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January 2018

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Tomorrow, we have an important and exciting OLH trustee meeting. Looking forward to spending the day with brilliant intelligent people discussing strategic decisions. @the_blochian

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Had one of those rare, almost wholly satisfying days. Began with some stimulating research reading & writing. Then did lots of OLH admin, followed by some tech work with @ajrbyers to migrate Orbit to Janeway.

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Requested repeat prescription from my doctors. Found out they'd removed the corticosteroid drugs I've been on for 11 years from my list of repeats. You know, the drug that I die if I don't get.

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'Baker says he would advocate a “healthy scepticism” towards the use of mathematical economics for forecasting.' - where's the neoliberalism gone?

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Love how the solution to unequal pay at the BBC is: we'll cut the pay of the men, rather than raise the pay of women.

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Does seem a bit much, at this time, just after the sector voted heavily for strike action on pensions, to get an annual member benefit statement from USS.

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I'm rereading /The End of History/ (don't ask - grim project) but had forgotten this: "For are there not reservoirs of idealism that cannot be exhausted - indeed, that are not even touched - if one becomes a developer like Donald Trump?"

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Wrote a book review for a journal in 2014 that is still unpublished. They've just got back to me asking for a biographical statement noting that a response at my earliest convenience would be appreciated.

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Do you know why we didn't exchange contracts on a house today? Because somebody else's solicitor, in a massive chain, wasn't contactable on exchange day. House purchasing in England is abysmal.

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I enjoyed the afternoon panel on "why lit lovers don't love literary criticism" at Thinking Big today. My responses: #1 have you read this stuff? #2 it's usually priced at around £60 per book.

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My overriding thought of the day was that what we mean by "big" here was usually actually: "differently". That is, how existing structures of discipline constrain our methods and approaches -- or even objects of study. @IES_London

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Some interesting conversations around digital approaches, interdisciplinarity, and inter-lingual work today at the @IES_London "Thinking Big" conference.

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Today, I am speaking at the Thinking Big conference at @IES_London on Distant Reading at Depth.

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Having some autoimmune eye problems that are wrecking the vision in one of my eyes. My solution for reading is rendering me somewhat piratical at present... :/

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Crunching some numbers here at OLH. I think, given last year's publication volume, we worked out at approximately £2 per article per institution. Not bad!

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Drat. Accidentally powered off my PC mid-open of Zotero database, which was then corrupted. Now have to resync from scratch. Better go make some tea.

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Urgh. Had a terrible day where everything has just seemed to go wrong. Clumsy, mis-reading emails, headaches galore. Roll on the weekend.

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I'm trying to write an impact case study, but we also just got a house moving date to move to live NEXT TO THE SEA and I'm finding it hard to concentrate.

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Goodbye Jo Johnson. Your disastrous legacy for HE will be with us for bloody ages, but glad you're off.

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So now the OfS board only has tax-avoiding pharmacists and crash-causing bankers to discredit it.

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I'd still like to know just what the appointment process was for OfS board and what "properly constituted panel" was convened. Have FOI request pending on this.

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Fingers crossed that Jo Johnson’s idiotic attention seeking appointments to OfS has annoyed the PM enough to get him demoted.

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In all seriousness, I despair of airlines sometimes. @delta overbooked my flight, four hours from now, and are asking for volunteers to change flights. But: info desk won't book me onto an earlier flight, despite there being space, because I have a basic economy ticket.

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First questioner goes to a point I wondered about: is it really true that, say, data from a blood test procedure to diagnose disease "has a neoliberal logic to it" even if many neoliberal processes use data? #s808 #mla18

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I like @whkchun's point that "critical algorithm studies" based in the humanities is antagonistic and that a trans-disciplinary algorithm studies might be a more profitable space. #s808 #mla18

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Great example of strange incentives for neural networks here at #s808. A cleaning machine's network that is rewarded for how little dirt it sees could shut down its visual sensors. #mla18

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One of the talks on this panel is called "Speculative Algorithms" and I'm kindof hoping it's related to the speculative execution bugs of the past week... #s808 #mla18

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I think the anxiety re big collaboration is rooted in division of labor questions, somehow mirroring the structures of capital... But, weirdly, at the same time, we're OK in #hss with niche specialisation... #s723 #mla18

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. @_akpiper now moves the discussion on to notions of credit in collaborative writing. Wonder whether anyone will mention the CRediT taxonomy of contributor roles...? #mla18 #s723

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Group benefits and pleasures of sociability and humility are excellent byproducts of collaborative writing, says Michelle Nancy Levy #s723 #mla18

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. @LBMcGrath talks about challenges of hierarchy and authority in collaboration across prof / grad student / undergraduate levels #s723 #mla18

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.@_akpiper notes that we are often not that comfortable writing through conflict #s723 #mla18

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Michelle Nancy Levy notes the challenges of scalability pertain to enthusiasm and energy of co-authors #s723 #mla18

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Jonathan Sachs says, of collaborative authorship: at some point you should decide - are you writing a book or do you really need a website? #s723 #mla18

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. @ProfTomMole says that collaborative writing needs ability to meet in person and asynchronously. Need to have confidence in deleting each others' words. #s723 #mla18

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Now @beth_seltzer is describing her investigation of "alternative skill requirements" in academic job ads, using a range of quantitative and qualitative methods. #s198 #mla18

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A moment of hope from @roopikarisam: few other areas of the university have made their own labour the subject of inquiry as much as the digital humanities. A very different perspective to the neoliberal critique detractors. #mla18 #s198

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In #s198 and @roopikarisam is telling us about her survey of DH in regional comprehensive universities: lone wolves, libraries, and proto-centers are dominant models. #mla18

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No conference day would be complete without a dose of meta-publishing stuff. So here I am at #mla18 panel 184: Publishing at the Center of the Humanities

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This panel on working class British fiction has just got onto a topic dear to my heart: British pubs #mla18

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In some ways, I'll go with that. But nonrivalrous media do something truly strange to economies of dissemination and circulation that is different to print. Peer networks simply haven't existed at this speed and distance before.

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Panel at #mla18 just now on fake news and fiction. I asked how changing mediation of news & fiction in digital age - erosion of print scarcity & authority - might affect this. To my surprise, panel argued against exceptionality of current moment.

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Panel 1 of MLA and there are some technical problems. I'm not stepping up as the DH guy, though... (#willyoufixmyprinter)

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The fix involves loads of extra context switching, as I understand it, hence we're going to see a huge performance hit...

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What I understand about the Meltdown security bug is that speculative execution doesn't properly protect kernel-space memory/page table stuff and side-channel leakage is possible via a race condition. Am I missing anything?

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From that post by @amcgettigan: "Ownership of the loans will pass to a special purpose vehicle, Income Contingent Student Loans 1 (2002-2006) Plc."

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Feels as though Johnson is obsessed with the idea - fuelled by Adonis - that HE is a cartel of vested interests that has to be broken up. Thus, when we say "none of these people has any idea about higher education", that just registers as a good thing for him.