Short interview with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/30/genesis-p-orridge-pleasure-is-a-weapon

Academic labour: Why 1953? http://zpr.io/bXe3

Nothing makes my Friday evening like OLH signups! My analysis clearly shows that library acquisitions meetings in the US are on a Friday...

. Great post from @SimonTanner on Stern review http://simon-tanner.blogspot.fr/2016/07/REFballoon.html

Editors’ Choice: Institutional Repositories and the Research Lifecycle http://zpr.io/bTfX

A symposium on failure at @SussexEnglish hosted by @Excursions_J https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2016/07/13/failure-a-one-day-symposium-at-the-university-of-sussex

Not very hard a-Stern: steering a slightly new course for the REF http://zpr.io/bYqR

Stern just a set of recommendations for now; challenges re. ECRs + temp contracts will probably be worked out in implementation.

Suspect that Stern moves the "point of gaming" to the contract stage. But unis can't take too many off res. contracts or will get less QR.

Suspect that needs some nuancing. See also: subsequently hired independent researchers.

Seems a bit unfair for institutions housing Ph.D. students to be able to take their outputs, given fee structures(!)

There's a problem with the Stern output portability stuff... What about Ph.D. students/ECRs who build a profile in order to get hired?

Indonesia: families told that 14 death row prisoners will be executed tonight https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/28/indonesia-death-row-prisoners-executed-tonight

"Ekelund acknowledged that work pressures made taking lengthy breaks unrealistic for some." Need 1 hour to not die. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/27/health-risk-one-hour-activity-offset-eight-hours-sitting-desk

Highest-Paid CEOs Run Worst-Performing Companies, Research Finds http://zpr.io/bZcW

Editors’ Choice: Technology changes how authors write, but the big impact isn’t on their style http://zpr.io/bZZZ

The Citation Graph http://zpr.io/bZZp

Foucault, the Archive and the Writing of Intellectual History – audio of lecture http://zpr.io/bZZz

Out in 2 days! https://x.com/BloomsburyLit/status/757987853070512129

Postgraduates might be interested in this interesting, aesthetically-pleasing OA journal run from Sussex http://briefencounters-journal.co.uk/BE

No doubt to be made up by otherwise-apparently-impossible state subsidy to avoid losing their votes. https://x.com/PSbook/status/757870853048692736

NIST Prepares To Ban SMS-Based Two-Factor Authentication http://zpr.io/bpHR

Foucault, hybridization and social research: reflections on the Foucault @90 Conference (2016) http://zpr.io/bzyv

Martin Eve on William Gaddis’s JR – Birkbeck, Department of English & Humanities blog - http://blogs.bbk.ac.uk/english/2016/07/25/martin-eve/

Spent the day celebrating my grandmother's 95th birthday and played some sax with my brother

Can Iris-Scanning ID Systems Tell the Difference Between a Live and Dead Eye? http://zpr.io/bqGW

The Book Index: A Two-Day Symposium http://zpr.io/bRch

I like Harvey's line: if you're building housing for foreign investment instead of for people to live in, you get different kinds of cities.

We have the Brexit question from the audience #birkbeck #bingo

Zizek arguing that psychoanalysis shakes deep ontological assumptions with its epistemology #birkbeck

Susan Buck-Morss noting the necessarily partial knowledge paths that we must pursue even if we crave systematicity #birkbeck

Harvey's insistence on a useful critical theory an interesting twist given the origins of the term in Horkheimer #birkbeck

Harvey points out that the crash of 07-08 not (just) a financial crash but an urban event. Originated in housing. #birkbeck

David Harvey on using Marx for practical understanding of housing crises and his trans-application of critical-theoretical ideas.

Esther Leslie kicking off with observations on the relations of critical theory to Benjamin's constant state of emergency and crises.

Kicking off #birkbeck

Also, never heard Susan Buck-Morss speak before, but I admire her work on Adorno.

Zizek rocks up in black Bartleby "I would prefer not to" t-shirt. Ha!

Looking forward to this afternoon's stellar panel at Birkbeck. S Zizek, S Buck-Morss, D Harvey and E Leslie. Chaired by Jacqueline Rose.

