldn't relate their life story when there's a queue.

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Teaching a widening participation week @SussexUni in June for A-Levellers. Hope to enthuse them about Literature despite grim state of HE.

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"V.'s is a country of coincidence, ruled by a ministry of myth. Whose emissaries haunt this century's streets." - Pynchon, V.

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Disingenuous cyclical term "wealth creators". Uses broken economy as an argument for exemption from tax, because they make the economy work.