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April 2020

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New fave subtle-aggressive Twitter move: @-ing people with the call for papers for the International Interdisciplinary Boredom Studies conference.

Not that subtle

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Not that some humanities discourse styles are routinized or anything, but I still smile when I return to my recurrent neural network that fabricated a citation to ‘John Spottisley, “The Privatized Climax”. (1929), p. 4, emphasis in original’.

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My other half has been working on digging the pond with an ambitious reference model.

another suggestion was: an amphitheatre for guinea pigs

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Seriously unimpressed with Starmer's calls for an "exit plan". This is the easiest thing in the world for the government to answer while looking responsible ("we can't have a plan until the situation is stable"). At the same time, it encourages a dangerous impatience.

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My dining companion at Neath
Drew a long scary knife from its sheath:
‘You have to get rough
When the steaks are this tough,’
She explained, as she sharpened her teeth.

Worthless rhymes for mirthless times.

http://errol.thoughtcat.com/

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Is ‘the money in the system’?

One of the oft-repeated adages in the scholarly communications world is that ‘the money is in the system’, it's just badly distributed. This is one of the core problems with APCs; they don't distribute funds in a similar way to subscriptions, so even if we could afford it, we still have a…

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Someone at Virgin Media clearly pulled a crucial plug and caused a nationwide broadband outage during a work-from-home pandemic. Glad I wasn't on the tech team dealing with that.

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It was a shame that Devs had to end on such a hokey note. I wanted vicious revenge on the murdering tech. company bosses and not just some "well, you're special because you made a _real_ choice, against determinism" outcome where everyone lives happily ever after.

good soundtrack though. Highlights: Low - Conversation and Patrick Cowley feat. Sylvester - Menergy.

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Getting the Gist of Reading

Today, I read Andrew Elfenbein’s The Gist of Reading (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). By any account, this is a provocative and stimulating read that brings observations from cognitive psychology to bear on literary critical concerns. Predominantly concerned with nineteenth-century…

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Who'd have thought the true message we were teaching kids when they studied An Inspector Calls in 2020 was "drinking bleach kills you horribly"?

Also: "the ruling classes will, subtly or otherwise, try to get you to drink bleach". Important messages.

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The main problem with /Devs/ is that the baddie called Kenton has to be said in a "Fenton! Fenton! Oh Jesus Christ. FENTON!" voice.

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Sainsbury: "Fancy some new healthy recipe ideas?"
Me: "No, I fancy pizza and beer, quite frankly"

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Strange dreamscapes for this week included obligatory re-training as a butler for billionaires. It was very much of the Remains of the Day variety and I had no aptitude for it.

I spilled the afternoon tea

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Why academic bookstores?

A famous line from Jurassic Park (1993) is that ‘[y]our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should’. I felt much the same, today, reading J. M. Hawker’s Capital Letters: The Economics of Academic Bookselling (Cambridge: Cambridge…

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Wasn't it great that we made our entire UK health research infrastructure dependent on cross-subsidy from overseas tuition fees?

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"UK ministers under pressure to offer ‘hope’ about return to normality". This is utterly absurd. Why should they offer hope when/if there isn't any?

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The difference between a million and a billion, for no particular reason: one million seconds is 12 days. One billion seconds is 31 years.

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I must say that, recently, blogging has been a most therapeutic and enjoyable activity for me -- particularly for writing up my scholarly reading. I do write reviews for journals, but there is no immediacy to the gratification of instant publication and dissemination there.

I also deposit all of my blog posts in BIROn, our institutional repository, so the work is preserved and properly metadata catalogued. Some of my most downloaded work from the repo -- and the ones that generate the most personal correspondence -- are blog posts.

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Today was meant to be the celebration day for 100 years of awarding PhDs at @BirkbeckUoL. Disrupted by the pandemic, obviously, but a great milestone nonetheless.

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The Edited Collection and its Discontents

I have just finished editing a book collection in which Robin de Mourat, Donato Ricci, and Bruno Latour ask: how does a format make a public? It has been a somewhat painful process of editing, but the questions in that chapter as well as the very process of editing itself prompted me to turn back…

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Huge congratulations to Dr @lowercasename who today passed his Ph.D. viva! It's been a pleasure supervising him with @the_blochian. I just had some jelly to celebrate!

