2026
The Lineages and Inheritances of Shadow Libraries and their Documentation
Shadow libraries, that is, illegal massive repositories of books of all kinds, are of course prone to takedowns by police and disappearance from the internet...
2025
Profit, cost, price, learned societies; further thoughts on Samuel A. Moore's Publishing Beyond the Market
Since I last wrote, I have had a few more thoughts on Samuel Moore’s book. Again, these are not necessarily things that he does not discuss or things that he...
Authorship, division of labour, material and digital form; thoughts on Samuel A. Moore's Publishing Beyond the Market
On Christmas day, we had a quiet time this year. One of the things I did was to read Moore, Samuel A., Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and t...
On citations, AI, and 'not reading'
There has been a major furore in recent days on social media about the rise in AI citations that have been hallucinated. These citations appear in manuscript...
2,000 Christmas trees sold by the 14th December
This year we had a familiar argument in my household about when the Christmas tree should go up. My other half insists that it should be a late arrival, just...
My 2025 end-of-year reading and writing roundup
As is my custom, I am writing, for my own historical logging, to show what I read and wrote this year. This year I have been working at Knowledge Commons, wh...
Handling 403 errors in BuddyPress's new_activity_comment
Today I had a weird problem. Our BuddyPress activity stream comments were just not working. When you clicked the reply icon, then typed a response and presse...
ERROR: failed to build: failed to solve: failed to compute cache key: failed to calculate checksum of ref XXYYZZ
Another annoying error that you can get, during a docker build, that basically does not explain what’s going on is something like:
Lando giving '404 page not found'
I spent the morning bashing my head against a brick wall, trying to sort out a problem with my Lando install. This worked on Friday, but by Monday was misbeh...
Using a public API, or the instability of MusicBrainz IDs
I have a script (a custom static site generator) that produces the output at https://ticitaci.com – a page for the record label on which I have released musi...
Pangolin, Newt, Gerbil and custom ports
I have been playing around with Pangolin, a really nice management system for exposing internal services over HTTPS.
Trying out the Nurosym vagus nerve stimulator for a couple of weeks
A really good measure of how wrecked you are is your body’s “heart rate variability” (HRV). This is the difference between the gap between your heart beats. ...
What is a University Press?
I was having a pretty good week last week, until we got to the closing minutes of play. At that point, I learned that Amsterdam University Press (AUP) had be...
Hacking the full site editor in WordPress
Today, I have been battling a frustrating bug. In the latest versions of Chrome and Edge, users cannot highlight text in Full Site Editor or Post/Page Editor...
Work in progress: 'Rage Against the Machine: The Politics of Open Access, Large Language Models, and the Reaction Against Open'
This morning, having been re-reading and thinking extensively about Moore, Samuel, ‘A Genealogy of Open Access: Negotiations between Openness and Access to R...
Open Journals Collective: Making Open Access a Reality at Scale
tl;dr: cancel your big deals and transitional agreements (they’re not working) and invest in a set of hundreds of non-APC, OA titles offered by Open Journals...
A few critical notes on Elly Griffith's The Frozen People
This week, I took some time out to read Elly Griffith’s most recent book, The Frozen People. I thought this sounded quite an interesting genre-fusing novel, ...
A critical bibliography about LibGen, the pirate site that Meta used for AI training
Yesterday, academic social media went into overdrive as many intellectuals discovered LibGen (“Library Genesis”) for the first time, thanks to an article and...
A successful Philip Leverhulme Prize application in the field of languages and literature from 2019
I am making a concerted effort to make grant applications that I have written openly available. We are far too secretive about these, because we don’t like t...
Testing 1, 2, 3 (on software testing and why it's interesting even to non-developers/non-coders)
My days working at Knowledge Commons are highly varied. It’s great. I get up in the morning and do some research work, writing my next book (OK, that isn’t K...
Swimming upstream
Open source projects like InvenioRDM – on which we rely for our repository software at Knowledge Commons – thrive on community contributions. When initiative...
Getting external access to BuddyPress's notifications (for Knowledge Commons)
As part of my work on Knowledge Commons, I want to make more of our development process open, welcoming, and transparent, by using blogging. So I will be wri...
How to securely create an encrypted digital 'in case of death' document
Very few people like thinking about the fact they will die. But it can prove a substantial administrative headache to loved ones if they don’t know about all...
What to do when your Tor relay isn't listening
I had a problem with my Tor relay last night. For some reason, the application (daemon) started but then after about 5 seconds it stopped listening. The Tor ...
An Introduction to Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'
Among the works of fiction in the feminist canon, few are as celebrated as Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. This short story, or novella, d...
Going Dark: Running a Tor relay and a dark web version of this site
Dark times at the moment. Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere and censorship regimes become ever more common. None of the material on my blog is parti...
An introduction to the poetry of Emily Dickinson
This text is derived from a lecture I gave to first-year undergraduates about a decade ago. It was languishing on my computer and I thought it better to put ...
Getting Knowledge Commons Works running locally
This week, I have started work at Michigan State University, as interim technical lead on the Knowledge Commons project. I’ll probably say more about this at...
2024
History and Digital Preservation
This week, over Christmas 2024, I have read two pieces about digital preservation: Ian Milligan’s Averting the Digital Dark Age1 and Ageh et al.’s “The Prese...
Evaluating Document Similarity Detection Approaches for Content Drift Detection
“Content drift” is an important concept for digital preservation and web archiving. Scholarly readers expect to find immutable (“persisted”) content at the r...
My academic year in review
Like most years, a mixed bag for me here. Kidney failure continues to be a truly challenging medical fiasco, with AV fistulas, overnight dialysis, hormone th...
My conflicted thoughts on the UK's assisted dying bill
The UK currently has an assisted dying bill going through parliament and I am very conflicted about it. On the one hand, I am a member of DIGNITAS, the organ...
Why it's worth avoiding as many viruses/common colds as possible: mine led to permanent disability
People are obsessed with the short-term effects of Covid, prioritising them over the longer-term impacts. “It was just like a minor cold, really”, they say, ...
Are metadata facts?
This post picks up an argument that I made in Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History about facts and copyright. Namely, that although facts are e...
Rollercoaster days
There are lots of things that I have learned about kidneys and their functions since BK virus destroyed mine. Kidneys regulate potassium in your blood; they ...
On dropping the REF OA mandate for books (this time)
Research England has dropped the mandate for OA books in its guidance for the next REF, saying that it will, now, apply instead by 2029.
Boycott Routledge over AI training? It's probably in the contract...
There’s a movement at the moment on social media where angry academic authors are gathering with the intent to boycott Routledge, who are apparently distribu...
Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History is out today!
I am very pleased to say that my book, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History, is out today!
Errata for Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History
It’s always frustrating to find errors in a work that has already gone to press/been through peer review, but unfortunately my friend Pete Christian has unea...
AI and Open Cultural Licensing (remarks to be presented at the SHARP plenary roundtable: AI In the Communications Circuit)
Some remarks that will be presented at the SHARP plenary roundtable: AI in the Communications Circuit.
Some personal notes on the REF OA mandate for books
A few personal notes on the clamour around OA for books (written from the perspective of an author of 10 books that are all openly accessible):
How long have I got, doc?
“End-stage renal disease is a terminal illness with a glomerular filtration rate of less than 15 mL/min.” - Hashmi et al.
‘Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely’: Serious Openings and Subversive Epigraphs in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon
People often think that reading a novel is a very linear activity. You start at the start and proceed through the text. As in most media forms, though, the b...
The problem for REF 2029
The Research Excellence Framework is the UK system for rewarding unhypothecated research funding from the government to universities. It gives a block of fun...
Preservation as a Memento Mori and Matter of Ethics
When training PhD students and other postgraduates, we often have a section on publication. It covers the basic background process, the rudiments of peer rev...
Betting against the future
I am tired of medical decisions with a trade-off. On a regular basis I am presented with decisions that have deferred negative consequences in order to fix s...
On Rheumatoid Arthritis and the Things Most People Don't Know About It
I have suffered from rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for almost twenty years now, which is almost half my life. If I had known back at the start of my diagnosis wh...
Rusting Away (or: packing the entire Crossref database into a SQLite file)
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working to pack the entire Crossref database into a distributable SQLite file. While this sounds somewhat insane – the resu...
2023
A year of looking in on academia
As many of you know, I took secondment from my academic role this year to work on research and development at Crossref. A variety of factors inspired this, n...
My 2023 year in review
2023 continued to pose the all-important question: just how many health disasters can I endure? This year, I started haemodialysis as my kidneys entered the ...
Land of hope and tolerance
A letter to the Editor of the Guardian, who declined to publish it.
Blocking My Crawl
My day job involves quite a lot of crawling lists of websites to determine statistics about Crossref members and their behaviours. A good example is somethin...
Connecting to AWS OpenSearch Serverless using Python
I recently wanted to use ElasticSearch (or OpenSearch as Amazon terms it from the fork) in an AWS environment, using Python. When I tried to connect I got a ...
Self-referential language counting (I learned another word today bringing my total to fourteen words and twenty letters)
A recent XKCD caused some amusement: “Vocabulary update: I learned another word today, bringing my total to twelve”.
Creating a voice-activated AI responder in Python
How do you solve a problem like a séance? With Python and GPT3, is my answer.
Citations and addressability
What is the point of a citation? As Anthony Grafton puts it in his history of the footnote, “the culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers...
Why Lever Press?
My next book, tentatively titled Star Trek: Voyager: Critical and Historical Approaches to Ethics, Politics, and the End of the 1990s is now under contract a...
Retract this!
Today’s big news is that Crossref has acquired the Retraction Watch database of expressions of concerns and retractions and has made it openly accessible to ...
Points mean prizes
This morning I gave the third of my keynote talks this week at the Janeway conference: The Lower Decks. It’s been quite a week and I am exhausted with my kid...
New wheels
Well, it finally happened, as Queen once sang. But I am not going “slightly mad” as the song professes. Instead, I have decided that the time has come where ...
Converting Excel date serial numbers to Python datetime format
Excel stores dates in a very odd way: a serial number of days since 1900.
Rules vs. Principles in POSI
In recent days, several signatories to the Principles on Open Scholarly Infrastructure have taken to performing self-audits of their compliance with the prin...
What’s the point of having open scholarly infrastructures and how do we test their resilience?
It is sometimes easy, when discussing openness, to get bogged down in the technical weeds. People often want detail and specifics: what open license should I...
We Are Terrible at Online Identity Management (or: Using Emails as An Identifier Was a Bad Move)
As noted previously, I am vacating my martineve.com domain. To do so has been a painful process that involves changing every account that uses martin@martine...
Sunsetting martineve.com
This is a quick note to say that, in the near future, I will be abandoning the martineve.com domain name. For quite some time now, the primary address for th...
The latest Ithaka S+R draft report is hugely regressive
I have read, with some dismay, the draft of Ithaka S+R’s most recent report. I offer here some critical remarks that I hope will allow for revision of the wo...
On pain and subjectivity
Pain is a great topic for philosophers. Wittgenstein uses the example of “owning” pain (“I cannot have your pains”) in his Philosophical Investigations. Susa...
On application observability in serverless cloud contexts
I have been thinking, this week, about the observability of AWS Lambda functions in API Gateway contexts. The major challenge is that Prometheus metrics pose...
Integration testing locally and on GitLab CI using LocalStack
LocalStack is a great cloud emulation layer. It lets you simulate interaction with AWS, which is great for writing integration tests.
A data pipeline with Apache Airflow and Dask
In my new role at Crossref I work on a series of data pipelines for research and development projects. These are resource-intensive data processing tasks tha...
Getting to grips with Airflow on Amazon AWS
I am currently conducting a research project at Crossref that requires me to build a database using large backend files (e.g. building a relational database ...
2022
How do you get access to antivirals on the NHS CDMU system and does it work?
So, after three years of shielding, I got Covid. I contracted it at hospital (or on my way there). How do I know? Because I don’t go anywhere else. I thought...
Some of my upcoming projects at Crossref
As I posted a while ago, from January 2023 I will be working at Crossref while retaining my university Professorship. I wanted, here, to outline a few of the...
My 2022 year in review
Like many years, 2022 was a year of health problems for me. The entire year has been overshadowed by the episode of kidney failure that I suffered as a resul...
I had Evusheld privately in the UK
As many of you know, I have been involved for the past few months in a campaign to get Evusheld – a protective/prophylactic drug for immunocompromised people...
The UK's department for health and preprints
The other day I wrote about the response that we had from the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care. In that reply the DHSC said that it had a problem wi...
The politics of peer review and preprints in the real world
This week has been one in which my personal and professional lives have aligned in interesting ways. As you may know, one strand of my work focuses on the st...
Small publishers and subscribe to open
There’s a lot of focus in the scholarly communications space on transformative agreements for the mega-publishers. Indeed, most of the discourse, most of the...
Open peer review and its rhythms
I was lucky enough, recently, to get a slightly-ahead-of-general-release opportunity to openly peer review Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s most recent book manuscript...
It's Tricky
The title of this post refers not to the classic 1987 single by Run-DMC but, instead, to the trickiness of rheumatoid arthritis and vasculitis as multisystem...
Moving On: My Infrastructural Turn
The next few months mark a series of “10”s for me. On the 10th September, it will be 10 years since my Ph.D. viva. In November, it will be 10 years since I g...
A glimmer of hope
Affect Theory
Lastpass CLI can't login using master password
If you can’t login using the Lastpass CLI tool and it just says “unknown” when you enter your password, there’s a simple fix.
What is 'the scholarly record'?
What is “the scholarly record”? There is some work on this already. For instance, Dougherty, M. V., ‘Defining the Scholarly Record’, in Correcting the Schola...
Reloading SQLite databases in Django when there have been external changes
My backup application, django-caretaker, has to reload the SQLite database after it has run the import procedure. Basically, we’re using an external tool to ...