“This is all artificial”: An Interview with Jennifer Egan http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/05/this-is-all-artificial-an-interview-with-jennifer-egan/

TEF Times: 2nd Reading of the HE Bill http://zpr.io/bHN3

Amazon Enters Student Loan Business in Partnership With Wells Fargo - http://mobile.nytimes.com/reuters/2016/07/21/business/21reuters-amazon-com-wells-fargo-student-loans.html?referer=

QLC Flash on the horizon http://zpr.io/bt8W

Closed Access http://zpr.io/bt8B

Job: Digital Scholarship Librarian, Boston College http://zpr.io/bt8V

It's also interesting that the anxiety sometimes seems to be that everyone will be forced to do the new thing...

I understand internal legitimation struggles/anxiety within a field as well as the next fool but, still...

But the second it's e.g. stylometry people say things like: "well, so what that we can know about quantified aspects of literary style?"

All study of aesthetics ends in a "so what" that can only justify it unto itself. It is knowledge about art, after all.

The "so what" response that I often get to digital methods in the study of literature is curious.

Blogging Foucault’s most recently published lectures, Théories et institutions pénales. XII 1972 https://foucaultnews.com/2016/07/21/blogging-foucaults-most-recently-published-lectures-theories-et-institutions-penales-xii-1972/

And anyway, like William Gibson's future, that surplus is not evenly distributed between institutions.

Also, the whole "the sector has £Xbn surplus, it's just grabbing cash". Except that with Brexit it's spent in 1.5 years to cover EU funding.

I don't see newspapers clamouring to put front pages out that slam *above*-inflation rises in energy rates etc.

As they do badly in TEF, they lose income & reputation. Then they have to lose staff. Then they go bust. Then the new alt-providers swoop.

But the thing to worry about with TEF isn't the rise. It's the cutting of how much institutions that fare badly can charge.

There's no recognition that tuition fees are needed so that universities can employ people (b/c gov won't tax), not just as a punishment.

OK, so did these newspapers expect that, as inflation rises, universities would just perpetually stay at the 2011 level?

I've never agreed with tuition fees, but the popular press coverage of TEF is dire. "TUITION FEES TO TO RISE ABOVE £9K", for example.

Call for entries for the Library Publishing Directory http://zpr.io/b6mT

While some parts of AngularJS are quite useful, JS frameworks still seem painful to me.

Great interview with @the_blochian about gold OA and @openlibhums http://scilog.fwf.ac.at/en/article/4482/the-gold-route-to-open-science

More on Terms of Service http://zpr.io/bPwZ

I'm just going to say that working with @mchris4duke on tech projects at MIT library would be a pretty sweet job https://libraries.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/SVACDirector-of-Digital-Projects.pdf

HE Bill passed to next stage 294-258.

Teaser screenshot of our @openlibhums translation tool (work in progress) @elotroalex @dennistenen @the_blochian

And I've just clicked "go" to start the next round of OLH Library Board votes for journal admissions! Exciting times.

"As accurate as the Brexit campaign" https://x.com/thebookseller/status/755115431615078401

Anyway, forthcoming piece is on different versions of the novel & the publishing processes that led to different texts appearing worldwide.

Truth is, I'm not sure I even like Cloud Atlas, but something about it keeps drawing me back. Particularly its stylometric signatures.

My article on Cloud Atlas went into production today. I feel thoroughly peer reviewed but will be glad to share this with the world.

The University of Utopia http://zpr.io/uWts

. @DrBlacklock on Roly Porter at Corsica Studios – Birkbeck, Department of English & Humanities @birkbeck_eh blog - http://blogs.bbk.ac.uk/english/2016/07/18/mark-blacklock-on-roly-porter-at-corsica-studios/

I've written to my MP @joanryanEnfield to ask her to please attend and vote against the dire HE bill on Tuesday. I hope others will too.

Not dead but stunned: HE policy in the May government http://zpr.io/uVhN

“But That’s Not Preservation!” Notes on Preservation’s Divergent Lineages http://www.trevorowens.org/2016/07/but-thats-not-preservation-notes-on-preservations-divergent-lineages/

Five immediate steps the government should take to support universities http://zpr.io/u4LC

Hacking heritage: power and participation in digital cultural collections http://zpr.io/u4As

Job: Digital Research Architect at Stanford University http://zpr.io/ucxR

The pros and cons of moving universities to DfE http://zpr.io/ucxH

Editors’ Choice: What Made the Front Page in the 19th Century?: Computationally Classifying Genre in ‘Viral Texts’ - http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DigitalHumanitiesNow/~3/dDAGYcC0dwY/

A little anxious around movement of HE to education since unclear what position for research. Glad Javid is off though.

Interesting set of free-to-listen-to Walter Benjamin radio sets http://clocktower.org/series/radio-benjamin

Stylo and the Stevensons http://zpr.io/udM9

Who'd have thought it? https://x.com/timeshighered/status/753107470323687424

This week v. good for OLH. Thanks to a Canadian consortial group for renewing & on Friday, we work on the next round of journal admissions!

University centres – challenger institutions http://zpr.io/uiPv

Code here: https://github.com/sahiga/degrees-of-pynchon

Not sure about its accuracy, but interesting visualization of authors close to Pynchon http://sahiga.github.io/degrees-of-pynchon/

Urgh. Was debating whether it was a better idea to work at home today. Got halfway to Birkbeck and all trains cancelled.

I wonder whether under Prime Minister May we will have a new minister for universities and science?

I think it's a scandal that 18-24 year olds can be paid less. Discriminatory. https://x.com/mikecoulson48/status/752405253551783936

Giving a keynote at the Electronic Visualization and the Arts Pre-Conference Symposium today... Hope to see some of you there!

EU referendum: youth turnout almost twice as high as first thought

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/09/young-people-referendum-turnout-brexit-twice-as-high

Such stability. Wow. Much Brexit.

Trouble is that May now looks reasonable... https://x.com/jblackauthor/status/751842404131536896

This week was the best yet since my stroke. Every day has been pretty much normal, I've started exercising & the fatigue is so much better.

The Contemporary: an exhibition http://zpr.io/uSr7

Counting Backwards http://zpr.io/uSrq

This is the most anti-intellectual evaluation programme https://x.com/vivdunstan/status/751481441834430464

I'm also rereading Gaddis's JR at the moment. And it hurts my head a great deal. In a good way. Maybe.

Hoping to bypass that using DOM mutation observers to check substitution state vs original.

Only bug we have left is that if you fire an event from within a DOM object that is overwritten, JS execution halts.

Today I wrote the code for our translation app that takes the contents of a hypothes.is annotation and replaces the text in the DOM with it.

New article at Orbit: The Female Sleuth in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and @GreatDismal's Pattern Recognition https://www.pynchon.net/article/10.16995/orbit.195/

No second reading of the HE bill next week in parliament. Only a few days left to get it in. via @Wonkhe

Momentum http://zpr.io/u35V

In other news, pleased with how the work on the translation tool for @openlibhums is going. A good day of building today.

And that's it, so I guess it could be much worse!

Since my stroke I've had odd type of memory loss. First time I try to remember a number, I can't. Once I've looked it up, it's back though.

Experimenting with Post-Quantum Cryptography http://zpr.io/u3Aq

The coming storm https://x.com/HEFCE/status/751082591822966784

Understanding the alternative HE sector: the first HESA release http://zpr.io/u3gy

Kurt Wallander and the Case of the Text-Encoding Gremlins http://zpr.io/uwSx

Lecturer, Teaching and Research position in Internet Studies at Curtin. Good value against the UK pound at the mo... https://webkiosk.curtin.edu.au/recruit/WK8127$APP.draw_attachments?P_VACANCY_REF_NO=4252&P_CALLER_URL=WK8127ZZDOLLARZZAPP.QueryListZZQMARKZZZ_VACANCY_CAT=ACADZZAMPZZZ_ORDER_BY=1

Talk at JISC/CNI Workshop http://zpr.io/uDdQ

Would be far better to provide some stability to the sector than to introduce further upset in the light of Brexit. https://x.com/ResFortnight/status/750612966609973248

The ASA apparently can't regulate political advertising because politicians don't want to be stopped from lying https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/06/advertising-standards-authority-political-advertisements

That said, a decade is both a long time but also gone in the blink of an eye. Clear that early warnings not taken seriously, though.

Then, a decade later, in 2013, there's a rush to claim that it's all moving too quickly because nothing was done for a decade.

I've been reading back through past House of Commons Sci/Tech sessions. Amazing that open access is considered a "live issue" in 2003 by MRC

Dear Elsevier, stop spamming me to take your survey, regardless of the fact that I "have published research in scholarly journals".

MRI Software Bugs Could Upend Years Of Research http://zpr.io/u8g5

Now escaping politics, twitter and all by learning the Baker Street solo on my sax. The neighbours will thank me, I'm sure.

Did my first gym session since I had a stroke. A world away from previous levels of fitness doing a short light cycle but it's a start.

Succumbed to the lure of the Gordon Square ice cream van.

A day of strike puts education at risk but high court rules it's fine for kids to be taken off school for holiday? https://x.com/GuardianEdu/status/750233267392032768

He'd had enough of the experts even back then apparently.

Just revisited that 2013 piece by Michael Gove headed "I refuse to surrender to the Marxist teachers hell-bent on destroying our schools".

Basically, it might be whether people are perceived to have your interests at heart, not their expertise https://x.com/NazlinBhimani/status/750227017216487424

I wrote a few words on The Glass Bead Game (lent to me by @ersatzben) for @birkbeck_eh's "What We're Looking At" http://blogs.bbk.ac.uk/english/2016/06/09/martin-eve-on-hermann-hesse-the-glass-bead-game/

That Lambert review stuff brought to my attention by @josswinn and @HallyMk1

If you want to know when management became enshrined as "us and them" in UK HE, check out page 93 of this report: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130129110402/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/9/0/lambert_review_final_450.pdf

Dorothy has to come back because Aunt Em can't afford to put on mourning and still pay mortgage. #FutureHums

Great reading of the Wizard of Oz here by Bridget Bennett: it's about mortgages! #FutureHums

I wonder what the role of "high theory" is in @sarahchurchwell's take... Has a scientistic bent to name but has undone hums #futurehums

Well, there are campaigns for the value of science... #futurehums

Yes. Afraid I agree w/ @sarahchurchwell; our politicians often have hums degrees. The "critical thinking" line is not strong. #futurehums

Challenge w/ current system, though: last time I submitted article in accessible language, reviewers blasted it for being casual #futurehums

I quite like @sarahchurchwell here on access in the sense of language & readability (in symbiosis with my work on OA) #futurehums

Palgrave justify double dipping/no offsetting around sustainability. Even though they have the highest book processing charge. #futurehums

Off to Leeds today for the Festival of the Humanities day. @elebelfiore @DrKatyShaw @DrOwenClayton

"Why didn't the people on the other side have a plan for how to fulfil our promises?", asked Boris, slurringly.

The Fight To Save the Australian Digital Archive Trove http://zpr.io/uKeM

The candidates for Prime Minister and higher education http://zpr.io/uKhM

A lifetime. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/12/09/ohio-man-exonerated-after-spending-27-years-in-prison-for-a-murder-he-didnt-commit/?utm_term=.cf0d9f46d453

Sounds easy, but I was just reading some of our documents. HEFCE & its functions mentioned often in responsibilities of governors etc.

Besides rewrites, complex documents then require committees to ratify, possibly legal filings etc. Not even considered as a cost by BIS.

Overhead in labour time that new UK "HE architecture" creates is huge. Move HEFCE and every institution has to rewrite governance statutes.

Conference Report: True Crime Fictions http://zpr.io/uy3X

An Apology & House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee http://zpr.io/uAb7

New Bedford Falls Players track is also quite a catchy one https://soundcloud.com/44100hzsocialclub/premiere-bedford-falls-players-chugglers-in-crime-forthcoming-on-night-noise @jon_fugler @ernestopriego @qui_oui

A couple of musical numbers for Friday: https://soundcloud.com/logicalrecords/lr0051-ands-mega-blood-kiss-original-mix top of my forthcoming list @jon_fugler @ernestopriego @qui_oui

Helen Pleasance gives alternative title to her paper "what it means to know too much about Myra Hindley" (!) #trucrifi16

Now Martin King is looking at masculinity in the Red Riding Quartet and the way in which policing is shaped by time and space. #trucrifi16

First up at #trucrifi16 is Het Phillips speaking about true crime and modernism. Currently charting the use of small detail.

Still, I'll then have an enjoyable day chairing the author panel at the @birkbeck_eh True Crime Fictions event. Can't wait!

Sadist in the hospital admin block booked me in for a 7.30am MRI scan at hospital on the other side of London.