@lowercasename @the_blochian Not jelly

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Highlight from last night's University Challenge final for me - probably for many others, too - was Brandon's energy and humour. “This is African American post-colonial theory. And I’m about to get it wrong. On TV”.

was also pleased to get "Electro-Hydro-Dynamics" before Imperial 😂

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There are few things worse in the independent music scene than Bandcamp "announcements" for forthcoming albums/EPs that have no previews. What do you want me to say? "Well done on your tracklisting"?

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Can anyone in computational biology/biophysics tell me, please: how helpful are computer folding simulations like those run by "Folding at Home"? I have my rig setup to go but want to know whether this is futile or actually useful.

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Citation to McMenemy, David always make me say to myself "You don't want me as your McMenemy, David" in a Severus Snape/Alan Rickman voice.

all those who know the scripts to the HP films off by heart coming out in the likes

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I know we say that DOIs don't make an item "citeable" and I know what we mean by that (anything is citeable, the DOI is a mark of a social contract of preservation), but checking a 60-page bibliography reveals the extent to which these are the only guaranteed resolvable items.

institutional repository links, YouTube links also pretty good on stability. Basically: institutionally backed or contracted links are strong.

Could be because, when you have massive-scale institutions, changing CMS becomes virtually impossible because you are so locked-in

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BTW, if anyone wants a brilliant indexer, @SFD85 has done a terrific job for us. He's really reasonable on his rates and he also sent in a load of typos he found, some of which I had missed(!) Totally recommended.

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"NHS staff to be asked to treat coronavirus patients without gowns". This is murderous employment negligence and not acceptable. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/nhs-staff-to-be-asked-to-treat-coronavirus-patients-without-gowns

They have turned our hospitals into warzones where people are asked to expose themselves in extreme danger, as though they were in the armed services, through chronic underfunding

Oh we all nodded when we watched the docu-drama Chernobyl and Soviet Russia asked its citizens to sacrifice themselves by entering the reactor without proper protection. We are so superior to that.

Dulce et decorum est pro NHS mori.

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Can't say how grateful I am when contributors stick to deadlines for edited collection turnarounds. Not a single author missed our proofing deadline for _Reassembling Scholarly Communications_ and it makes such a difference for the ease of process. Thank you all!

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We're having an @openlibhums quarantine party tonight and I'm starting early. Sorry gang!

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We finished decorating our room over Easter. The crow lamps look great, but honestly would be easier to get a real bird to come perch in that position and hold the lamps for all time than it was to put these up.

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Me: reviewers always criticise when you write "in chapter one, we will do X" at the end of the introduction. I am smart so I will not do this in this book.

Reviewer: "I was surprised not to see a summary of the book's main argument at the end of the introduction".

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Dreamed I was writing a short story called "Lynden Furby’s Partial Skeletal Transplant" about a flight on which a surgeon conducts an allogeneic osteograft from a long-distance runner called Lynden Furby to allow the plane to land without shattering the narrator.

Those purple bars are Lynden Furby

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Having a good morning with work on three books. I have just finished writing the first draft of The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies, completed proofreading of Reassembling Scholarly Communications and had peer review in on Peer Review and Institutional Change in Academia!

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Today I am rereading @Ted_Underwood's _Distant Horizons_. Fantastically interesting even on a second pass.

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A thought: lots of pieces going around that do a "deaths per X number of the population" analysis. But shouldn't this also factor in how densely populated the landmass in question is as how proximal people are to one another is a big transmission factor?

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The last several decades have seen a remarkable turn toward cli-fi: novels and stories that imagine in various ways and seek to raise the alarm for the consequences of catastrophic climate change...

http://post45.org/2020/04/penguin-random-house-co-opted-valuesand-contemporary-cli-fi/

But neoliberalism exerts a palpable force on today's publishing industry, making one question whether that industry is simply a cultured arm of the capitalist menace that threatens the ecological future of the planet...

How ought we negotiate the tensions created between these different vectors at work in contemporary literary production? -- Jeremy Rosen

How can a historically-oriented genre criticism attend to how the publishing industry's embeddedness in neoliberal conditions shapes and mediates the genres that it brings to market?

