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November 2012

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Moving on from Sussex and joining the University of Lincoln

It is my pleasure to announce, with both great excitement and the inevitable slight sadness, that as of January 2013, I will be leaving the University of Sussex (the inevitable slight sadness) to take a permanent position as a Lecturer in Literature at the University of Lincoln (the great…

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Verdict for #THEAwards: fantastic people there, great achievements, even when cloaked in CorpSpeak. Still not endeared to Walliams.

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Oxford academics are protesting over improved wheelchair access to the Bodleian. For goodness' sake...

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It's just a bit rich; REF/RAE- style metrics drive model of prestige, which exacerbated economic problems of serials crisis.

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I must say, all the talk of REF 2020 in my feed is really so very, truly, utterly, totally heartening.

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“@carenmilloy Hubbard: REF is a valuable tool for influencing behaviour of researcher/research managers #acssfinch” < influencing=coercing?

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I start to feel that some objections to OA are more rooted in value through scarcity models than the objectors would like to admit.

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Especially in hums, what exploitation is supposedly anticipated under CC-BY? Surely bigger danger is that nobody even wants to exploit.

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“@carenmilloy Q. from learned society: CC BY has no protection for our authors and leaves them open to exploitation #acssfinch” #facepalm

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The Clause Model of Adorno's Dialectical Sentences

Earlier this week I participated in a small reading group on Adorno's "The Essay as Form" and there was one particularly good sentence from this piece that I thought worth sharing in the light of that discussion as it forms a perfect examples of Adorno's model of the dialectical sentence. "The…

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Had fun with a provocative paper at Westminster; very nice to meet all and thanks to @cr_daley for organizing!

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Spoke to some sixth-formers about their creative-critical engagement with Russell Hoban. Now off to speak at Westminster fiction seminar.

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Tomorrow features critical feedback for A-Level students writing on Russell Hoban & a paper at Westminster on Bolano and Pynchon.

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Right, off for hours 4 to 6 of teaching now. More Gulliver. More Travelling. Managed to jam in some book editing between.

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Second occasion on which somebody has stopped me to ask about Open Access in our English department. Just got real.

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Been having profitable seminar discussions on Gulliver's Travels and utopia with students today. Most enjoyable!

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I'm struggling to get on with Franzen's 27th City. It feels like he read some Rushdie and thought: "yeah, I could do that too!"

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Tech tweet: if you want a classic desktop metaphor in Ubuntu, installing Mint's Cinnamon env. might do it. I've been trying & liking it.

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Today's teaching is The Pardoner's Tale followed by Gulliver's Travels tomorrow. I always like to mention big & little endian in compsci...

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Grayling wants right to deploy "disproportionate force". Must mean is that he thinks that any degree of force is appropriate (proportionate)

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Conference paper ready, journal article submitted. Now to make the accompanying Prezi for the former. But first, I lunch!

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. @SRDEdinburgh @RacWood yes, was about to point out that's nothing to do with peer review, but still...

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Today is conference paper writing day on Pynchon & Bolaño. Taken me quite a few stabs from other events to be happy with this one.

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Students told me they went on an English social last week and one of my old students told them I'm his academic model and he wants to be me!

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Judging the Safety of an Open Access Journal

Software to roll-your-own Open Access journal are now fairly easy to get hold of. OJS is available from the Public Knowledge Project as Free Open Source Software, Annotum builds on top of Wordpress and there are forthcoming projects such as Faculty that also broaden the field. However, there is…

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Article on unaffiliated academics ignores associated word: "academy"? Academic: a member of the academy? Why not "independent researcher"?

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Felt weird checking my RSS feeds today and seeing my own article aggregated into the Foucault blog. Weird but good.

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Just want to smugly point out that my first thought re. Android 4.2 bug that omits December was that it was clearly a zero-indexing problem.

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I nominated @jharvell as a deserving colleague and have now won tickets to the @timeshighered awards!

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I have to say that Subsonic for Android is brilliant. Whole music library wherever I go makes commute so much more pleasant.

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Teaching The Miller's Tale today. Much lewdness and, surprisingly, student embarrassment anticipated.

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“@DrKatyShaw @martin_eve really think the marketing execs have read Pynchon? #monkeystypewriters” < no, but I like to think so :p

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Haribo using one of Pynchon's proverbs for paranoids from Gravity's Rainbow in their adverts! "You hide. They seek."

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If I refuse any discount, will Ebay rule in my favour if she wanted arbitration, or do they just always side with buyer?

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Ebay definition of "used": "The item may have some signs of cosmetic wear, but is fully operational and functions as intended."

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Hacked off with Ebay buyer who claims trivial cosmetic damage to a "used" item should entitle her to a post-sale discount.

