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March 2013

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Exposing XML data for Orbit

Although, for now, this will be of limited interest/use to probably most readers of the journal, I today undertook the necessary work (by which I mean: cleaning up for compliance!) to expose the XML files that power the typesetting behind my journal of Pynchon studies, Orbit: Writing Around…

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I am reaching my limit of 10 hours straight for XSLT debugging for today. Just one more trace...

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Having as enjoyable a day as one can when on methotrexate: getting all Orbit articles 100% NLM-journal-tagset-compliant.

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In fact, it's just a totally cynical nostalgic marketing of protest implying "look at those past protests for real issues". So disappointing

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Gather possession order served against @occupysussex. Interesting how, at graduation though, @sussexuni is proud to show history of protest.

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Massive technical problem with @britishlibrary announcement system. It's replaying an amplified drilling noise through the reading rooms!

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Modernist Intimacies conference

A quick heads-up to flag the following conference, taking place on the 17th May at the University of Sussex. Excellent exciting line-up! Modernist Intimacies: Panel Schedule. 9.00-9.30: Registration and coffee [Jubilee 155]. 9:30-9:45: Conference Welcome: Ruth Charnock 9.45-11.00: Affective…

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David Milliband is going to run international rescue... That's the thing from Thunderbirds, right?

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CrossRef, DOIs and Preparing for Future Assignment

It is a fundamental part of the PILA agreement that is signed when a publisher joins CrossRef that they will link to other articles using their DOIs. So, for example, if I cite an article in a journal that has a DOI, I must ensure that I use that DOI. If it doesn't have a DOI, then I needn't link…

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Futurity, Books, Marx, Labour

This post is a transcript of a talk I gave at the University of Nottingham on the 25th March 2013 for the ECHIC "Beyond the Book" conference. As I've intimated in other talks that I've been giving recently, when speculating about the “future of X or Y”, I think it's important for us to countenance…

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If you don't take advantage of digital preservation mechanisms, how can you complain about permanence? #ECHIC2013

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Damousi speaking on permanence of digital resources. Nobody has mentioned CLOCKSS, LOCKSS or Portico. #ECHIC2013

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Damousi notes the importance of quality control in online publication. What about Shirky's "filter failure"? #ECHIC2013

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Future of the book: if the best scholarship is being done elsewhere in other forms, that's the new book says Joy Damousi #ECHIC2013

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Just had a somewhat dubious interpretation of the creative commons license here #OAbingo #ECHIC2013

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. @ernestopriego touching a little on the economic shifts that I'll be speaking about later #ECHIC2013

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Now up at #ECHIC2013 is @ernestopriego talking about digital hums, altmetrics & various intersections

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Really enjoying Schreibman and Edmond's talk at #ECHIC2013 - on how we evaluate digital humanities scholarship.

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a DOI after the linking object is published, is there an obligation to update the link? How would we know about the new DOI?

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Quick CrossRef question... There's an obligation for publishers to use DOIs for links when available. If another publisher assigns...

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Speaking at Nottingham on the future of the scholarly book tomorrow. There /was/ quite a bit of Marx in there already, but now w/ added Gove

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This is a far better way to get the news than reading the stuff itself! Thanks @respros, @jonhickman, @drdaveobrien and @ambrouk

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Can somebody briefly tell me what Gove has written in the Mail so that I, too, can be angry, but without visiting the Mail?

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Then again, perhaps NLM is the way to go and I just need to re-write the citation parser that I have.

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If not, I might start hacking this together. As far as I can see, the current transforms don't do bibliographies, though (which is a PITA).

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Quick q: has anybody developed the TEI xsl-fo transform to produce aesthetically nice hums PDF journal articles? I've done this for NLM...

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Buy This Album: Mountain of Love (ex-Alabama 3)

Deviating from my current series of posts on ScholComms, I wanted to interject to recommend a new, independent music project from two of the original members of the Alabama 3. The project is entitled Mountain of Love (the founder, Piers Marsh's, pseudonym) and the genre is "dubtronica", a fusion of…

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Speaking on digital media alongside a great lineup tomorrow at City University! @ElizaTalks, @TranscriBentham, @ndalyrose. @ernestopriego

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Right, Twitter off. Time to eat before heading up to Lincoln for final week of teaching!

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Spent this afternoon preparing a talk for #CityLIS next Friday, which should be enjoyable. That and visiting a pet shop to look at hamsters.

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Slightly passive aggressive tweet: love it when somebody treats you like an idiot in an email because they've misunderstood the issue.

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Take it that Pope Francis will be selling off the obscene wealth of the Vatican, then, to help the poor? We'll see...

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That said, another rocking Prezi lined up for my second years' lecture on Sarah Waters' Affinity.

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I always find the "making slides/presentation" component to be the least enjoyable part of giving a lecture. Love the writing bit.

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So I'm going to roll my own Tiny Tiny RSS instance to replace Google Reader. Wondering if I should wean myself off Gmail also...

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My take on classes where nobody has read the book: there isn't a class. That's a lecture. @PlashingVole

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Just realised that I seem to have thought yesterday was 2014. Must fix that in that post when home!

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The Future of Peer Review

Yesterday, Thursday the 14th of March 2013, I had the great pleasure of speaking at the University of Sussex to an entirely mixed audience of humanists, scientists, librarians, OA enthusiasts and OA sceptics on the topic of the Future of Peer Review. The advantage of being too busy to practice a…

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Good comment on article: "How about retrospective legislation to claw back money from private-public partnerships, bankers & politicians?"

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A great time speaking at Sussex today with great people. @filmstudiesff, @chriskeene, @jharvell and many more. Dinner with @liannedemello!

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Don't quite get this "RCUK decision tree is confusing" stuff. Sure, it's different, but following a flowchart isn't that hard...

