September 2016

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I have to say, also, that the copyediting and cover design processes on my book at @OpenBookPublish so far has been superb.

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Been somewhat sluggish today as had a bit of a relapse. Feeling better now though and these days get fewer and further between.

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My mother, who went on to get a Ph.D. in neuro-biology from Cambridge, failed the 11+ exam. Grammar schools are a terrible idea.

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What I think I actually need to look at (and now recompute) is intra-text frequency relative to novel vs. intra-corpus frequency of the OEC.

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Have isolated that word distribution as I am currently measuring it is a feature of the corpus or of literary fiction in general. Drat.

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What does the profile of a contemporary English novel look like? How different is this from the overall shape/profile of the OEC?

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Next steps/questions: Is this how one writes to sound like an 1850s novel? Do novels from the 1850s have a similar distribution?

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My res. on Oxford English Corpus: 52% of words in Cloud Atlas Part I (1850s) used in less than 0.001% cases in average contemporary English.

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Note: "Copyright of the manuscript remains in the author's name and the author reserves all other rights."

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Note: not exclusive. "The author hereby grants and assigns to the Publisher the rights [...associated rights]"

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Received takedown notice from T&F on piece published in @JofVictCulture. Contract was non-exclusive and I retained copyright...

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Looking forward to that sensation of speaking into the abyss with no idea whether participants can hear you. #webinar

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They should balance these "the secret to long-life is 20 whiskies a day" articles with the counterpart interviews with the innumerable dead.

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The video is done and everything worked! We'll be releasing it tomorrow as we move towards a public beta of the translation tool.

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Claims Gravity's Rainbow less successful than V./Lt 49 because it's messy and supposedly utterly morally relativistic.

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Couldn't sleep last night, so re-read Zamora's /Writing the Apocalypse/. A strong introduction. Good on Barth & style. Terrible on Pynchon.

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Today we're polishing up our unit tests for the translation tool. Hoping to record a video of it in action later this week!

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Worked on my submission for the OLH special on Station Eleven today. Think I really found the argument and feel positive about it.

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Had a slightly worse day today with post-stroke fatigue. But they're getting a bit better at least and I remain quasi-functional all day.

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Our sources are usually published by others and re-analysed from multiple, sometimes conflicting, perspectives.

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Revisiting data leech/vampire thing is so odd as a humanist. Why assume that the person who collected data is always best to analyse it?

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Author doesn't consider that the changes in style are due to the changing material forms of dissemination & the variety of cited sources?

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"Real scholars write manuscripts to submit them for peer review and editing, not to share them immediately with a final audience"

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I apologise in advance to the people I am meeting this evening. I am hot, sticky, and unpleasant. #fourthfloorproblems

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And "think of all the jobs you create by using a terrible word processor" isn't a great argument. Hardly fulfilling work.

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Of LaTeX and labour

I've been gearing up for quite some time to write about the false labour dichotomies in the academy that seem to be emerging that put "academic labour" as some privileged space of difference from other types. This isn't that post, which I haven't had time to work on yet, but it is related.

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Looks like I'm not alone in having been ignored by @jaybirdsport for 2 months now. @verge @engadget @techrepublic

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ScholComm mailing lists are just the internet's way of showing who has way too much free time on their hands. #subtweet

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Writing grant reports is satisfying when everything you said you'd do has been done. Especially when you can add, "oh and I had a stroke".

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Have a good workflow now for automatic PDF CV and website about page updates. All using open source software that I wrote.

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Demand that universities fund secondary education from student debt is further abdication of the duty of the state.

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The process of finishing writing books that need an MS Word index in LibreOffice is painful. VM on Linux -> Windows -> Word (-> XML/PDF).

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Saxophone still going well. I perhaps look more competent in this picture than I actually sound, though.

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Things I learned today. New NHS commissioning procedures mean that departments have to refer to each other via GPs. Ridiculous waste.

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As we enter the anniversary month for @openlibhums we have lots of exciting news to share! Watch this space... #tease

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. @UKRI_tweets might be the most niche of higher education political parody accounts I have yet seen... and niche defines the genre!