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Hectic week. Teaching @ Sussex tomorrow (6 hrs). Interview on Tuesday(!). Teaching @ Sussex on Wednesday (6 hrs). 2 days to...

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Beginning work on the next round of technical improvements to @AlluviumJournal -- watch this space!

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Got to the point where if I don't receive any emails for an hour, even on Saturday/Sunday, I assume there's a technical fault.

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. @the_blochian yep, absolutely. I must point out it wasn't me with the "motivation problem" against which terminology I was railing!

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"I cannot count the times I have cursed our lack of urgency. If ever I love again, I will not wait to love as best as I can.

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Re-reading Eggers' What is the What. There's a part that always rips me up that I'm now going to inflict on Twitter.

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Seems ascetic morality is live and well. What makes a foetus more "innocent" than a grown woman? Presumably sexuality plays a part?

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I really dislike the phrase "motivation problem". Willing to accept it's harder for some than others, but totally pathologizes it.

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Students: "are you Movembering". Me: "no, I just haven't shaved". Them: "Since Sunday when your house flooded?" If only I were that manly.

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On ORCID, accreditation structures and altmetrics

This post is written in response to a question by the ace Bernie Folan, from Sage publishers, who asked whether ORCID has the potential to disrupt, or conversely endorse, the problems in publication driven by accreditation structures. Here's a few of my hastily assembled, initial thoughts... First…

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Enough #gradhatchat, today is all about conference paper writing, article finishing and interview preparation.

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Person I spoke to at the graduation office didn't find hat humiliation funny & gave me a lecture on how it's not for me, it's for relatives.

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I tweet many many interesting things, but the one that gets everyone cheering on Twitter is: "Put Eve in a silly hat! Yeah! Humiliation!"

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If you're interested in the literature of @arrroberts, you should follow @newgenrearmy, a conference on his work organised by @chriscallowjr

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The amazing Sussex library team, @jharvell, @chriskeene and Joanna Ball bought me this! #OA #awesome

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On Freedom of Speech

A teenager has been arrested for posting a picture of a burnt remembrance poppy. Nick Griffin walks free despite tweeting the address of a gay couple who won their appeal against discrimination advocating a "British justice squad" who should "show them a bit of drama". Free speech assumes the…

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Laughing at this "ultimate reward for failure" thing levelled at the BBC. Because I remember all the bankers losing their jobs and bonuses.

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Now assessing the damage that a bathtub's worth of water makes when it comes through the living room ceiling.

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Reviewing with Kindness

In the past few weeks I've had several peer review requests and it has always struck me that it is far too easy to come across as a heartless bastard when blind reviewing work. That's why I have decided to always be kind in my reviews, even when offering the harshest of criticism. Consider the…

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Guardian "news" of John Lewis xmas ad's cover of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Power of Love". If it was "Relax", that would be different.

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I've just noticed that one of the universities from which I receive email has mail servers named after houses in Dune.

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Everybody should send their congratulations today to @walled_city for passing his Ph.D. viva! #phdchat #ecrchat

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You should follow @adelinekoh right now for a fascinating stream on "theory" and complicity with homophobia and racism. #everdayism

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/Academic success: God determines it too (a handbook for students and Christian career counsellors)/. Well, that told me.

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Ampibrachal trimeter = fancyspeak fr Dr. Seuss
And now comes an act of enormous enormance!
No former performer’s performed this performance!

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Damn. Fire alarm at the British Library. Plus it wasn't preceded by the usual drill warning: "Would the building manager etc." :(

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OK, sigh of relief etc. Now pressure must be applied re. drone strikes and other undesirable Obama policies.

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Wow. I've made the shortlist for a permanent lecturing job that I'd be hard-pressed to want more! #ecrchat

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I'm preparing to teach Chaucer, by the way, after a morning of programming scholarly journal software.

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More on OJS and CLOCKSS

Frequent readers may recall that I had implemented CLOCKSS support in OJS. I'm sad to say that the original commit was flawed and it was decided that the best thing to do was to revert it, the reason being that there was no selective option to turn off the CLOCKSS manifest. Anyway, after extensive…

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CFP: Feminism;; Influence;; Inheritance

23rd March 2013 This one-­day symposium hosted by the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London aims to bring together postgraduates and academics to explore how the issues of feminism, influence and inheritance animate or problematize their work and practice in the field of…

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On Academic Blogging

Although I want to preface this with my usual warnings about too much meta, I did speak to the Times Higher Education this week for a piece they were doing on blogging. If you read the original piece, you'll note that the quotation is an elided excerpt, so I thought it worth sharing the full spiel,…