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October 2015

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In fact, I'd say "academic freedom" is about making radical expression possible, not about sheltering students from radical expression.

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I've always assumed that the space needed to be "safe" so that students could voice radical or unpopular views without being degraded.

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What's weird about this backlash against "safe spaces" at universities is that I've always used the phrase differently.

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As @elotroalex keeps pointing out, now relevant to EEBO, commercial providers giveth, but they can also taketh away.

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I do wish our undemocratic second house wasn't the only thing stopping the worst excesses of our government. It makes me conflicted.

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But hey, it's good this was in a top peer-reviewed journal that rigorously reviews such statements etc. etc. etc.

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Or practically the whole chapter in my own book on this very aspect. Or the several chapters in Z. Kolbuszewska's edited volume.

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Well, that's true if you don't cite the things that have. Like the whole book on /Terrorism and Temporality/ in Pynchon by James Gourley.

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But I think this seems like an oversight so far if talking about contemporary philosophical "critique" & its persistence.

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Whereas falsifiability (negative knowledge) & intersubjective defences against false appearance strike me as natural-scientific concepts.

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Just the fleeting references to /The Order of Things/ to the transformation of the empirical to the human sciences.

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What I haven't seen so far is enough emphasis on the fact that "critique" might come from the practices of the natural/empirical sciences.

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Academia.edu’s peer-review experiments

I've been sitting on the below piece for a while, but have written about academia.edu before. In recent days, though, Gary Hall and Kathleen Fitzpatrick have both written critiques of the site and so I thought it also worth adding this specific angle rather than just letting it sit on my hard drive.

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I feel @chrissyfleps & @tinyhippo1979 may have underplayed how scary Crimson Peak is for horror wimps. But beautifully shot & still enjoyed!

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Hmm, we're a bit wimpish with horror but enjoyed most of del Toro's output... (esp. Pan's L.) How will we do with Crimson Peak?

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Stayed in a "CitizenM" hotel & it resonated so much with Hu's data centres/parataxis in /A Prehistory of the Cloud/.

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My counter for the "vs science" arg: if lit contains a comparable epistemology, why is it also treated as an object of study? #bbkhustvedt

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Stringent peer review procedures, good access provisions, but unless it gets a number via a made-up formula assigned by an external provider

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I despair of all the talk about new journals and impact factors. We're really saying that you can have expert editorial boards...

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Stem-, Spraak- and Taalpathologie, a journal were discussing, sounds a great deal like something in The Flame Alphabet. @DrBlacklock

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Groningen verdict so far: very pretty, trains are good, but church bells don't seem to care about sleep.

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One reading of RCUK merger: trying to signal efficiencies in a HEFCE-like way. HEFCE maybe doing a better job internally.

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Some confusion here. To clarify: Rumours are that HEFCE is at threat. RCUK just announced mergers. #ucloa15

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Two more OLH signups since I sat down at #ucloa15. Pleasing! This makes one of my slides inaccurate. Displeasing! #conflicted #notreally

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I do remember in my teens looking at SciFi dates in the future & wondering if I'd live that long. Of BTTF I felt confident. OMF2097 less so.

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Unless I misheard someone this evening on the OA monographs panel said or implied (paraphrased) that OA for journals is easy. Errr.

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"One of them was a report so nasty it made me question my will to write another sentence." How does that ever help anyone?

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Started work on that Jennifer Egan piece in August 2013. Highlight of the article's development: Jennifer Egan telling me she loved it.

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Thanks to @DrMagennis for handling peer-review process (& thanks to the anonymous reviewers). Was terrified of submitting to my own place!

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Electronic music group called the Bedford Falls Players but I can only think of them as the Bedlington Fall Terriers

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If I wanted to manually semantically tag a corpus, including sentiment information keyed to terms, is there a good framework out there? #dh

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That nervous moment when the crowd is thinning at the baggage reclaim and bag still not sighted...

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Has anyone initiated an OA digital preservation project using BitTorrent with controlled location boxes as clients?

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Went on a great tour of a London deep-subterranean bomb shelter today. Tomorrow, off to @TriangleSCI !

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When it's arbitrary, petty, statistically insignificant, binary gatekeeping (which I've seen more in journals), it feels broken.

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When peer review works well (especially for books) by providing constructive and specific feedback to improve work, I like it.

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It's quite a tired debate by now I guess but this just seemed a particularly under-considered version of it.

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But this person seems to be saying we should stop letting people do PhDs unless we can fund academic jobs.

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I'm all for advice - the first thing I say to PhD students is that getting an academic job is very very hard.

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Clear CILIP statement is a strategic move to ingratiate etc. but need to highlight damage done to our public infrastructure by this gov.

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UK government to introduce a new category of HE institution in the UK in order to broaden diversity. They call it the bankrupt university.

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But all models of "disruption" seem to be about for-profit providers being paid by students. How "innovative". [4/4]

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for its students alone, that would be "disruptive". Other institutions would be very resistant, I'd imagine. [3/4]

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If a single existing educational institution (with prestige etc.) came up with a model to restore free education [2/4]

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Still groaning in despair over Richard Branson's "disrupt education" nonsense, but something did strike me. [1/4]

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Tonight, in a departure from my usual routine, I will be going to see the metal band "Annihilator", for which my brother is the bassist.