Running Django apps on AWS Fargate with a serverless RDS
There are several tutorials out there on how to get Django apps dockerized and deployed onto AWS Fargate. None of them worked for me. So I have put together ...
Static site hosting in the cloud should not be this hard in 2022
Last weekend I converted my website hosting to an infrastructure-as-code solution. It’s no big deal, I thought. It’s just a static site so it must be really ...
How YOU can help people still shielding
I don’t normally do this kind of direct outreach, but the situation for people with serious immune system compromise at the moment in the UK is grim. We cann...
Resizing image uploads in Django
It should be an easy task to resize image uploads in Django, but it turns out to be a bit more complicated than one would hope. Here are my findings.
The Current State of Evusheld (tixagevimab/cilgavimab) in the UK
Evusheld is a combination of two long-acting antibodies (tixagevimab and cilgavimab). It’s a drug designed to protect clinically vulnerable people against Co...
If you cannot connect to a deluged daemon remotely
I had a setup of deluge running on a remote box as a daemon. I had verified the credentials were all OK, the port forwarding was setup, the daemon was runnin...
Good computer networking kit
OK, this is different from my usual fare, but I’ve been thinking about upgrading my home LAN to 10GbE. My WAN connection is now more than 1Gbit and so I’m ma...
Notes on 'Plan S for Shock'
These are my notes on Smits, Robert-Jan, and Rachael Pells, Plan S for Shock (London: Ubiquity Press, 2022) https://doi.org/10.5334/bcq, originally taken on ...
20th-Century British Isles
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
19th-Century British Isles
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
18th-Century British Isles
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
Using Django ORM, Click, and Rich to create useful command-line python apps
This is a post to document the setup that I use when I want quickly to create a great functional command-line python application with ORM database support.
The Brazilian Novel
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
Did you know that you can deposit the version of record of Bloomsbury Academic book chapters in your institutional repository?
As part of my ongoing quest to try to ensure that as much of my work is as accessible as possible, I was negotiating a contract with Bloomsbury Academic, ask...
Open access is building a one-time, shared, international library collection
One of the challenges for the open access movement has been to work out how to transition from a model in which libraries build their own local collections t...
Bildungsroman
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
The Baltic States and the Novel
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
Authorship
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
The Asian-American Novel
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
The Arabic Novel
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
Anthropology and the Novel
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
Andean Novels
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
Ancient West
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
The African-American Novel
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
Aspects of the Novel
As part of my 2021 research leave project, I am reading various encyclopaedias of the novel. As there is no way I could remember all that I have read, I have...
Ancient South Asia
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
Ancient China
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
Adaptation and Appropriation
This post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subje...
Input-Output
Something I am not very good at is decoupling the amount of effort I am expected to put in from the output result. That is, my academic contract has a nomina...
Aiming for downtime
Lots about contemporary computation stresses availability and uptime. It is important, for instance, that the OLH servers for which I have ultimate responsib...
Last year I spent 506 hours answering emails. How I hope to do less of it this year.
In 2021 I spent 506 hours answering email. That’s less than the 558 that I spent on the task in 2020, but it’s still a full 72 days’ worth of my time per yea...
2021
On informed consent and open licensing
I gave my final talk of the year, today, at the University of Leeds, on open access in the humanities disciplines. Perhaps predictably, all of the Q&A ce...
Today marks the publication of my eighth book: Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy
I am absolutely delighted to announce that, today, the 15th December 2021 marks the publication of my eighth academic book: Warez: The Infrastructure and Aes...
On PhD vivas and being a supervisor
I mustn’t say too much in public about this, for fear of being unprofessional. However, I wanted to jot down a few notes about “being a PhD supervisor” and w...
On life, death, dignity, and Dignitas
Some things we do in life happen once; the first time will be the only and last time. Our births and deaths, of course, are the two key ones.
What if downloads are not actually non-rivalrous?
One of the basic tenets of digital philosophy is that downloads are non-rivalrous. When I download something it remains accessible to other users to download...
My 2021 year in review
2021 was another pretty bad pandemic year, in many ways. For those of us with immune system compromise it was alarming to see a near-wholesale return to “nor...
What is the relationship between legal form, governance, and ethics?
In the world of OA publishing, there have been further (not-so)shock waves reverberating this week as Knowledge Unlatched was sold to Wiley. One of the quest...
All ten of my books now are (or will be when published) open access
Today marks a significant milestone for me. All ten of my academic monographs are now – or will be when published – openly accessible and free to download. T...
Citing Pirate Artifacts
By necessity, the bibliography to my book on Warez must cite a number of unconventional works that are not covered by standard style manuals. In particular, ...
Headless PDF printing in Chrome: when the standard timeout isn't enough
tl;dr: use the node.js module html-pdf-chrome to print programmatically, not Chrome’s built-in virtual-time-budget. See my print.js file for an example.
The proliferation of business models for open-access books
We are at an exciting moment for open-access books. UKRI has announced a forthcoming funding mandate, kicking off in 2024. Plan S funders are deciding what t...
Why 'Lower Tier' Journals Might Contain Better Work
I was reflecting this morning on the following propositions:
Paper Thin: moving on to Chapter Four and seven propositions
This morning marked the culmination of a long period of work for the chapter on the history of digital whitespace in my forthcoming book, Paper Thin. The cha...
On programming/languages
I asked on Twitter for where to start on considering programming languages as languages. Here are some of the best recommendations:
Replacing OpenVPN with Wireguard, including on Synology devices
This week, I decided that I should move my VPN system that I run on all my devices to use the new Wireguard protocol, replacing the OpenVPN setup.
A Bibliography on "The Interesting"/"I'm Interested In"
I asked, yesterday on Twitter, whether anybody had written about one of the most prominent verbal tics in humanistic academic discourse: “I am interested in”...
Thomas Pynchon, from S-Gerät to Y-Gerät
One of the core plot devices (in so far as there is a plot) in Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, is the S-Gerät: the Schwarzgerät or “black dev...
Notes on Nicholas Gaskill's Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color
Some incomplete notes on the introduction to Gaskill, Nicholas, Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color (Minneapolis: University of...
Some incomplete notes on Les Encres noires au Moyen Âge
Some very incomplete and casual-in-tone notes on Monique, Zerdoun Bat-Yehouda. 2003. Les Encres Noires au Moyen Age. Paris: CNRS EDITIONS. Originally a Twitt...
Mesh on a budget: converting RBR50 to RBS50 units and using LBR20 for 4G fallback
For quite some time, I’ve wanted to have an internet system that could fallback to a 4G connection if the primary internet connection failed. This would be h...
It's time we dropped Agamben
Giorgio Agamben gets around a lot on literature syllabi. His “What is the Contemporary?” is a staple of theoretical courses, his concept of “bare life” is us...
Augar, The Humanities, Covid: Gazing into the Crystal Ball
It has always “amused” me, to some extent, that the Augar review of post-18 education and funding was conducted by a bloke whose name is a near homonym for “...
Abandoning restrictions should not mean abandoning the vulnerable. We need policies to help those who remain at risk.
The government has told us that we must “learn to live with the virus”. It is undoubtedly true that coronavirus is not going to disappear any time soon. Howe...
Thinking about UK Ph.D. examinations
Yesterday, I examined a Ph.D. It’s not an unusual experience – and huge congratulations to the candidate who had a well-deserved pass! But every time I go th...
Birkbeck: The Oldest University English Department in the World? (and a new Oscar Wilde lecture at Birkbeck)
Most major studies of the discipline of English that I know of, such as Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago, IL: Universi...
On the Chromoclasm, the absence of colour, and notes towards a translation of Michel Pastoureau's ‘L’incolore n’existe Pas’
Throughout the works of Michel Pastoureau (at least in his books on Black and Green) are sketched ideas of the notion of a “chromoclasm”.
When and why did paper become white and why was white paper so valued?
I’ve spent the past few weeks tracking down answers to the questions: “When and why did paper become white and why was white paper so valued?” for my work on...
What’s happening at the moment with open-access books?
It’s an exciting time in the OA book world because many experiments are coming to fruition. We’ve seen MIT’s recent D2O offering; Michigan has a new membersh...
While the government introduces new freedom of speech rules at universities, the biggest threat to academic freedom remains their insistence on the financial destabilization of institutions
This morning I have been looking at the UK government’s so-called “Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill”. The politics of this are extremely complicated...
cOAlition S endorsing Subscribe to Open is a great start. We need the same thinking about books from the beginning.
This week, cOAlition S endorsed the Subscribe to Open (S2O) business model.
An update on the reprint of my book
I posted, a short while ago, about the reprinting of OA books under CC licenses. This is, of course, totally legal and allowed under the more liberal Creativ...
Questions and Answers from UKSG on Opening the Future
Do you think that the Subscribe-To-Open model could be applied to new academic presses who have no backlist?
Moog Minitaur: the editor and exclusive USB lock
I love my Moog Minitaur synth. It’s a great little bass station that packs a punch. However, I have been facing some issues using its full functionality.
Subscriptions for software and commodity fetishism
I was thinking idly today – and probably in a wildly unoriginal way – about some of the disputes about subscriptions to software and the politics of this mod...
How to fix a broken Crumar Bit99 synthesizer
A friend chucked me an old Crumar Bit99 synthesizer from the 1980s. It’s a beast! Lovely bass sounds. Totally unusable interface. See figure A.
Shielding is being eased again. Here's why this is so frightening.
Non-vulnerable people perhaps don’t understand why the government advice to shielders is so frightening. I think I can give a flavour though:
OA books being reprinted under CC BY license
I have to admit, today, that I was wrong about the risk of others reprinting open-access monographs produced under a Creative Commons license. An outfit call...
The social network of the London Review of Books
I have, this afternoon (on a day off – I know, I know) been playing around with the LRB archive, looking for fun patterns in the chain of “who reviews whom”....
The Publisher's Association's impact assessment on OA is pretty much as you'd expect
The Publisher’s Association has commissioned a report that seems to be their latest attempt at painting open access to research as economically damaging to t...
My resignation as an external examiner at the University of Leicester in the wake of proposed cuts to English
Today I have written to the University of Leicester tendering my resignation as an external examiner.
The Open Library of Humanities and Brexit: VAT Position
This morning I had to have a call with our accountants that I was somewhat dreading: does Brexit have tax implications for the Open Library of Humanities, a ...
On healthcare economics and valuing lives
This week opened with the distressing news that Lord Sumption, supposedly someone whose judgement is entirely sound, having been a Supreme Court justice, had...
How much optimism?
I am due up for vaccination in the very near future. This is good news. But it’s tempered.
On the costs of scholarly communications and the discourse of 'fairness'
A discourse of ‘fairness’ has emerged in open-access circles in recent years. It has come from a sense that big, for-profit publishers have not played ‘fairl...
Attempted realistic observations on 2021
There was some research earlier this year that I thought was apt for the pandemic, showing that realism is key to being happy, not optimism or pessimism.
Reading Peer Review is published today!
On the same day as I submitted my next book manuscript, I am pleased to be able to say that Reading Peer Review, my 7th academic book, has been published by ...
I have submitted the Warez book
I have, today, submitted the manuscript of my book, currently titled Warez: The Economic Aesthetics and Alternative Reality Games of the Topsite Scene to the...
2020
Resolutions, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly Parts of Academia
I usually start my New Year’s resolutions on the 28th or 29th December. I do this because I don’t like the season of excess; I come out of it feeling unfit, ...
An anecdote on editing
My Ph.D. supervisors were not particularly hands on. This was not slacking on their part – it suited me just fine and they could see that I had the thesis pr...
Some reflections on the professionalization of my disciplines
The disciplines that have had it hardest for unwanted appropriation and assumed specialization this year have undoubtedly been various strands of medicine, v...
My 2020 year in review
I wrote, last year, that 2019 was pretty bad for me. Little did any of us know of the grimness that 2020 would bring with the coronavirus pandemic. I have sp...
How to install Ubuntu on the HP Dragonfly Elite (hint: disable Optane)
There’s a prominent post at Ars Technica called Linux on laptops: Ubuntu 19.10 on the HP Dragonfly Elite G1 that implies that it is easy and straightforward ...
On the ethics of studying pirate cultures
Studies such as my Warez book fall under the rubric of ‘netnographies’; work that attempt to examine ethnographically the principles and characteristics of v...
Backlist to the Future: a new business model for university presses and open-access books
As part of my efforts on Work Package 3 of the COPIM project I am engaged in a project that seeks to convert publishers to business models that will allow th...
On Reassembling Scholarly Communications: A book about the ethics and egalitarianism of open access
After a Herculean effort, coinciding with open access week 2020, our edited volume Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Glo...
An update on my Warez book: a book about the artforms of the high-level piracy scene
I am, at present, working on a book currently entitled Warez: The Economic Artforms and Illicit Crafts of the Topsite Scene, under contract with punctum book...
The Observer should not offer column inches to allow Oxford College principals to denigrate other universities
Today, in the Observer, the Sunday national newspaper of the liberal Guardian Media Group, Will Hutton offered a sobering retrospective of the university cri...
Retractions against racial discrimination
A journalist recently asked me for a comment on why I, as an academic who studies academic publishing, signed a petition calling for the retraction of Mead, ...
Rapid-response grants and disciplinary boundaries
There’s an article out today in Research Fortnight detailing some of the frustrations that we had with a recent AHRC/UKRI grant proposal. Perhaps my favourit...
Rethinking assessment during the pandemic, particularly re. disability equality
The pandemic is not over. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill just went back for a week of in-person term. Seven days later, they have shut down,...
Some reflections on the politics of open peer review
I recently participated in the American Historical Association’s open peer review experiment on the manuscript of ‘History Can Be Open Source’. I enjoyed rea...
davmail uses Java certificate store, not central ca-certificates
A note to self (and others) for when this problem happens again. My university today updated the certificate for their OWA webmail service, signed by a certi...