@the_blochian

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The hybrid print-digital literary works I study are all made up of print codex and digital application. I refer to them as "binding media" to signal the metaphorical stitches joining their components - @elikaortega

http://post45.org/2020/04/the-many-books-of-the-future-print-digital-literatures/

Binding media works live far into the margins of the world of mass market publishing, both because they are most often published by independent publishers and because their digital applications tend to obsolesce pretty quickly

The other shortcoming was the lack of a market for bookish (to use Jessica Pressman's term) software and software-ish books

definitely one for @michaelbhaskar, this

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For scholars of the contemporary literary field, Pitch Parties offer yet another, unique appeal: the opportunity to see the process of publication unfold. The Pitch Party [...] makes the process somewhat more transparent to scholars. - @LBMcGrath

http://post45.org/2020/04/americas-next-top-novel/

We may not be privy to every conversation between author and agent, or between author and editor as mediated by agent; but by following the Pitch Party, we can see the extent of a book's development far before the acts of publication, circulation, and reception

At best, Pitch Parties reduce complex, large-scale structural inequities to a problem of mere access whose solution could present itself in 280-characters and a Heart icon. At worst, they prey on hopeful authors pursuing publication at all costs

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After all, any author can tell you who published their book. But how many can tell you who printed it? Or where it was printed? Or where the paper and the glue came from? Or anything about the ink? - @mkirschenbaum

http://post45.org/2020/04/bibliologistics-the-nature-of-books-now-or-a-memorable-fancy/

"Bibliologistics is a book history of the present, one that understands that books — individually and in aggregate — leave traces in ecological, economic, and many other registers"

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The first thing I thought when I read that Michael Gove said "The Prime Minister is not on a ventilator" was "he's on a ventilator, isn't he?"

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It's now (stop!) Easter time and spinning up the second posthumous release from the late Andrew Weatherall

B2 is a total bomb

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Subscribe to Open and Plan S

Subscribe to Open is a model pioneered by Annual Reviews that basically says that if libraries continue to subscribe, the title will become OA. If libraries drop out, it goes back to being subscription.

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Some very exciting news (for me, at least). My book, Close Reading with Computers, is now (and forever) free to download and openly licensed -- the first from Stanford University Press to be so, I believe! https://eve.gd/2020/04/07/close-reading-with-computers-is-now-open-access-at-stanford-university-press/

Hard to describe how pleased this makes me. You can still buy the print copy at a very reasonable price, but can also now search + re-use the digital version.

My third gold OA book. The next one will be _Reassembling Scholarly Communications_ from MIT [in production]. Then _Reading Peer Review_ at Cambridge [under review]. Then _Trading Scenes_ at punctum [working on it!].

It's hard to explain for those outside academia, but: I would far rather that anyone could read the work for free, because I am paid a salary to write. I give all my royalties to charity, but academic publishers often sell to recoup their costs.

The print version is still available in paperback at a very reasonable rate! https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=30253

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"Some groups have called for struggling tenants, and students in particular, to be given time rent-free.

But landlords said this would put the long-term future of rentals at risk."

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Cool stat I learned from @matt1nnes today. My university, Birkbeck, University of London is one of only five UK Universities to have a Prime Minister amongst its alumni. The first Labour PM, Ramsay MacDonald. New league table please.

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Gearing up to write the penultimate chapter of this book, on digital literary historical approaches

closest I'm going to get to photographing a shelf today, @Stephen_Curry !

Crucial writing materials

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I love nominal determinism in the neurological literature. "Brain (1959) made some brief, perceptive comments".

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I just passed the 200hr mark on work on this edited collection. I wish I'd fully tracked it from the start -- this has just been the production phase. A huge amount of work goes into editorial oversight of these volumes.

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Some more positive news for downbeat times. After my hair thinned out last year on cyclophosphamide I shaved my head entirely rather than going patchy. Lockdown allows me to report that it is successfully regrowing! Though I quite like the Foucault bald look...

"this is good news compared to the killer pandemic virus that is ravaging the globe"

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We've had Toby for a month now and any initial signs of anxiety seem to have worn off. As evidence for this, My Lord, I present Exhibit A.

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Terrifying news as my other half has imposed quarantine on incoming deliveries. Which means the new rekkids sitting in the hall are going to have to wait 2 days before I'm allowed to play them. Argh!

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All 431 pages of proofs for _Reassembling Scholarly Communications_ are now IN. Authors beware, they're coming your way shortly. This thing is a brick.

Earning one of these with each contributor I email

all eaten. Ran out of coins before I got to the end of the list, mind.