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Outcome of hospital today good. Funding application submitted to local authority for Tocilizumab, a monoclonal antibody against IL-6. #rheum

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Mass classification of world populations would make targeting through identity group easier than ever before.

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Wouldn't the long view be to point out how regimes have historically changed from moderate to genocidal extreme in short time period?

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Guardian piece on how we should accept changing standards of privacy worries me. Especially as it urges us to "take the long view".

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How can two different news sites report the same news in such diametrically opposed ways? (I know, I know: don't answer that)

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Not entirely sure what the picture of George Orwell hung in this Pizza Express is supposed to symbolize. Am I being watched?

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Suspect I should have done that in more detail, but feel it's well covered elsewhere (and have a billion other things to do today!)

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A few people pointing out that I neglected to mention specific problems of Finch in implementation of OA in that post.

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If you think that people should have to get your permission to cite you. Well, I don't know where to begin. Publisher FUD I suspect.

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House of Commons BIS Inquiry on Open Access Evidence Published

The written evidence for the BIS Inquiry on Open Access has now been published and is available on the website for the UK parliament. The inquiry follows the past House of Lords inquiry and continues the bitter rivalries and feuds between advocates and detractors. I must say that there is still a…

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Things are getting done. Lecture on Riddley Walker: sorted. Talk for Sussex Seminar: ready. Lecture on Waters' Affinity: getting there!

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Good to see that, a full day before @GdnHigherEd panel on women & HE, there's a troll screaming "blame teh womenz for having babies".

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Sure, there's no manager telling us at the moment and OA policy fears are of institutional direction, but policy just shows extant truth.

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Aren't we already coerced by structures into publishing in the historically prestigious journals based on brand? Doesn't sound free to me.

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Need to blog about this, but I have a problem with the academic freedom article. I'm not sure we currently have it.

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Re-reading Riddley Walker for teaching next week. I always say it, but... an extraordinary book.

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Whenever writing/speaking about the gatekeeper function, I want to jam in references to the keymaster. #bustingmakesmefeelgood

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Don't currently have time to do a citation analysis as thorough as @pj_webster's, but I'd anticipate a high rate of monograph citations.

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Not sure I'd class Waters' Affinity as a crime novel. The fact it won a best translated crime award in 2004 makes me query the translation!

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Today struck a sponsorship deal with the word "wonderful". Teaching /The Black Album/, meetings with good people and a drink with @heresfinn

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Heading on out to Brixton to see the @mountain_oflove perform some funky electronic dub.

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Ha ha! David Loyn also mentions that there have been some lemons since Iraq. #bbkiraq

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Teevan addressing notions of the limits of liberalism and liberal thought while acknowledging moral dilemmas #bbkiraq

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Teevan on notions of freedom, quoting Taliban leader (I think): "your freedom doesn't give us the freedom to reject your freedom" #bbkiraq

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Norton-Taylor suggests that theatre can be just an extension of investigatory journalism. I think this can be problematic... #bbkiraq

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Teevan pitched to BBC: I think I know what's going to happen (re Iraq) because Xenophon wrote about it 3000 years ago! #bbkiraq

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Next at #bbkiraq is a panel on Iraq on stage and screen with Colin Teevan, David Loyn and Richard Norton-Taylor

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Dinnen points out commercial platform and framing of these Iraq videos are shown. "Click to buy track on Google play" #bbkiraq

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Dinnen points out that YouTube videos made by US soldiers is "a war away from a war" - created in downtime #bbkiraq

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Dinnen examining "Refresh Refresh" - tale of young boys refreshing their email, waiting for news of their soldier fathers #bbkiraq

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Dinnen now tag-teaming with McBean to situate Oppenheim within a digital media framework #bbkiraq

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NB this is done critically but interesting for tie in with Mickwitz' previous point of personal and public identities #bbkiraq

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McBean examining a Bechdel strip "Metaphor as Illness" that uses the Iraq War, specifically, to talk about personal cancer #bbkiraq

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McBean shifts frame to Bechdel's "Dykes to Watch Out For" as one more closely related to the Iraq War #bbkiraq

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McBean relating Bechdel's Fun Home to Oppenheim's Iraqi sunsets - both frequently use the intruding hand to unite two temporalities #bbkiraq

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Oppenheim and "the sun is always setting somewhere else" being discussed by McBean. Transposes Iraqi sunsets onto US perspectives #bbkiraq

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Zara Dinnen and Sam McBean on next, talking on locating the Iraq War in contemporary visual culture #bbkiraq

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Mickwitz now using the notion of critical utopia/dystopia as a way of framing potential - a la Tom Moylan #bbkiraq

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Mickwitz arguing, along with McCracken, for the formation of identities through the personal and impersonal in contemporary fiction #bbkiraq

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Mickwitz examining the role of the represented reporter in the Iraq War graphic novel #bbkiraq

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Interestingly, the presentation of DMZ seems to be similar to the interior exteriority framed by an earlier panel #bbkiraq

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Nina Mickwitz now taking over from @contemporaryfic to talk about DMZ comics - demilitarised zone. #bbkiraq

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"sense of the nation" privileged over accuracy of image in Mirzoeff's theorisation of war, says @contemporaryfic #bbkiraq

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Southland Tales also plays on remediation, argues @contemporaryfic, but this is specifically framed in a post-cinematic mode #bbkiraq

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This is continued, says @contemporaryfic, in the satirical Army@Love series. #bbkiraq

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. @contemporaryfic talking about Dan Goldman and "Shooting War", which specifically foregrounds remediation.

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Now we have @contemporaryfic up at #bbkiraq, speaking on comic and graphic novel representations of the Iraq War.

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En route to Birkbeck to talk about representation of the second Iraq War. I'll be dealing with Don DeLillo.