The Emergence of Threat Infrastructures: Plan S and Behavioral Change
Defining Threat Infrastructures ‘Threat infrastructures’ are platforms that are established or promised to be established solely or primarily in order to cha...
The easing of shielding: the UK government's abrogation of responsibility
Anyone who has followed the UK government’s attitude to the sick and disabled over the past few years will be unsurprised by the way they are relaxing shield...
Reading ‘The Democratisation Myth’ and thinking through decolonial OA
This week for COPIM we are reading Knöchelmann, Marcel, The Democratisation Myth: Open Access and the Solidification of Epistemic Injustices (SocArXiv, 9 Jun...
On the overhead of 'business models'
OLH, obviously, has a business model for its open-access publishing. We operate due to a membership model in which approximately 300 libraries pay an annual ...
Notes on vulnerability and COVID-19
Quite frankly, the current situation is terrifying. Another approximately 400 deaths today in the UK from the virus and the reproduction number (R) is said t...
If I could radically reshape copyright law for research
The world is being rapidly reshaped by pandemic conditions beyond our control. This prompted me to do some radical rethinking of my own. What if I could tota...
On academic journals as clubs
This week for our COPIM reading group we are reading Hartley, John, Jason Potts, Lucy Montgomery, Ellie Rennie, and Cameron Neylon, ‘Do We Need to Move from ...
Notes on Raym Crow. (2009). Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice. SPARC.
Some choice excerpts and comments on Raym Crow. (2009). Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice. SPARC. https://sparcopen.org/wp-conte...
On business model generation for open access monographs
This week for our COPIM reading group we are turning to Osterwalder, Alexander, Yves Pigneur, and Tim Clark, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Vision...
Transformative agreements in the time of COVID-19
Transformative agreements for OA are all the rage at the moment. Plan S compliance beckons and early movers can make it sound as though they are really doing...
On critical design and designing for provocation
This week for COPIM we are reading Bardzell, Shaowen, Jeffrey Bardzell, Jodi Forlizzi, John Zimmerman, and John Antanitis, ‘Critical Design and Critical Theo...
On participatory design in library architecture
This week, our COPIM WP2/WP3 reading group discussed Meunier, Benjamin, and Olaf Eigenbrodt, ‘More Than Bricks and Mortar: Building a Community of Users Thro...
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 co...
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 r...
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 shou...
Museums continue to make third-party licensing for academic scholarship a total pain
Museums continue to make life miserable for academic scholars who wish to re-use their images in third-party publications. I am not against paying museums li...
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 s...
On ‘The Political Histories of UK Public Libraries and Access to Knowledge’
This week for our COPIM project reading group we are turning to the forthcoming Stuart Lawson, ‘The Political Histories of UK Public Libraries and Access to...
Notes on Susan Leigh Star’s ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’
As part of the COPIM project, my work packages are conducting some background reading groups. This week we are reading Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Ethnography of ...
Zotero and auto-downloading open access books
This bank holiday, I wanted to spend some time playing around with Zotero’s automatic ingest of open access books. There are some problems with this.
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 ...
On Springer and APCs 'in the wild'
Springer-Nature has a new report out on tracking APCs.
Close Reading with Computers is now open access at Stanford University Press
In ultra-exciting news – thanks to my Leverhulme Prize – I am very pleased to be able to be able to say that my book, Close Reading with Computers: Textual S...
Academic books I'm writing
I have a series of book projects in train at the moment and wanted to write a little bit of this down so that I have a record of where I was in the projects ...
On a challenge of print subsidy for OA
An interesting conceptual dilemma arose today. At OLH we don’t believe that print is incompatible with OA/the digital. (This is usually the part of the Skype...
I4OC open citations implementation in Janeway
One of the strongly recommended criteria under Plan S is that journals provide “Openly accessible data on citations according to the standards by the Initiat...
My draft response to the UKRI OA consultation
Some of my draft responses to the UKRI OA consultation.
Open access monographs and the REF-after-REF 2021
Since yesterday’s post on The UKRI Open Access Review Consultation Document my inbox has been swamped by journalists, librarians, and publishers asking what ...
Key Points from The UKRI Open Access Review Consultation Document
These are my notes on The UKRI Open Access Review Consultation Document.
Writing a data management plan
I am often asked for advice on writing data management plans in the humanities, so thought I would share my advice on this more generally. The first thing yo...
A hypothesis: kernel function density estimation and graphing may predict literary critical attention
This is really speculative, but today I returned to David McClure’s excellent and fun TextPlot tool. A type of topic modelling (but not LDA), McClure explain...
The T&F buyout of F1000 neutralizes the Plan S threat infrastructures
I am tempted to think that Taylor & Francis’s acquisition of F1000 should be critiqued on grounds of yet more gross for-profit consolidation in the schol...
Accelerating Synology RAID 6 (SHR-2) reshapes
Urgh. I had a RAID 6 reshape on my NAS that was projected to take 28 days to complete, I kid you not. It was stuck at an abysmal 4MB/s transfer rate. Here’s ...
2019
My 2019 in review
This was, in many ways, a pretty bad year for me. My health has, to be frank, been appalling once more. It has necessitated treatment with cyclophosphamide i...
The new REF individual circumstances setup: the good and the bad
I am quoted in today’s Research Fortnight on the new REF staff/individual circumstances under the heading ‘REF staff circumstances rules criticised’. The quo...
An irony of the 'hierarchy of journals'
It is often assumed that researchers submit their work to the highest prestige titles and, when rejected, move down the ‘hierarchy’ to titles with less strin...
The second OA liberated article from my Leverhulme Prize: Natural language generation and authorial labour
Some time around 2016 I was invited by Kasia Boddy and David Winters to contribute to a special issue of Critical Quarterly that they were putting together. ...
The first OA liberated article from my Leverhulme Prize: The Critique of Metamodernism
One of the earliest articles that I wrote during the final year of my Ph.D. was for the journal C21, published by Gylphi. The article is quite hard to track ...
A brief note on the RHS Plan S report
The most recent Royal Historical Society document on Plan S says the following about the Open Library of Humanities (OLH):
I have won the 2019 Philip Leverhulme Prize
Last week, while I was having blood products transfused at the Royal Free Hospital, I received an email from the Leverhulme Trust stating that I had been awa...
Immunity problems
From around 2010 to 2013 I was on a drug called Rituximab to control my autoimmune conditions (rheumatoid arthritis and vasculitis). This highly effective me...
An expensive but possible way to do Society OA
A Learned Society spoke to me last week about what they could do to move to an open-access model. They currently receive about 100,000 EUR per year from thei...
A thought experiment: do we really care about the type of scholarly publishing entity?
After last week’s post on APCs, some further musings. Following Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s work on generous thinking and the importance of community for the acad...
The Problems of Unit Costs Per Article
Every five minutes or so, someone tries to come up with a cost-per-article figure for academic publishing. In the past, I’ve tried to do it too. But more and...
Learned Societies, Open Access and Budgetary Cross-Subsidy
There’s an article out in The Times Higher Education Science Magazine (edit 11:38am) about Learned Societies and open access. As usual, it points out the tho...
When infrastructural support clashes with DORA and good research assessment practices
Here’s an interesting one for me. The article processing charge (APC) model for open access is attracting a lot of flack. It’s being called the “scourge” of ...
Elsevier threatens others for linking to Sci-Hub but does so itself
Sci-Hub is a copyright-violating site that provides infringing access to scholarly publications that are behind paywalls. Its ethics are problematic but it’s...
Thinking through citation resolution and proposals for consumer-driven, DOI-like metadata repositories
One of the major challenges that we face in the Jisc Open Monographs Metrics Experiment is in aligning the linguistic expression of a citation with its under...
The British Academy response misrepresents Plan S and OA
The British Academy has responded to the revised Plan S consultation. It’s nice of them to grudgingly accept there have been some improvements but I remain d...
Academic author rights of presentation on mutable digital platforms
An interesting discussion today with one of my senior publishing technology developers, Mauro Sanchez, led me to thinking about the rights of presentation an...
Ratholin'
Stare him in the eyes when you think he’s folding You play your luck with the cards you’re holding You throw a double six with the dice you’re rolling You go...
Jennifer Egan’s Editorial Processes and the Archival Edition of Emerald City
This is an author’s accepted manuscript of an article accepted for publication in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory. It is made available, here, on a per...
From Mars and Back to Close Reading with Computers
In the acknowledgements to Close Reading with Computers, I write:
Opting out of league tables is, of course, a type of prestige game
Birkbeck, University of London, my institution, has pulled out of all national league tables. I think this is a good move.
Old Traditions and New Technologies
It has been a pretty epic editing process and one that I would not be in a hurry to repeat any time soon, but I am pleased to say that the volume that I am e...
Close Reading with Computers is Published Today and Next Projects
Today marks the publication of my latest book, Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, ...
What size should my music studio be?
In Everest, F. Alton, and Ken C Pohlmann, Master Handbook of Acoustics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), p. 247, a range of room ratios are listed to achieve op...
How do you describe this kind of illness?
The autoimmune conditions from which I suffer are a total pain to describe under the general frameworks within which most people understand illness.
Instrumental reading
Today I read Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University, a book that touches on many of my interests (public human...
Thoughts on academic prestige and institutional solvency
The economy of prestige in academia is odd. We often like to think that the prestige of our institutions – whether that be a university or a publisher – is n...
Text of Digital Library Futures keynote (Cambridge, 21st May 2019)
The Sacred Unreadable Artefact: Digital Preservation, Computational Abundance, and Scarce Access
The Learning Experience out today on Tici Taci and my book has gone to print at Stanford University Press
I have a music release/EP out on Tici Taci records today, called The Learning Experience.
Running the PreSonus Quantum interfaces on Windows 7
The PreSonus Quantum interfaces are definitely not supported on Windows 7. But if you are not faint of heart, it is possible to hack the driver onto a Window...
The supervisory frustrations of AHRC Doctoral Training Partnerships
The AHRC awards Ph.D. funding, now, through a system of Doctoral Training Partnerships. These are groups of institutions who share a funding pool, and traini...
How long does it take to examine a PhD thesis?
I examined a Ph.D. thesis this week. I usually do about two or three of these a year. I was curious to work out how long it takes to undertake this task, so ...
Learned Societies Plan S report and a note on double dipping
The report on Learned Societies and Plan S commissioned by Wellcome, UKRI, and ALPSP has been released. In general, this is a very good document. Societies s...
A missing audio hardware device
On Mac OSX there is a really neat feature: the ability to create an “aggregate audio device” that chains multiple soundcards into a single virtual device. Th...
On music, life, Tici Taci, and a new release
Today marks the 50th release on the Tici Taci music label. It’s a track called ‘Opsimath and Eremite’ by the Wales-based outfit, The Long Champs (otherwise k...
(Digital) Ways of Looking
Those who are not invested in the digital humanities, on either side of an often nasty binary “for-or-against” style argument, may have missed the bust up in...
Running unoconv on Ubuntu 18.04 and Libreoffice 6
I’ve been having some serious problems running unoconv, the document conversion tool, on Ubuntu 18.04 using Libreoffice 6. This has been blocking the test su...
How to read a (blank) page: on redaction in contemporary fiction
I have a new article out in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction on how to read redaction in contemporary fiction.
Birkbeck updates draft REF code of practice to specify that it will not submit anyone on compulsory redundancy, despite not having any such redundancies anyway
Today, Research England released its final guidance for REF2021 submissions in the UK.
A little more on defamation and CC BY
The problem with non-lawyers, like me, speculating on legal matters is that there’s a risk of scaremongering or just plain inaccuracy. Not that this really e...
Additional points in my Plan S response
Further to my other post earlier this week, I have added the additional points to my response letter to the Plan S implementation guidelines. These centre ar...
My Draft Plan S Implementation Guidance Feedback
I write to provide feedback in an individual capacity on the Plan S implementation guidelines.
Comments on the interim Royal Historical Society response to Plan S
The Royal Historical Society has published an interim/draft report feeding back on Plan S. Although not a historian but as someone with a keen interest in op...
2018
My 2018 in review
2018 was, in general, a pretty good year for me. Certainly, parts of it were marred by handling my new hearing loss, but an assistive device (a speech-filter...
Some jottings on academic freedom and Plan S/open access
The announcement of Plan S – an ambitious undertaking to mandate open access in Europe by 2020 on most funded research, but also now expanding overseas, pote...
M-Audio Trigger Finger Pro synchronisation problems
If you read any review of the M-Audio Trigger Finger Pro, it sounds like a steal. A sequencer, drum machine, and more, all packed into a hardware unit that i...
On the practical implementation of Plan S
A coalition of funders from across Europe has proposed a bold initiative, called Plan S, to push towards OA for 2020. It includes the following 10 points:
Institutional Cultures, Patents, and Open-Source Software for Open Access
As you may know, the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck publishes and maintains a piece of open-source software for journal publishing called J...
Linux CPU Frequency Scaling on the Intel i9 7980XE
I spent some time this morning trying to work out why my CPU - the beastly Intel i9 7980XE - was capped at 2.6ghz when the BIOS allows scaling to 4.3ghz.
The real ethics of AI are about the labour underpinning it
Even as worldwide militaries develop autonomous killer robots, when we think of the ethics of AI, we often turn to the Asimov principles:
Where we are with the OA monograph mandate for the Third Research Excellence Framework
HEFCE, the precursor to Research England, announced in 2016 that “we intend to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that fo...
Transparency agendas are being used to legislate against consortial open-access models even though it has good cost outcomes
Some open-access advocates argue that transparency and accountability are key for open access (meaning: the removal of price and permission barriers to readi...
Forthcoming Books in the New Horizons in Contemporary Writing Series
I’m very pleased to be able to announce some forthcoming titles in the Bloomsbury New Horizons in Contemporary Writing series that I edit! Dates are, of cour...
My critique of metamodernism
A few years ago I wrote an article: Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of “Metamodernism”: Post-Millennial Post-Postmod...
Thoughts on the UUK offer and why I voted yes
In the past few days I have spoken with many colleagues with differing views on the offer from UUK. Like many other colleagues, I have been on strike to halt...
On the OA "mandate" for books in the Third REF and the worry over trade books
In the past few days, well over a year since HEFCE signalled its “inten[tion] to move towards an open-access requirement for monographs in the exercise that ...
The Tender Document for the European Commission's Open Access Platform Asks for an Awful Lot for Not Very Much
I’ve just been reading the EC’s tender document for their new open-access platform. Everyone thinks that it’s a shoo-in for F1000. But quite frankly, good lu...
Keith McMillen K-Mix on Linux
I have a Keith McMillen K-Mix audio device that I use for music-making. I noticed, though, that if you have a simple stereo setup on this, with, say, monitor...
Action Short of a Strike Must Recognize That 9-5 is Not Always Helpful
A lot of the social media posts that I’ve seen recently about the UCU’s call for “Action Short of a Strike” (ASOS) are fixated on the idea that everyone’s co...
Who does the work of implementing DORA?
Thinking aloud. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is undoubtedly a good idea, in my view. The thrust of the declaration states that...
Who was actually responsible for the Toby Young OfS debacle?
Who do you think was responsible for the monumental failure of judgement that ended with Toby Young being appointed to a regulatory body for HE in the UK, th...
How Learned Societies Could Flip to Open Access, With No Author-Facing Charges, Using a Consortial Model
Let’s assume that we have a Learned Society that fulfills the following conditions:
Open Access Resources and Evaluation; or: why OA journals might fare badly in terms of conventional usage
I am frequently asked, by libraries, to provide usage statistics for their institutions at the Open Library of Humanities. I usually resist this, since there...
2017
My 2017 academic year in review
2017 was, as with last year, a mixed bag for me. On the positive side, OLH continues to grow, I received a grant for the peer-review project on which I am wo...
My autoimmune diseases are attacking my ears and I am losing my hearing
This is partly a therapeutic post to get this off my chest and partly a post to which I can point friends and colleagues to avoid re-explaining everything ev...
On digital publishing and third-party rights
I’m currently handling a difficult case where a poetry publisher is demanding a royalty for citation of text within a work of literary criticism. They want t...
Cambridge University Press and Censorship
The recent self-censorship by Cambridge University Press in China is billed, by some, as an assault on academic freedom. It is certainly a worrying trend.
Open Access Monographs Misrepresented
I have a letter in today’s Times Higher Education repying to Marilyn Deegan on open-access books. The full, unedited version of the letter is in my instituti...
On ECRs, long-form-outputs, and the non-portability of outputs for REF
There has been a lot of angst about the newly proposed non-portability requirements for REF2021 and beyond, particularly from ECRs. I want to say upfront tha...
Mediating forms and free thinking (or "on selecting journals")
Last week I attended the rather enjoyable English: Shared Futures conference and participated in a panel titled “How to Get Published as an Early Career Acad...
Dear Walt
Dear Walt,
Did Thomas Pynchon write Cow Country? Stylistic affinities and divergences
In mid-2015, Art Winslow caused something of an online furore when he suggested that the pseudonymously-authored novel by “Adrian Jones Pearson”, Cow Country...
If I still subscribed to Elsevier's Lingua, I'd demand a refund
You may remember that, a while back, the editorial board of Elsevier’s journal, Lingua, decided to leave the publisher to setup a new journal called Glossa t...
Two types of post-critique
It seems to me that there are two types of “post-critical” articulations. Felski et al are calling for a turn away from the idea that we should employ critiq...
An important note if you have a Lenovo G580
The Lenovo G580 comes with Windows 8. It is possible to permanently lock yourself out of the operating system if you begin with a Microsoft account and migra...
A note on moral relativism and unthinkable liberalism
Some thoughts to myself now voiced out loud. Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that there is no objective wrong or right between parties with different eth...
On consortial OA funding models and renewals
Consortial OA funding models such as Knowledge Unlatched, the Open Library of Humanities, and others are non-classical economic setups. They are susceptible ...
The Folio Society Edition of Riddley Walker
Cheap it is not, but the Folio Society Edition of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker is a beautiful item to behold.
100 people in a room: on the distributional effects of different open-access funding models
There are 100 people in a room. They have $10 each. The academic speaker will give them a talk but the venue wants $50 to cover its costs (and any profit/sur...
Librarian Evaluation of Non-APC OA Models in the Age of Open Access
One of the things we have to contend with at the Open Library of Humanities is the fact that libraries will evaluate our performance and decide whether or no...
On the economics of flipping subscription journals
One of the most pleasing, but also most difficult, parts of running the Open Library of Humanities is bringing new journals onto the platform.
Conducting non-commercial research on in-copyright Amazon Kindle books
The saga continues from where I left off. Since then, I emailed a publisher to request a corpus of a specific author’s work in a format that would allow comp...
Judging the painting (research) without the frame (the journal)
It is a common step in the ongoing reform of research practices to criticize the set of proxy measures that we use to evaluate research. I’ve certainly done ...
How much does it cost to run a small scholarly publisher?
I run a small academic publisher, the Open Library of Humanities. Well, I say small but, at 18 journals, we are bigger than quite a few small university pres...
On automatically detecting parenthetical citations
One of the things that we have to do in meTypeset is to capture parenthetical citations. These range in styles, but the following are good examples:
On responses and rebuttals in the discipline of English literature
There is an article, published in a “top” journal in my field, that makes a series of claims with which I substantially disagree. In fact, I think the piece,...
Thinking more about EU law and UK copyright exemptions
I have previously written, having had conversations with Erik Ketzan (although any misunderstandings in the final things I’m writing here are mine, not his),...
My responses to the Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework
Here are my draft responses to the parts of the Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework that attracted my interested. These are my individua...
Four implementation questions about open access and monographs
From January this year, I am a member of the Universities UK Open Access Monographs Working Group. The aims of the group, in preparation for the mandate for ...
Learned societies in the humanities, open access, and paying for disciplinary goods
As I’ve written before, Learned Societies are one of the biggest barriers to open access. They derive revenue from publishing that they then use to pay for d...
The rivalrous parts of non-rivalrous digital forms
Peter Suber has asked, following a long chain of thinking about knowledge as a non-rivalrous form that is inscribed, historically, within rivalrous forms:
2016
My 2016 academic year in review
2016 was a year of mixed fortune for me. On the positive side, OLH continues to grow, I was made a (full) Professor, and I published two books. On the downsi...
Introducing Cemmento: A digital preservation tool for annotations
Annotation tools on the web are somewhat fragile. They depend upon complex XPath queries and other anchoring technologies to ensure that annotations are keye...
The thing that's gone missing in the revisions to the REF consultation between February and December 2016: the 5* category
The internal draft of the Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework that was requested by FOI last February contained the following clause:
Points from my first reading of the Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework
HEFCE has today released its Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework after a year of delays in light of the Stern Review and now modified fr...
Five un-busted aspects of the TEF
In his recent piece for WonkHE, Chris Husbands, the chair of the TEF panel, wrote in order to “bust” five myths about the TEF.
Referring Elsevier/RELX to the Competition and Markets Authority
Today, along with Stuart Lawson and Jon Tennant, I have submitted the below as a complaint to the Competition and Markets Authority, making good on the advic...
What we mean when we ask whether open access is sustainable
The most frequent question that is asked in scholarly communication circles about gold open access is whether a business model is sustainable and/or scalable.
Next book project: The Aesthetics of Metadata: Redaction, Reference, & the Archive in Contemporary Fiction
I just wanted to share some of the work I’ve been doing on one of my next book project, which is provisionally entitled The Aesthetics of Metadata: Redaction...
Questions about APC-free models
I’m here at the Kansas University conference on “Envisioning a world beyond Article/Book Processing Charges”. One of the first things we were asked to do was...
The single largest challenge for information publishing in the digital age
A fragment of thought:
'But the public don't need access to humanities research'
An email I received today about one of my open-access articles:
Some of the arguments, counter-arguments, and political alignments for and against open access
As a result of a discussion today, I thought it worth writing out some of my observations/thoughts on a few of the arguments, counter-arguments, and politica...
My new book, Literature Against Criticism, is published today
I am extremely pleased to say that my latest peer-reviewed book, Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict has to...
More on my experience with Open Book Publishers
I can say, without a shred of doubt, that my experience with Open Book Publishers has been nothing short of excellent. For reference/comparison: I’ve publish...
Now accepting proposals to 'New Horizons in Contemporary Writing' series
I’m delighted to say that I have taken up an editorship, alongside Professor Bryan Cheyette, of the Bloomsbury New Horizons in Contemporary Writing series. I...
A few initial notes on David Golumbia's 'Marxism and Open Access in the Humanities'
I don’t know David Golumbia, but I suspect I agree with him on many matters, actually. In particular, the centrality of an understanding of labour within a d...
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 so...
Why Open Book Publishers for my next book?
In Open Access and the Humanities, I wrote:
'Paying it forward' to fund scholarly communications?
A post today at the Scholarly Kitchen has spurred me to write something that I’ve been pondering for a while. Namely: how helpful is this idea of “paying it ...
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 bec...
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 rea...
Have you read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas? If so, which of the two very different versions?
Today, my peer-reviewed journal article on the publishing history of the two substantially different versions of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was published. ...
Stern and REF: assessing the past to fund the future with non-portability
Something that occurred to me about the Stern review of REF and the proposed non-portability of research outputs is how this changes the relationship of fund...
The Stern review of REF
Lord Stern’s review of the Research Excellence Framework is out today in the UK. Not as exciting as the fact that my book is also out today, I know, but stil...
On the ownership, portability and accreditation of research
One of the aspects of the Stern review that has attracted the most attention from my Twitter stream is the non-portability of research outputs. What this mea...
My book, Password, is out now!
My short book in the Object Lessons series, Password, is released today, published by Bloomsbury. It’s available to buy in all the usual places. All author r...
Overriding AngularJS directives' isolate scopes
We have a third-party Angular app and want to override the isolate scopes that are provided by its directives. We don’t want to modify the original app. How ...
Continuing javascript execution after total DOM body replacement using DOM mutation observers
As part of the translation platform we’re building, I needed to implement the following workflow:
Selecting specified text ranges in a browser using javascript and xpath
Continuing my post from yesterday, one of the interface components that we want to work is that, when a user clicks a paragraph, the first sentence is select...
Creating a generic loader for Annotator.js plugins inside a hypothes.is extension project
Part of the work for our grant to Birkbeck from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is to create a software project that uses the annotation backend of hypothes....
CaSSius now supports full headless PDF creation from JATS XML
CaSSius is the PDF typesetter that I am building as part of my work for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to Birkbeck for the Open Library of Humanities....
Consortial funding and downward price pressure for open access
Different groups of open-access advocates want different things to be achieved by OA. The “OA movement” is not a homogenous group. Some members of the group ...
Initial parsing work on large JSON corpus
Yesterday, I wrote of a challenge that I faced in working out which texts in a corpus have decent OCR and, then, which texts they actually are. This morning,...
Identifying 26GB of JSON Novel Data
For part of one of my current research projects I have a pretty large (26GB) corpus of digitized JSON novels. I’m interested in ingesting these and then perf...
What do we mean when we call scholarly communications platforms 'sustainable'?
The title here is a little deceptive. Because, clearly, I do know what we mean when we call scholarly communications platforms ‘sustainable’. We mean that th...
Reading Potter Stewart on recognition
In a famous US Supreme Court case on pornography: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that ...
Hypothes.is v0.8.14 error: "OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory"
If you are attempting to build the dev setup for hypothes.is v0.8.14 and are receiving the error “OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory” whenever you ...
Transcript of meeting between Elsevier and the Minister for Higher Education in the UK, Jo Johnson
I’ve been pursuing a Freedom of Information request against the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills for some time now. BIS have consistently tried ...
On neural networks and health data privacy
Dear all,
Overriding hypothesis's interface the right way
Hypothes.is is an annotation framework that uses Pyramid to provide interface asset locations. This means that it is possible to override the interface and o...
Embargoing metadata?
I’ve heard reports that the journals Science and Nature want the metadata on forthcoming articles to be embargoed. In other words, they are saying that they ...
The Faber Finds edition of Rex Warner's The Professor is very poorly formatted and proofed
Having previously read and greatly enjoyed The Aerodrome, I sat down this morning and read Rex Warner’s second novel, The Professor. I’d say it is a remarkab...
Open access in a time of illness
I noted, on Twitter, how pleased I was to discover that there was good information available online about my current condition. I want, here though, to offer...
I have suffered from an episode of cerebral vasculitis and a stroke
A few weeks ago, at the beginning of March, I was feeling quite unwell with a chest and sinus infection, for which I’d had three courses of antibiotics from ...
It looks unlikely that UK universities are going to get out of the Freedom of Information Act
The recent Green Paper proposed that universities should be excluded from the Freedom of Information Act. As of today, it now looks very unlikely that this w...
The critique of utopia
Today, at the FORCE11 workshop that I am attending in Madrid our facilitators spoke of utopian thinking and then of attempting to realize that utopia in the ...
A world reimagined without the university
I’m at a workshop in Madrid organized by FORCE11. The first exercise was to imagine a world where universities did not exist, their hierarchies and power wer...
Evolving notes on the political philosophy of David Willetts
David Willetts is the politician responsible, above all others, in the United Kingdom for the £9,000 student fee level and its associated phenomena (includin...
The postponed REF consultation document
Research Fortnight is running an interesting piece about the REF consultation document that was pulled late last year. Indeed, while the sector is desperate ...
On speed and open access
At the time of a global health emergency – the Zika virus – there are renewed calls for a faster and more open research publication system in disciplines whe...
Trying to understand Ofqual's inter-subject comparability Rasch model tests for easy/hard subjects at GCSE and A-Level
Last night I spent almost three hours reading the full Ofqual statistical paper on subject comparability at school level in the UK. I am not a statistician (...
Accreditation and research-assessment practices (on DORA and the Tickell review)
Last week, the Tickell review of open access in the United Kingdom was published. There are no unwelcome nasty surprises in the review and, in fact, there ar...
On ten years of chronic illness
I’m not one to mope or to seek any special sympathy but this month marks an ambivalent anniversary for me and I promised myself I’d write publicly about it. ...
Undergraduates, digital humanities, and visualization: looking back on my early visualizations of Gravity's Rainbow
Today I don’t feel well. In fact, I’ve got some horrible virus that’s confining me mostly to bed, which I hate. So, naturally, I’ve spent quite a lot of time...
Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing
I had some utterly fantastic news yesterday that I think/hope it’s now OK for me to share. At the start of the next academic year (from 1st October 2016) I w...
An old tradition and a new technology: notes on why open access remains hard
The Budapest Open Access Initiative statement begins: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good”. T...
Why handling Book Processing Charges from a purchasing library is hard
I keep trying to write about the economics of open access to academic books via Book Processing Charges (BPCs) in a clear way. So there’s nothing really new ...
Institutional Finance and Academic Freedom
An article in the Times Higher Education yesterday got me thinking about institutional stability, finance, and the ongoing “reforms” to UK higher education. ...
Ph.D. criterion: to 'merit publication'
Yesterday, I attended my university’s official training course for Ph.D. examiners. It was an extremely useful day to familiarize myself with the regulations...
The methodology of literary taxonomy: HARKing and p-hacking
A central anxiety for literary studies in the era of scientific dominance pertains to the extent to which groupings, taxonomies and classifications are metho...
These games we play (in ScholComms)
Today, I gave a talk at Royal Holloway for the TECHNE consortium of Ph.D. students on open access and scholarly communications. In the second part of the ses...
The UK copyright exemption for text and data mining vs. the DMCA and EUCD
New provisions in UK copyright law look promising for text and data mining. Last year, the government signed into effect an exemption to copyright for the pu...
My response to the HE Green Paper
This post is the final in an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welco...
HE Green Paper: response to question 28
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 27
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
2015
HE Green Paper: response to question 26
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 25
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
Internal review of FOI2015/25797
Dear Sir/Madam,
How to do a hard reset on a Jaybird Reign
So, probably against my better thoughts with respect to quantified self stuff, I got a fitness tracker for Christmas: the Jaybird Reign. The trouble was, reg...
Visualizing textual variance/genetics with SankeyVariant
Over the holiday period I wanted to visualize the differences between two editions of a text that I had found to be very different (more on this in the new y...
HE Green Paper: response to question 24
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
My 2015 academic year in review
This year was a good year for me in terms of academia. I started my job as a Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, I launched the Open Library of Humanities with a su...
HE Green Paper: response to question 22
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
Auto-renewing SSL Certificates with Let'sEncrypt
Let’sEncrypt is a brilliant new service that aims to bring mass-scale SSL, free-of-charge to the wide web. It’s in beta at the moment but it works pretty wel...
HE Green Paper: response to question 21
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 20
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 19
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 18
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 17
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 16
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 15
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 14
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 13
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 12
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 11
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 9
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 10
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 8
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 7
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 6
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 5
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 4
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
My response to the NHS consultation
Q2: Is there anything else we should be considering in producing the mandate to NHS England?
HE Green Paper: response to question 3
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 2
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
HE Green Paper: response to question 1
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
BIS, metrics and non-selective QR-allocation
This post originally appeared in an edited form on Wonkhe.
Some numbers on book processing charge scalability
Thinking more about how book processing charges concentrate costs.
It is no use trying to replace the Impact Factor
At a session at OpenCon last weekend we discussed how to replace the impact factor. While the actual title of the session was “Taking on the Impact Factor”, ...
HE Green Paper: response to question 23
This post is part of an ongoing series where I intend to develop my full personal (not institutional) response to the HE Green Paper. Comments are welcome to...
What TEF is really for
In today’s Research Professional (paywalled) Martin McQuillan asks:
Two fundamental challenges for a transition to open-access monographs
In my recent book I set out some of the benefits but also the challenges of transitioning to a world of open-access monographs. I’ve also written previously ...
Clarifying a few facts for Elsevier and their response to Lingua
Elsevier has just published a response of sorts to the resignation of the Lingua editors and editorial board. The company there claims that:
New review published of Joanna Freer, Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture
#About This is an author’s accepted manuscript for a review published in Journal of American Studies. It will appear in a revised form, subsequent to editori...
Jo Johnson: your proposals for British higher education will not yield the competitiveness you seek
Dear Mr. Johnson,
Academia.edu’s peer-review experiments
I’ve been sitting on the below piece for a while, but have written about academia.edu before. In recent days, though, Gary Hall and Kathleen Fitzpatrick have...
Re-hosting the 2014 British Academy report on OA Journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences
It has been drawn to my attention that the 2014 report from the British Academy seems to have disappeared from their site. I hereby re-host it: Darley, Rebec...
Quasi-Objects
An off-cut from writing.
'It's not about stifling academic freedom'
David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has “named and shamed” several top universities for allowing claimed “hate speech” on campus. Camero...
TEF, REF, QR, deregulation: thoughts on Jo Johnson's HE talk
I feel fairly drained today reading the speech given by the minister for Higher Education, Jo Johnson.
A final example to show that misquotation is nothing to do with open licensing
In a previous piece, I noted in defence of Creative Commons licenses that “Whether a work is openly licensed or not does not affect whether people can or wil...
How to block distributed brute-force attacks against Wordpress using fail2ban
In recent days my server has become prey to ever-more brute-force attacks against Wordpress instances. This is a total pain, although they’re unlikely (touch...
Researchers are altering their methods because of uncertainty over Creative Commons licenses
First of all, let me say that I found the piece of work I’m about to discuss really interesting in its own right. I know one of the co-authors and I’m an avi...
Wordpress php eval attacks
Sigh. More hacking attempts and seems someone did manage to inject a php eval attack into one of my Wordpress installs.
Additional contexts for reading the emergence of new UK university presses
In a recent piece for The Bookseller, Anthony Cond (for whom I have a huge deal of respect), writes approvingly, if cautiously, of the births of new universi...
Fix some of your writing tics with a bit of technology
Everyone, when they are writing, can find themselves falling into bad habits. This is because, as my friend Liz Sage pointed out to me, when you are writing,...
Getting started typesetting with CaSSius
Over the past week I’ve done some of the initial development work on CaSSius, the portion of the typesetter for the Open Library of Humanities that produces ...
CaSSius: a PDF typesetter using CSS regions (via polyfill)
Announcing CaSSius: a tool to create beautiful paginated PDF documents from HTML content using CSS regions. It is intended to be part of XML-first/XML-in wo...
Building a real XML-first (XML-in) workflow for scholarly typesetting
For some time now, I’ve worked to build an open-source JATS XML typesetter. It’s called meTypeset. It’s not by any means perfect and the approach it takes is...
The politics of style: on styleguides in scholarly communications
In the past couple of weeks I’ve had a number of emails about the styleguide for the Open Library of Humanities. Queries range from “my discipline does thing...
'He doesn’t talk politics any more': Politics and Postmodernism; Morality and Metafiction; Nihilism and the Novel?
The following is the slightly revised text of my keynote at the Action Writing: The Politics of US Literature, 1960-Present, held at Birkbeck College, Univer...
The link between teaching, tuition fees and research publication economics
If you think carefully about research publication and its economics, a strange (but also obvious) point becomes clear. In university ecosystems where we have...
The Conservatism of Cloud Atlas
Some thoughts…
Disable "incoming call" voice announcement on the Nexus 6
A quick post to help anyone else, as I couldn’t find this info easily on the web. In the middle of the night, I was awoken by my Nexus 6 announcing an “Incom...
Vint Cerf on Digital Preservation at AAUP 2015
Vint Cerf is one of the few people in the world who can viably use the phrase “my internet” in a talk and it be true. Tim Berners-Lee developed the Hypertext...
APCs and Uneven Distribution
The things that concern me about article processing charges (APCs) for open access are not those surrounding quality control, “predatory publishers” or so fo...
Visualizing Gravity's Rainbow
At this year’s Canadian Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences I had the pleasure of attending a talk by David McClure in the digital humanities strand o...
Heidi's Years of Learning and Travel: Late Pynchon's Academics
The abstract for my paper, to be presented at International Pynchon Week 2015, in Athens on Wednesday 10th June.
Applications now open for OpenCon 2015
Applications to attend OpenCon 2015 on November 14-16 in Brussels, Belgium are now open! The application is available on the OpenCon website at opencon2015.o...
Flipping journals to OA while supporting existing OA publications
It was with great pleasure that we announced, on Friday, that the OLH now has its first journal joining that has moved away from a subscription model to a pu...
Dissemination and Assessment: Open Access, Reputation and Economics
The abstract for my talk at Congress 2015, in Ottawa:
Thoughts in response to Michael Chibnik's editorial on OA and American Anthropologist
In February of this year Michael Chibnik published an editorial piece in American Anthropologist arguing that while he supported the idea of open access to t...
Some lessons in writing Python web scrapers
Last weekend I wanted a break from my usual activities, so I decided to write myself some tools to automate a few tasks. One of these is to pull down QIF dat...
More on fair-use of screengrabs
I wrote yesterday, in a grumpy state, about the restrictiveness of copyright and licensing of screenshots in academic material. Today brings happier news.
Another copyright absurdity: using film screenshots
Just a little anger/despair at the state of our cultural industries.
Some thoughts on repealing the Human Rights Act
The new Conservative government in the United Kingdom has promised to scrap the Human Rights Act. The rationale that they give for this centres around origin...
Scalability, Sustainability, Market Responsiveness and Mandates in OA
Academic publishers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are commercial, some are mission-driven, some are not-for-profit. This creates an interesting dynamic ...
Moving to Birkbeck
I am very pleased to announce that, as of today (1st of May, 2015), I am now a Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, Universi...
Gearing up for OLH in the UK and the resolution to the VAT question
A while ago, I wrote of the tricky situation potentially faced by UK OA publishers operating on a cost-pool basis/consortial basis. After our accountants gav...
What does the academic monograph market look like for a new open-access publisher?
I tell people, repeatedly, that publisher brand fuels a strange economic environment for scholarly communications. I also note that symbolic capital (reputat...
In the beginning was the Word
There is no single cause of the problems with the economics of scholarly communications. The expectation that we can publish more and more research on the sa...
It is never a good time to start a new journal
“It is never a good time to start a new journal. Even so, 1987 seems unpropitious to a remarkable degree. The academic world in general feels itself to be un...
Publishers: Serving Authors or Readers?
The most common way in which we can re-conceive of the economics of gold open access is to think of the publisher as providing a service to the author. After...
Publication: Co-operating for gold open access without APCs
The current transition to gold open access (OA) through the implementation of an author- or institution-facing charge (an article or book processing charg...
Object Thinking, Systems Description Languages and the Future of the Book
I am reading a most remarkable book.
Chapter Four: Academic Fiction
A map, as of the 1st March 2015, of Chapter Four of the book I am slowly working on. This chapter primarily focuses on Percival Everett’s Erasure.
Chapter Three: Political Critique and the University in Roberto Bolaño's 2666
A map, as of the 28th February 2015, of Chapter Three of the book I am slowly working on.
Ethics of a Journal's Surplus
I wrote the following letter in this week’s Times Higher Education. I post it here for those who can’t get past the paywall.
Chapter Two: Self-Canonisation, Literary-Historical Fictions and Aesthetic Critique
A map, as of the 22nd February 2015, of Chapter Two of the book I am slowly working on.
The Anxiety of Academia: Academics, Legitimation and Discipline in Contemporary Metafiction
Since 2012, I have been slowly working on a book about contemporary metafiction. A lot of this work was done over weekends in the last year, as a break from ...
How can Elsevier claim that its OA revenue stream is separate from subscriptions in a hybrid environment?
For an open-access advocate, it's easy to pick on Elsevier. An enormous and immensely profitable publisher, it has been, in my personal view, obstructive tow...
Financing for fee-driven gold open access
The most well-known, although neither the most common nor the only, way of providing gold open access to research material is through article or book process...
On open-access books and “double dipping”
In a hybrid open-access environment, “double dipping” refers to cases where a publisher sells their services to an author (author-pays open access) while sim...
The HEFCE report on Open Access Monographs: some reflections
The environment surrounding open access to monographs was significantly advanced today by the release of a report commissioned by the UK's Higher Education F...
Being called to account: tax considerations for UK-based collectively-funded open access publishers
That's a pretty specific title, I suspect, but as I am learning with the Open Library of Humanities, we're in uncharted territory, a place where the specific...
"A Web of Rights": Roundtable and Conversation at the British Library (Feb 19th, 2015) #bldigital
This event will debate how and in what ways the web has complicated, enhanced, and changed the rights of citizens for better or for worse. The ongoing fallou...
Foucauldian methodologies for considering emerging archives?
Some notes and early (very abstract) draft thoughts on whether Foucauldian genealogies, as redefined by Colin Koopman, can help us to address the problems of...
Stephen Curry (@Stephen_Curry) reviews Open Access and the Humanities
At the end of 2013 and 2014 I wrote blog posts on Occam’s Corner (over at the Guardian) to list and briefly review the books I read in each of those years. I...
Metrics in the Arts and Humanities
Tomorrow I will be speaking at the HEFCE Metrics and the assessment of research quality and impact in the Arts and Humanities workshop, commissioned by the i...
2014
Tied to the mast? A response to RMS's principles for loyal computers
In a recent essay, Richard M. Stallman, pioneer of the free software movement, asked “what does it mean for a computer to be loyal?” The "tentative definitio...
My 2014 round-up
2014 was a good year for me. I spent my time mostly working on scholarly communications projects, including the meTypeset software for the Public Knowledge P...
Online p̶a̶r̶t̶y̶ webinar to talk open access with @mweller and me: Tuesday 16th December 3pm
Come along tomorrow to celebrate the launch of two books on "openness" in higher education! From 2pm UK time tomorrow, this room will be open for a discussio...
Gold Open Access and Article Processing Charges: Point of Risk and the Risk Pool
In my recent work I have begun to think of the subscription publication environment in terms of a risk pool. I wanted to use this space to share a little of ...
The tension between dissemination and measurement
I remain firmly convinced that many (but not all) of the economic problems of scholarly communication are linked to the fact that academic outputs are both v...
Book: Open Access and the Humanities
I am extremely pleased to announce that my book, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future has today been published by Cambridge...
A consumerist rant: what's wrong with banks
This is a slight departure from my usual more high-minded posts simply to have a rant about the entities with whom I have the most frustrating interactions i...
Current working music
Based on Mark Carrigan's posts on music that he finds helpful when writing, I decided to do a quick post with some of the stuff that I'm listening to at the ...
Above and beyond: “good” and “bad” surpluses in academic publishing
In a recent post, I came up with a per-article costing figure, based on Ubiquity Press's economy of scale, for a learned society to go open access. I receive...
"Because we care about our planet..."
Same great sleeve, less waste. Because we care about our planet, this 85% post-consumer-fiber cup sleeve uses 34% less paper than our original. Intended for ...
Universities, DH, “the crowd”, and labour that looks like a game
This week I had the privilege and pleasure to attend the Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute event at the University of North Carolina. It was a grea...
Discussing/annotating The History Manifesto and the open access effect(?)
Amid my travels this month I've been keeping an excited and close eye on the progress of Jo Guldi and David Armitage's The History Manifesto. This interest i...
We're a small learned society charging £25. What are we doing wrong?: OA for small society journals
This was a question that I received at a recent event where I spoke. Having set out the economic problems of the subscription model and the difficulties of c...
Pondering a solution to the problem of Learned Societies and the transition to open access
One of the biggest problems faced in the transition to a pure open access environment for journals is that learned societies have become dependent upon subsc...
Academic Libraries and Non-Disclosure Clauses: institutions should internally mandate against them
As I've said before, including in my oral evidence to the UK House of Commons BIS Select Committee Inquiry into Open Access in 2013, non-disclosure agreement...
Is open access a "solution without a problem" for the humanities?
At a recent talk I gave, I was asked whether open access in the humanities is a "solution without a problem". Without wanting to disparage my questioner, I c...
University Presses and Commercial Publishers should start offering green OA for monographs
Green open access refers to making academic, peer-reviewed research that has been published elsewhere (even subscription/sales venues) available for anyone t...
Define: impact
The extraction of use-value, exchange-value or surplus-value from academic research at sites distant from the university.
Things academia.edu (@academia) should do (hint: work with green OA)
academia.edu is a "social network" for academics. Their latest design mirrors Facebook with its blue header and notification schema. When I saw Ben Lund spea...
Rancière misreading Kautsky?
In Althusser's Lesson, Jacques Rancière writes: "This reading of Marx via Althusser and Lacan does little more than give a new sheen to a thesis Kautsky had ...
What's so moral about the "moral rights" of copyright for academics?
Copyright is generally considered to consist of two components: economic rights and moral rights. The former is designed to give a time-limited monopoly to c...
Why do some academic publishers think they should charge extra for more liberal licenses (CC BY)?
In recent days, there has been a surge of opposition from some members of the scientific community over the new journal being launched by the American Associ...
Does Amazon kill a revenue channel for open access monographs?
It is widely acknowledged (in many funder mandates, for instance) that open access for peer-reviewed academic books in the humanities is a harder proposition...
Forthcoming book: Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (Cambridge UP, 2014)
I'm extremely pleased to be able to say that my next book is entitled Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future and it will be p...
The Ice Bucket challenge and the "waste of water" critique
WaterAid is a very good charity to which I would heartily suggest that people donate. I also agree that it would be good if more people gave regularly to cha...
Publication: Historicizing the Iraq War in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega
Update from a previous post, now with a final PDF. About This is a Cambridge "FirstView" version of an article forthcoming in Journal of American Studies. Th...
Publication: All That Glisters: Investigating Collective Funding Mechanisms for Gold Open Access in Humanities Disciplines
New article out in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication: Eve, Martin Paul, ‘All That Glisters: Investigating Collective Funding Mechanism...
Open access: effective measures to put UK research online under threat?
A great deal of water has passed under the bridge in the two years since the UK government reinvigorated its push towards open access – making publicly funde...
Semantically marking up JATS bibliographies using meTypeset and Zotero
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the potential for producing semantically rich JATS element-citations by using Zotero's built-in CSL engine. A short while...
My personal response to the TTIP consultation
This morning I took time to write to the TTIP consultation to oppose its implementation, and especially the ISDS clause. You should too. Responses must be pe...
Historicizing the Iraq War in Don DeLillo's Point Omega (preprint, forthcoming in Journal of American Studies)
About This is an “accepted manuscript” for an article forthcoming in Journal of American Studies. It will appear in a revised form, subsequent to editorial i...
Dumping JATS from Zotero
Progress! Work in progress code resides in the "zotero" branch of meTypeset. Image below shows command line search of library and dump of journal article. ...
Typesetting JATS bibliographies using CSL and Zotero
One of the hardest parts of typesetting articles for scholarly publication in the JATS standard, especially when using homemade tools, is the bibliography. J...
My short additional response to the HEFCE metrics consultation
The views below represent my own personal addendum to other responses to the HEFCE metrics consultation that I have valued and endorsed. They are not necessa...
Ann Wordsworth, Critical Theory, Faculty Contingency and the University in Ruins
Bill readings was in the process of making final revisions to this book when he died in the crash of American Eagle flight 4184 on October 31, 1994. [...] To...
A research tool I want (but probably won't get): cross-reference/intersect bibliographies of books and articles
I was thinking last week about the process of starting any new project -- and it's fairly clear cut. When I am conducting an initial literature review, I hea...
update-grub/os-prober not detecting Windows 7
Note to self/anybody else it might help: if you have disks with previous dmraid headers (potentially corrupt etc.), you need to remove the dmraid package bef...
Here by the Sea and Sand: A Symposium on Quadrophenia
Sponsored by the Centre for Modernist Studies, the Centre for Visual Fields, the Centre for Research into Childhood and Youth, University of Sussex, and the ...
The "tax his land" meme and its discontents (me)
There's a meme going around at the moment (or at least internet post, if not a meme), which I think is pretty insidious. It reads as follows: Tax his land...
Two free copies of "Pynchon and Philosophy" to win and/or a 25% discount
OK, so, as I am sure you know, this coming Thursday is Pynchon in Public Day, when we celebrate the birthday of one of America's greatest (and most invisible...
Open Access, Monographs and "working for publishers for free"
The other day, I was sent a text message by a senior academic friend who has a healthily sceptical view of the open access work that I do. The question was: ...
An Open Library of Humanities? Adeline Koh interviews me at the Chronicle's ProfHacker
This is the tenth interview in a series, Digital Challenges to Academic Publishing, by Adeline Koh. Each article in this series features an interview with an...
Openness for society or for profit?
A twitter conversation that I had with Michelle Brook this morning. [View the story "Openness for society or for profit?" on Storify]
Bitmask values for w:tblLook w:val attribute in OOXML
For my own reference: 0x0020 Apply first row conditional formatting 0x0040 Apply last row conditional formatting 0x0080 Apply first column conditiona...
What do we mean by the "standing" and "reach" of research?
This article originally appeared, in a shorter, edited form in the Guardian: Is UK humanities research reaching the widest possible audience? Today marks the...
Alluvium 2nd Birthday Panel Event
It's almost 2 years since I founded the open access journal Alluvium, which publishes short, topical articles written by leading academics on 21-century writ...
First Impressions From Paul Thomas Anderson’s film of ‘Inherent Vice‘
With his fastest turn-around in well over a decade, Paul Thomas Anderson completed production on Inherent Vice last summer, just around a year after initial ...
Symposium on David Mitchell: 9th May, London
I'm very pleased to be able to say that I will be speaking at the symposium on David Mitchell, organised by Courtney Hopf and Wendy Knepper, on the 9th May a...
Enabling a triple-head (3 monitor) setup on Linux Mint 16 ("Petra") with two Nvidia cards
OK, so this was utterly painful and I needed to share what finally worked for me. I have 2 x Nvidia GTX480 cards. I have 3 x monitors. I wanted to be able to...
Book: Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno
Martin Paul Eve, Pynchon and Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Thomas Pynchon, perhaps the most important living American author, is famed f...
Funding for the Open Library of Humanities from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
As detailed over on the OLH site, I am very pleased to be able to say that we have secured a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to launch the Open Li...
Designing an open source OA toolchain for books
The Cluster and the University Library invited Dr. Martin Eve (Lincoln University) for a two day intensive workshop with Dulip Withanage and Dr. Andrea Hacke...
Why OA mandates don't compromise academic freedom
Since yesterday's HEFCE announcement, I've seen some comments floating around that resurrect the argument that OA mandates are a blow to academic freedom. I ...
HEFCE's Post-2014 Open Access Policy: the short "what you need to know" version
The Really Short Version: Submit journal article. Check journal policy at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ (the bits on “post-print” are the thing to pay atte...
Scholars and scientists who work in languages other than English: please help
As you may, or may not, know, I am working on an open source tool for scholarly article typesetting. Whether you care about this or not (it's quite geeky in ...
Who owns a Prezi?
From the Prezi terms of use: Section 6.2: Regardless of whether you designate content public or private, Prezi makes no claim of ownership to your User Co...
Debugging meTypeset using a git filesystem
Debugging a text-based transcoder meTypeset is, in essence, a transcoder for text. While “transcode” is usually used in a multimedia context, we are transc...
MathML support in the meTypeset typesetter
Diversity of material One of the big challenges that we face in designing an open source scholarly typesetter is ensuring that a diverse range of papers can ...
Predatory Publishers: Not Just OA (and who loses out?)
The Critics of OA and Acknowledging “Predation” Several of the critics of OA, most notably in recent days Jeffrey Beall and John Bohannon –...
Modularizing the meTypeset typesetter for the user interface phase
Modularizing the Project Today brings with it some notable changes to my scholarly article XML (NLM/JATS) typesetter (meTypeset). First off, the project is n...
Google Scholar will count a blog post as an article if it's cited: a preservation suggestion
When checking out my Google Scholar profile today, I noticed that, if a blog post is cited, it will be counted as an article by Google Scholar. This is inter...
Publication: Pynchon and Wittgenstein: Ethics, Relativism and Philosophical Methodology
Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Pynchon and Wittgenstein: Ethics, Relativism and Philosophical Methodology’, in Profils Américains: Thomas Pynchon, ed. by Gilles Chameroi...
Publication: The Means of (Re-)Production: Expertise, Open Tools, Standards and Communication
Eve, Martin Paul. 2014. "The Means of (Re-)Production: Expertise, Open Tools, Standards and Communication." Publications 2, no. 1: 38-43. This article exam...
What's it like to publish in SAGE Open?
An evaluation of the experience of publishing in the only current humanities mega-journal. The short version: it was good! Your mileage may vary as they have...
Publication: David Mitchell, Russell Hoban, and Metafiction After the Millennium
This article appraises the debt that David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas owes to the novels of Russell Hoban, including, but not limited to, Riddley Walker. After c...
HEFCE (REF2020), IR deposit and embargoes
As is now fairly common knowledge, HEFCE expects green deposit on all journal articles to be included in REF2020. EDIT: just to clarify: HEFCE has not finali...
"Every generation has its philosopher"
Every generation has its philosopher — a writer or an artist who captures the imagination of a time. Sometimes these philosophers are recognized as such; oft...
Dear Publisher (#2)
10 month review process. Two week typesetting wait. And you want me to return proofs within 24 hours as it may delay publication? Dear Dr. Martin Eve, Your...
Handling the absence of a (newline) break tag in JATS
As I noted in a previous post, a lot of my work this term involves technical implementation of an open source JATS (previously NLM) typesetter for scholarly ...
Introducing eprintsCV: a python script to create an academic web CV from your eprints record
This afternoon, after an intense day of writing, I decided that I was finally fed up with maintaining so many different copies of my publication record. I ha...
2013
My 2013 academic year in review
As a round-up of the academic stuff I have achieved over the past year, purely for my own benefit and in anticipation of like-minded posts from my Twitter fo...
Why I'm a fan of open source software: An argument by anecdote/example
An argument by anecdote. My prized Christmas present this year (which I obtained by selling a load of old electronics that I didn't want/need) was a pair of ...
Publication: Utopia Fading: Taxonomies, Freedom and Dissent in Open Access Publishing
I was very pleased, late last year, to have been invited by Jim Mussell to contribute to a Digital Forum in the Literature journal, the Journal of Victorian ...
Dear "top journal": 1 year and 4 months to review is too long
Dear X and Y, I'm writing in a state of some frustration and disappointment to withdraw my essay from Top Journal in My Field of American Literature. I sub...
Publication: Review of Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Utility and Markets
I have a new review of Belfiore, Eleonora, and Anna Upchurch, eds., Humanities in the Twenty-first Century: Beyond Utility and Markets (Basingstoke: Palgrave...
Gov and RCUK responses to Open Access Inquiry: eradicating non-disclosure clauses
Today marked the publication of the Government and RCUK responses to the UK's BIS Committee Inquiry into Open Access. I haven't had time to digest the full d...
First meeting of HEFCE Expert Reference Group on Open Access Monographs
I'm pleased to say that I was able to participate in the first meeting of the HEFCE Expert Reference Group on Open Access Monographs a few weeks ago. Having ...
Three reasons why I think journal prestige is a broken system
One of the aspects that people seem to disagree with most, when I write or talk about open access, is that there is a problem with journal “prestige”. Overly...
Some diagrams of Jennifer Egan novels
As I'm preparing to speak tomorrow at the Literature off the Page conference, I was, as usual, creating a set of slides for my talk. As I'm looking at the no...
My forthcoming book: Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno (Palgrave, 2014)
It gives me great pleasure to announce that, should all go to plan, my book Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno will be published by Pa...
How ironic are the open access irony awards?
I saw, going around on Twitter today, a 2012 article on the Open Access Irony Awards. This site is dedicated to the practice of humorously exposing articles/...
What's "open" got to do with it?
The below is a piece that I wrote for The Conversation in the state before it was edited for publication there. While the version published there captures be...
Fixing broken spellcheck in Thunderbird 24
Quick post to add some Google juice to a problem. If you upgrade to Thunderbird 24 and it no longer underlines your misspelt text in red, go to Tools -> P...
Publication: "Gatekeepers in a digital wasteland", The Author
It is already a cliché to announce the demise of the book in the wake of the digital revolution. While it might be unwise to stake our futures on the printed...
Is what I do "digital humanities"?
As a scholar in a literature department, I end up doing some very odd things. Among these is the development of various pieces of software for the typesettin...
Work on open access technology, get a masters degree in Computer Science: funded place
I've already tweeted this a few times, but I'm pleased to announce that, in partnership with PKP (and subject to finding the right candidate) we have a funde...
Publication: "Terrorism and the Cold War in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Don DeLillo's Underworld"
This piece explores the conceptions of terrorism in two novels that stand separated by the calamitous events of September 11th, 2001: Pynchon's Against the D...
What is it like to publish in the journal 'Neo-Victorian Studies'?
Short answer: very good. This publication, in its sixth volume at the time of writing, is a scholar-led, open-access journal focusing on the "neo-Victorian" ...
Publication: “You will see the logic of the design of this”: From Historiography to Taxonomography in the Contemporary Metafiction of Sarah Waters’s Affinity
Although, in some ways, Sarah Waters’s Affinity looks akin to historiographic metafiction, M.-L. Kohlke has persuasively argued that the text is more accurat...
Full response to Science-Metrix report on gold OA citation rates
Last week, I was contacted by Elizabeth Gibney, who writes for the Times Higher, with a request for comment on the recent Science-Metrix report, and particul...
The Democracy We Do Not Want
Yesterday evening I received a letter from my MP. I reproduce it below, with my response. This is the democracy that we do not want. Dear Sir and Madam Pl...
SXSW Panel: Vote to get Open Access on the agenda
So, in conjunction with the amazing people at South End Press -- a group of people unsurpassed in my esteem -- I'm proud to be part of a proposal for the SXS...
Reports from the frontline of humanities OA in Japan
This week I had the privilege of visiting Japan for the first time to speak with SPARC Japan (in Tokyo) about developments in open access for the humanities....
Using git in my writing workflow
My two spheres of interest -- difficult works of English literature and computer programming (OK, scholarly communications and publishing, also. OK, there ar...
On International Pynchon Week
Last week saw the descent of some sixty Pynchon scholars upon the small northern city of Durham in the UK. The occasion was the International Pynchon Week co...
Has "the licensing battle been deferred" in the latest HEFCE document?
While I agree with much of what they say, in a post on the LSE Impact Blog, Meera Sabaratnam and Paul Kirby write, of the latest round of HEFCE consultations...
Rendering MathML in XSL:FO to PDF using fop
Another brief post on fop. I wanted to render some MathML markup inside an XSL:FO document to be converted to PDF using fop. The way to do this is to use JEu...
Determining glyph availability for FOP
I've just spent the past hour grappling with getting FOP to render the Unicode glyph for a checkmark (U+2713) in PDF output from XSL:FO. I thought I'd share ...
HEFCE, the State of Open Access in the UK and Post-2014 REF
Having returned from a glorious week away in Crotia and Bosnia (for Pynchon fans: it was "very nice, very nice, very nice indeed"), I have returned to an inb...
Joining the UK National Monographs Strategy Expert Panel
I'm very pleased to announce that I am joining Jisc's National Monographs Strategy Expert Advisory Panel. As the project's website puts it: The scholarly m...
Punchdrunk's The Drowned Man
Last night I went to see Punchdrunk's performance of The Drowned Man, the latest in their series of promenade theatre pieces. Housed in an enormous building ...
Speaking at SPARC Japan
I'm extremely pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition on "The Front Line of OA in Humanities...
Displaying EE mobile data usage in Conky
OK, this is probably one of the most specific posts I've ever written, but... I wrote a bash script to automatically fetch and parse the currently used data ...
Evaluating the Open Access software toolchain
I received an interesting email this week from Nate Wright, who posed the following questions: I'm a web developer interested in contributing to a low-cost, ...
Ethics
This is a post that I have found very difficult to write, because it puts me in a conflicted position. A while back, in light of the Troy Davis execution, wh...
Digital Literatures; Digital Democracies; Digital Threats?
Digital Literatures; Digital Democracies; Digital Threats? Dr. Martin Paul Eve, University of Lincoln Paper delivered at conference: 5th July 2013 This work...
Publication: 'Guide to Creative Commons for humanities and social science monograph authors'
I'm pleased to announce the publication of the open access booklet, Collins, Ellen and Milloy, Caren and Stone, Graham, Guide to Creative Commons for humanit...
Publication: 'Before the law: open access, quality control and the future of peer review'
In this piece on the future of peer review for the British Academy, I assert that, in the humanities: OA is not about abandoning peer review but it does p...
Publication: 'The Botnet: Webs of Hegemony/Zombies Who Publish', in Zombies in the Academy (Bristol: Intellect, 2013)
This book chapter was written in 2010, but is finally out! Eve, Martin Paul, ‘The Botnet: Webs of Hegemony/Zombies Who Publish’, in Zombies in the Academy, e...
Fixing mpd segfault on Ubuntu 12.10 on ARM devices (Mele, Pandaboard etc)
If you are experiencing crashes when you update your mpd library on Ubuntu 12.10, the fault is with libmad0. This can be fixed by installing libmad0 from Deb...
Getting free_cite running on your own server
I decided that the best way to spend this Sunday morning was to try to get free_cite, a citation parsing system, running on my server. Turns out this is easi...
Internationalisation of New Open Access Initiatives
A quick plug for a blog post by a member of OLH's internationalisation committee, Erika Corradini. In her piece, The Languages of Academic Publishing, Erika ...
Pynchon in Public Day 2013
Now in its third year, we invite you to submit, on Twitter via the #Pynchon2013 hashtag, the Facebook Event page or even just by emailing me, your photograph...
More on new Thomas Pynchon novel, Bleeding Edge
Brought to my attention by Dave Monroe, from the Pynchon List and culled from the Penguin Press release: It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the...
Historical Sources for Pynchon's Peter Pinguid Society now available for download (Green Open Access)
In a bid to ensure that as many of my publications are as open as possible, I've begun trawling the back catalogue and am pleased to say, after a conversatio...
I'm appearing before the House of Commons BIS Select Committee into Open Access
I'm very pleased to announce that, this Tuesday, 16th April 2013, I will be joining the Commons Select Committee inquiry into open access being hosted by the...
Exposing XML data for Orbit
Although, for now, this will be of limited interest/use to probably most readers of the journal, I today undertook the necessary work (by which I mean: clean...
Modernist Intimacies conference
A quick heads-up to flag the following conference, taking place on the 17th May at the University of Sussex. Excellent exciting line-up! Modernist Intimacie...
CrossRef, DOIs and Preparing for Future Assignment
It is a fundamental part of the PILA agreement that is signed when a publisher joins CrossRef that they will link to other articles using their DOIs. So, for...
Futurity, Books, Marx, Labour
This post is a transcript of a talk I gave at the University of Nottingham on the 25th March 2013 for the ECHIC "Beyond the Book" conference. As I've intimat...
Buy This Album: Mountain of Love (ex-Alabama 3)
Deviating from my current series of posts on ScholComms, I wanted to interject to recommend a new, independent music project from two of the original members...
The Future of Peer Review
Yesterday, Thursday the 14th of March 2013, I had the great pleasure of speaking at the University of Sussex to an entirely mixed audience of humanists, scie...
Open Access, "Neoliberalism", "Impact" and the Privatisation of Knowledge
One of the problems with Open Access (both the movement and the practice), one that rings alarm bells in certain sectors, is the fact that the term "open" is...
House of Commons BIS Inquiry on Open Access Evidence Published
The written evidence for the BIS Inquiry on Open Access has now been published and is available on the website for the UK parliament. The inquiry follows the...
Conference Paper: "The Future of Peer Review", University of Sussex, 14th March 2013, 12-2pm
A quick heads-up that I'll be speaking at the University of Sussex next week, my Ph.D. alma mater, on the "Future of Peer Review", alongside Maria Kowalczuk ...
Conference Paper: "Too many goddamn echoes": Historicizing the Iraq War in Don DeLillo's /Point Omega/', Birkbeck
March 2013 marks ten years since the start of the attack on Iraq. This controversial military action divided opinion in Britain and around the world, and its...
Publication: 'Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of 'Metamodernism': Post-millennial Post-postmodernism?'
Martin Paul Eve, ‘Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of “Metamodernism”: Post-Millennial Post-Postmodernism?’, C21 Literature: Journal of ...
Conference Paper: "Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Finch: Adorno, Utopia and Open Access Publishing" (Lincoln University)
Co-presented with Dr. Caroline Edwards: "Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Finch: Adorno, Utopia and Open Access Publishing", Lincoln University, 21st-C...
Q&A with me in Library Journal: Why We Need a Public Library of the Humanities and Social Sciences
There's a Q&A with me that has just been published in Library Journal on why we need a public library of the humanities and social sciences (a "PLOS-like...
On Opposition to *any* APC model
Just to share my response to a comment on the PLOHSS project from somebody who claimed that: Any form of APC was unacceptable All APCs would be viewed as va...
An update on the PLOHSS project
An email that I just sent out to people who have expressed an interest. If you'd like to know more, visit http://www.plohss.org or email me with "PLOHSS" in ...
Call For Participants to Build a PLOS-style Model for the Humanities and Social Sciences
For quite some time, I have been interested in/incensed by the scholarly publication system; the exclusions, iniquities and absurdities of it can be clearly ...
New Pynchon Novel! Fall 2013: "Bleeding Edge"
Ron Charles has tweeted that a new Pynchon novel will be published by Penguin in Fall 2013. Entitled Bleeding Edge the work will not quite be out in time for...
2012
Tech things I have learned in the last 12 hours
It is not worth trying to restore a Windows partition using dd unless you restore it to *exactly* the same offset on the new drive. Even then it might not w...
Using bumblebee for opteron graphics on Ubuntu 12.10 on a Samsung Chronos 7 Series laptop
Getting this to work has been the bane of my morning, so here's what I did to eventually get it working:
Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon receives funding from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce that Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon has entered into a partnership with Ludwig Maximilian University of M...
On /That/ Statement by History Journal Editors
I'm quoted with a few choice words this week in the Times Higher Education for their piece on the already infamous statement by a coalition of editors of his...
Alluvium technical news: DOI numbers, CLOCKSS and MLA Bibliography
Several exciting goings-on at Alluvium merit a quick post here to give a rundown of the new features available, which are mostly behind-the-scenes, but defin...
Publication: 'Review of Theophilius Savvas, American Postmodern Fiction and the Past', Literature and History, 21, 2 (Autumn 2012), pp. 106-108
My review of Theophilius Savvas' American Postmodern Fiction and the Past is now out in Literature and History, 21, 2 (Autumn 2012), pp. 106-108. As the DOI ...
Fixing scanning on an HP Photosmart C6300 series in Ubuntu 12.10
If you own an HP Photosmart C6300 series and upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10, you may have noticed that you are unable to set the scan resolution (DPI) in any of yo...
Moving on from Sussex and joining the University of Lincoln
It is my pleasure to announce, with both great excitement and the inevitable slight sadness, that as of January 2013, I will be leaving the University of Sus...
The Clause Model of Adorno's Dialectical Sentences
Earlier this week I participated in a small reading group on Adorno's "The Essay as Form" and there was one particularly good sentence from this piece that I...
Judging the Safety of an Open Access Journal
Software to roll-your-own Open Access journal are now fairly easy to get hold of. OJS is available from the Public Knowledge Project as Free Open Source Soft...
On ORCID, accreditation structures and altmetrics
This post is written in response to a question by the ace Bernie Folan, from Sage publishers, who asked whether ORCID has the potential to disrupt, or conver...
On Freedom of Speech
A teenager has been arrested for posting a picture of a burnt remembrance poppy. Nick Griffin walks free despite tweeting the address of a gay couple who won...
Reviewing with Kindness
In the past few weeks I've had several peer review requests and it has always struck me that it is far too easy to come across as a heartless bastard when bl...
Publication: Review of 1Q84 in 1001 Books to Read Before You Die (London: Cassell Illustrated, 2012)
A trip down the Yodel depot this morning yielded my copy of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die in which I have a review of Marukami's flawed masterpiece...
More on OJS and CLOCKSS
Frequent readers may recall that I had implemented CLOCKSS support in OJS. I'm sad to say that the original commit was flawed and it was decided that the bes...
CFP: Feminism;; Influence;; Inheritance
23rd March 2013 This one-day symposium hosted by the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London aims to bring together postgraduates an...
On Academic Blogging
Although I want to preface this with my usual warnings about too much meta, I did speak to the Times Higher Education this week for a piece they were doing o...
Notes on Adorno's "The Essay as Form"
Adorno, Theodor W. ‘The Essay as Form’. The Adorno Reader. Trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor & Frederic Will. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 92–111. Print. 92: Essay fo...
Open Journal Systems now supports archiving with CLOCKSS out of the box
I'm pleased to say that my patch to add a CLOCKSS manifest to OJS' LOCKSS page has been merged! This means that anybody who wants to sign up to be archived b...
The Grim Phoenix: The New Challenges for Open Access
It seems that 2012 really was the “tipping point” for Open Access, especially in the UK. The Finch Report has mandated OA for RCUK-funded projects and the im...
New Orbit review: American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past, by Theophilus Savvas
A quick note to say that David Letzler has very kindly submitted a review of American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past, by Theophilus Savvas that is now li...
Crude, but helpful, typesetting script from meXml
In my quest to create a set of free and open tools for platinum, scholar-run OA journals, I've just committed a crude, provisional script to my meXml git rep...
Orbit 1.2 is now "open" and our "rolling format" is live
I'm pleased to announce that Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon today launched into its second issue. If you visit the journal at present, you may think that the ...
Publication: 'Thomas Pynchon & the Dark Passages of History (review)', Textual Practice, 26, 5
'Thomas Pynchon & the Dark Passages of History', Textual Practice, 26, 5, pp. 973-978 A review of David Cowart's Thomas Pynchon & the Dark Passages o...
Jeffrey Archer's 140-character story and plagiarism
Today, the Guardian published the following 140-character short story by Jeffrey Archer. "It's a miracle he survived," said the doctor. "It was God's will," ...
My thoughts on DT Max's biography of DFW
Let me start by stating upfront how much I wanted to dislike this book. I caution students against biographical readings all the time. The author on whom I'v...
On the Impurity of the Humanities and Critical University Studies
There is a proud tradition in many fields of the humanities of critical thinking. Linked to the Enlightenment Humanist tradition, this critique achieves its ...
Conference paper: 'Opening children's eyes': Overloaded Forms and the Didactic Function (Westminster University)
Pleased to say that I'll be speaking at Westminster University on Wednesday 28 November, 4.00pm – 5.15pm in Wells Street, room 106. If you'd like to attend, ...
Weird Council: The first international conference on the works of China Miéville #mieville2012 (storify)
[View the story "Weird Council: #mieville2012" on Storify] Weird Council: #mieville2012 Storified by Martin Eve · Sun, Sep 16 2012 02:22:19 @thecity...
Relativize and Historicize: Open Access, Article Processing Charges and Transparency
The predominant intellectual trend of the past 200 years (or longer, actually) has been to relativize and historicize. Although it's possible to read this in...
The Viva
Yesterday, the 10th September 2012, I passed my Ph.D. Viva, straight-out, no corrections. It was an amazing experience. I'd been incredibly nervous for the p...
By the time you read this, I will be...
in my Ph.D. viva. But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. -- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow It went on for a month. Those ...
What will the Humanities do Post-Finch? (or: where are the OA venues?)
As is now common knowledge, the Finch report has recommended the Gold Open Access route and the government policy implementation has followed the advice that...
Conference Panel: Pynchon Now (Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar)
I'm very pleased to report that I'll be speaking to the Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar on Saturday the 13th October from 2-4pm. I hope to see as many ...
Can't receive emails from Hotmail: fixing their buggy DNS process
I run Google Apps for Domains to handle my email. Recently, a friend was having trouble emailing me. I asked her to send me the source of the message. In the...
Astrid and Producteev
I've been a long-term user of Astrid and Producteev to manage my tasks list. When I went to reinstall Astrid today, I noticed that there was no longer a Prod...
Keeping up with Research (in response to @PlashingVole)
Yesterday, the Plashing Vole posted a request for tips on keeping up with research. While I don't want to improperly place myself in the "super researchers" ...
"Karl Marx, that sly old racist"
One of the references in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow that eludes me (in its specificity, not in its generality) is the following quotation: wait a minute the...
The Final Week
With less than a week until my Ph.D. viva, I've been taking everyone's advice to heart and not going completely nuts on the revision. After all, I do know th...
Conference on China Miéville: Weird Council
Organized by Dr. Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia, the Weird Council conference takes place from the 14th-15th September. Register now! Or you can download...
Quibbling with the LRB over "Hackers"
In a recent piece for the LRB, Mattathias Schwartz gives an inside look at the truly scary world of carding, the practice of stealing credit card information...
Re-Decentralizing the Web
I have just seen, via Rohan Maitzen on Twitter, a useful page of suggestions for the "first day of term", teaching-wise. This led me to re-think a few of the...
Publication: 'Whose line is it anyway?: enlightenment, revolution, and ipseic ethics in the works of Thomas Pynchon', Textual Practice, 26, 5
'Whose line is it anyway?: enlightenment, revolution, and ipseic ethics in the works of Thomas Pynchon', Textual Practice, 26, 5, pp. 921-939 This piece effe...
Open Access needs terminology to distinguish between funding models: Platinum OA/Gold NON-APC
In the wake of the Finch report, one of the most frequent cries from academics, particularly at the early career phase, was one of despair. The endorsement o...
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Live Stage Version at the ICA
Although I'm nothing to do with the organization of this, I wanted to give it a plug! Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace Adapted for t...
The real problem with this mode of "curbing grade inflation"
Although I'm not universally convinced by claims of grade inflation (and have written about the examination system over at the Guardian), I do welcome some a...
What app.net has to teach scholarly publishing: altruism has been forgotten and everything is a "product"
I've been mightily impressed by the role of crowdfunding solutions in recent days. I think it's great that these projects allow initiatives to get off the gr...
On Blog Inequality in Scholarly Research
At the risk of more meta, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts on blogs in scholarly research. Sarah Quinnell recently wrote a post on the LSE impact blog, fo...
E-Books: Copyright Infringement, Theft, Materiality and the Virtual
Last night, as I was heading to bed, a guy called Mark Kohut, whom I know from various Pynchon-interest intersections, published a copy of a letter he was pl...
More unpaid academic positions and apparent "culture of entitlement"
Yet again a certain group of people are being screwed over... guess who? That's right! The people who paid tuition fees to go to university and are now tryin...
Impossible Objects: Preservation and Extinction (on the First Folio)
News of the Bodleian's plans to digitise the First Folio are to be welcomed, but several passages in this article made me question the purpose of indefinite ...
Perverse advert for BITE: "Keep Calm About University Fees"
Walking down my usual route to the British Library today, I encountered one of the most flagrant attempts to normalize the commodification of Higher Educatio...
Mythbusting: "A Proposed List — 60 Things Journal Publishers Do"
Kent Anderson recently wrote a post over at Scholarly Kitchen entitled "A Proposed List — 60 Things Journal Publishers Do". I think this list needs a little ...
Post-Submission Weirdness
This is just a quick post about my experience of submitting a Ph.D. having worked full-time on it previously since October 2009. It's odd. During the Ph.D. I...
The undervalued book collection and peer review
I've had several conversations in the past few weeks on the different modes of dissemination and the REF's undervaluation of the book collection. The argumen...
Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and 21st-Century Utopianism (presentation)
After the excellent, "What Happens Now" 21st-century fiction conference, I thought it would be worthwhile sharing the Prezi that I created, in case it's of ...
Gold Open Access does **NOT** mean: "author pays"
I've had two people now come back to me on Twitter saying that Gold Open Access, "by definition", means that the author pays. It does not. Much of the termin...
Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide. Table of contents.
Over the past week, I've put together a series of posts on starting an Open Access journal. This is a post to tie them all together, to provide a table of co...
Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide part 5
Following on from part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4, this is the third in a series of posts designed to get a new journal off the ground. So, you've got your...
Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide part 4
Following on from part 1, part 2 and part 3, this is the third in a series of posts designed to get a new journal off the ground. Copyediting and Proofreadi...
Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon is now digitally preserved by CLOCKSS
A quick post to state that Orbit is now preserved by the CLOCKSS archive. For more on this, see the press release, which even features a quotation from me! ...
Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide part 3
Following on from part 1 and part 2, this is the third in a series of posts designed to get a new journal off the ground. Launching the Journal The key to la...
Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide part 2
Following on from Part 1, let's begin to talk about the technological side of starting an OA journal. There are several components to the system that all ne...
Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide part 1
Prefatory note (2016) Please note that I receive several email requests per week from individuals asking for help or detailed guidance in how to setup an OA ...
Publication: 'Tear it down, build it up: the Research Output Team, or the library-as-publisher', Insights, 25, 2 (July 2012), pp. 158-162
Abstract Academic publishing is in an unstable period of transition. There is a growing degree of anger, especially from early-career academics in a time of...
Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon is live
It's taken quite a while and a lot of energy on my part, but my journal of scholarship on Thomas Pynchon, Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon, is now live and laun...
Signing over copyright vs. licensing your journal articles
I've just had through the request to sign a copyright form for a forthcoming article in a Taylor and Francis journal and duly read through their material on ...
Teaching Post-Millenial Fiction Conference archive
2nd July, 2012: University of Brighton
The part of the open access debate that is, irritatingly, ignored
In the wake of the Finch report, the Times Higher published a story entitled "Finch's open-access cure may be 'worse than the disease'" which was a response ...
Submitted my Ph.D! (in memory of my grandfather, John Gray [10/02/1920 - 14/06/2012])
A quick post to mark a milestone in my academic road. Today I submitted my Ph.D. thesis to the University of Sussex entitled "Hostility or Tolerance? Philoso...
Our epistemic gap: actually, we need to re-think "unemployment", "underemployment" and "benefits" entirely
David Cameron has now launched the end of "compassionate Conservatism", pledging to end the "entitlement culture" of benefits. Twitter has, predictably, expl...
International Pynchon Week 2013 Conference: Website and CFP
Up at Durham, Sam Thomas has just announced the details of the forthcoming International Pynchon Week 2013 Conference to be held at Durham University from 5t...
Another great source for free images to use in blogging
I'm always on the lookout for good, free image sharing sites and somebody pointed out MorgueFile to me the other day. It's not CC licensed. In fact, in many ...
Another Adorno-against-Wittgenstein moment
Just found one that I hadn't noticed before: The term "commitment" unites Heidegger and Jaspers together with the lowest tractatus-writers. – Adorno, Theodor...
Is this a picture of Thomas Pynchon aged 51?
Probably not. But... I was proofreading some articles for Orbit this morning (which, by the way, will come out now as soon as I have DOI number permissions),...
Metadata handling for Open Access Journal PDFs
As I count down to the launch of Orbit: Writing around Pynchon, I've been thinking carefully about the mechanisms through which the articles will be consumed...
Sussex-Southampton Initiative: SuShI. An interdisciplinary fusion.
The third conference I attended last week was a day called SuShI. The idea was to bring together the humanities and business worlds. It was, from my extremel...
Day 2 of Twenty-First-Century Literature Conference at Birkbeck
I just realised that I forgot to Storify my live tweets from day 2 of this conference... enjoy! [View the story "Day 2 of Twenty-First-Century British Ficti...
Beware the next wave of academic publishing grimness: apps.
Imagine if you could have, in your pocket, access to the world's research information in an easy-to-navigate, accessible format with dynamic add-ons, custom...
Thinking Feeling Conference at the University of Sussex
This Friday and Saturday, the University of Sussex hosted the Thinking Feeling conference on affect, feeling and emotion, attempting to theorise the myriad w...
The Ontological Problems of Contemporary Fiction Studies are Actually its Ontological Prerequsites
The second day of the 21st-Century British Fiction Conference at Birkbeck saw an opening keynote from Bob Eaglestone in which he provocatively challenged the...
Day 1 of Twenty-First-Century Literature Conference at Birkbeck
[View the story "Day 1 of Twenty-First-Century Literature Conference at Birkbeck" on Storify]
Excursions Journal Vol 3: Launch Party
A quick note to say: come join us for the launch of Excursions volume 3 from 4pm-7pm on the 16th May in the Fulton Social Space at the University of Sussex!
An update on Orbit 1.1
I thought it was time for a brief "state of the issue" post for the, no doubt voluminous, hordes awaiting the launch of Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon. One re...
Pynchon in Public Day 2012: our meetup details
Following the success of last year's Pynchon in Public Day, this May 8th will play host to further celebrations of perhaps the world's greatest living author...
Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar Write-Up: Martin Amis' Money (2012-04-28)
Today, the SoAS was host to the Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar, marking the release of a special issue of Textual Practice on Martin Amis' Money. The ...
Teaching Post-Millennial Literature: A HEA and University of Brighton Symposium
2nd Jul 2012 Checkland, Falmer Campus, University of Brighton, UK A one-day symposium hosted by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Faculty of Arts, U...
Video of my #uksglive presentation on the future of academic publishing
Here's the video of my talk to the UKSG Conference in Glasgow in June 2012. In the contemporary publish-or-perish culture, very few academics query the mecha...
Starting a Digital Humanities Project: epiLog
As part of a transparent development process, I wanted to announce that I'm starting, thanks to some funding and support from a colleague at Sussex, a Digita...
The future of academic publishing Q&A
In which I look nervous and shifty. Please note: this post's featured image is licensed and not shared under a CC license.
New York Times writes about my Ph.D. thesis work!
On the train back from Glasgow last week, I finished writing a piece for 3:AM Magazine that sums up part of my Ph.D. thesis work, which I intend to submit in...
UKSG Conference: photos and slides
Last week I attended, and presented a keynote in the opening plenary at, my first academic publishing conference: the UK Serials Group conference. As I'm us...
I am joining the OAPEN-UK, Open Access Monograph, Steering Group
I'm delighted to announce that I am joining the OAPEN-UK Steering Group, a great JISC project that is gathering evidence for the viability of Open Access mon...
My day as a Higher Ed researcher
A growing criticism mounted by students/parents of students is the trite argument that there are too few contact hours. