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August 2016

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Just realised that I was singing "Hungry Like the Wolfgang Iser" to a Duran Duran riff because of a bibliography entry. Lit crit geek.

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My wife is out at her book group, so I am having a wild night in. By which I mean: checking a bibliography and writing press releases.

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Gonna go file a patent: all current systems of banking are inconvenient. I hereby patent convenient banking. Then wait, enforce, and retire.

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Although LOL at: "none of these systems provide convenient interfaces to facilitate the communications between editors, users and reviewers"

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It seems to be passing reviews between journals owned by different entities that is the specific, narrow target of Elsevier patent.

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Top tip for proofing/reading your own work: change the font, the margins, and print it out. Has an estrangement effect on your own words.

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I suppose, actually, the most descriptive title would really be: "Literature Against Criticism". No puns there though.

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Book titled: "The Anxiety of Academia: Critique, Legitimation, and Discipline in the Novel after Theory". Should I drop first phrase?

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I can find (re-)reading review feedback, even when it's mostly positive and constructively critical, somehow painful.

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Do others, when you get book/article review feedback, make a checklist of the points so you don't have to revisit the original review?

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(He's right. But I don't necessarily think it's wrong -- an acknowledgement of limited reading labour power, to which "critical non-reading"

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Read Amy Hungerford's latest today, /Making Literature Now/. @DavidCWinters had warned me that the Wallace chapter would be controversial!

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I buy quite a lot of digital music these days. But I can't remember the last time I bought something that I didn't find through Soundcloud.

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In other words, I'd like to read loads of really bad fiction that gets filtered and to write about it.

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I have a dream project if a publisher is interested. I'd like to study rejected manuscripts. The majority underside of the iceberg.

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A good day. More OLH signups, great OLH CFP, more OLH announcements forthcoming, book listed at publisher, PhD viva examination invitation.

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Right, there's one chapter in this book that I don't like & the reviewers didn't like. Time to bash it into proper shape.

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Most gratifying part of provisional acceptance of book: submitted it when at my lowest in hospital in March, a copy escrowed with a friend.

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We are hoping, within the next month, to have a video demonstration of our @openlibhums annotation-translation tool based on @hypothes_is.

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Received 3 reports(!) today on full manuscript of my next monograph. Some revisions required but it's going ahead & it will be open access!

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Re last tweet: The world ended in "April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine". Timothy Morton -- Hyperbojects.

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The worst kind of review is: "some [impossible-to-implement] structural suggestions". Vicious reviews are upsetting but I can get over them.

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Supposed to be receiving feedback/reader reports on multiple (book) projects this week. Always pushes my anxiety levels up.

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Proposal for International Pynchon Week titled “Maybe, but it’s code’s all it is”: Thomas Pynchon, Cow Country, and Computational Stylometry

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As he was quite frail, the bouncer asked: "do you know where you are, sir?" He mischievously replied with a faux naivety: "is this London?"

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One of my favourite anecdotes about the late Russell Hoban was that, late in life, he went to a heavy metal gig for research purposes.

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Logical consequence of this argument is to ask why diff students perform differently under the same circumstances. As though they are robots

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Oh god. Radio 4 is so annoying. "If students were taught properly, they wouldn't feel the need to cheat". Really?

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Minister for HE damaging his universities again with zero-evidence "mediocre teaching" claim in order to bolster his alt-provider agenda.

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I spent about an hour today trying to get access to a journal special issue. In the end, went to British Library. What a waste of time.

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New GCSE spec. for 2017 replaces A*-G with 9-1 scale. Teachers start teaching it in Sept. Yet no final grade descriptors that I can see.

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Thing holding back preprints isn't lack of infrastructure/repositories. It's academic fear of publisher rejection at credentialling stage.

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Hmm. Hard disk access times rising, ominous noises. Expecting imminent catastrophic disk death.

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Aren't you just being driven by technology?

Somebody, and I can't remember who (so treat this as a straw argument if you want), argued with me a while back that there was a problem with open access because it was driven by technological possibility. That I wanted people to be able to read things without paying because technology made it…

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Read Sarah Hall's /The Carhullan Army/ and /The Wolf Border/ this week. Blimey, what a range.

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Can't remember where from but great eg of PoS-tagging semantic probs: "Open the door with the key" / "Open the door with the window".

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Killer discovery: eating zero chocolatey things all week and then eating a little more than allowed at the weekend gives massive sugar rush.

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Have been put in charge of music for nephew's birthday party next weekend. Putting the sound system together...

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I do get the market reasons why books end up being £60 but we also know that beyond a certain point it's a very long tail, no?

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If it's closer to £20 for individual academics (this is 5 years after publication), I might opt for the convenience purchase.

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Pro-tip for publishers: if your academic book will cost me £120, I will opt for the £5 Oyster fare and make it to the British Library.

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One warning: it's currently very slow by design as it does remote lookups of words (rate limited to one hit per ten seconds on dict. site).

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Computational reading as 'reading against the reader'

I'm probably not the first to think these thoughts, but I thought I would write them anyway as they are fresh in my mind. When dealing with computational reading methods, it is easy to encounter an aesthetic/teleological opposition to stylometry from some quarters. Indeed, among the most common…

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The next thing I'm working on is to ascertain whether various stylometric signatures of Ebershoff feature in edited chapter of Cloud Atlas.

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I should also say that David Mitchell was incredibly generous in responding to my queries for that article.

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LOL. Just had an email that reads (paraphrased): "Due to current phishing attacks, we need your password to protect you".

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MLA CORE becoming an open, general, subject repository for the humanities is really great! @kfitz

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Now I'm going to do a little bit of writing and then heading off to see a production of Antigone directed by one of my wife's ex-students.

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Today's work on web translation software went well. There's now a neat option to move through a page sentence-by-sentence when translating.

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This first-edition signed copy of David Foster Wallace's /Broom of the System/ an amazing birthday gift from friends

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Ordered: Morton's "Literary Detection: How to Prove Authorship in Literature". Received: Wilson's "Color for Your Winter Yard & Garden".

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Read @Alison_Kinney's /Hood/ this morning. Powerful, distressing stuff, especially the last few pages.

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I don't get panic re non-portability for ECRs & REF. I get the anger - exploitative contracts etc - but what's the hiring disadvantage?

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Does anybody know of a machine-readable, good-quality English dictionary file or API that includes first-used dates of words? #dh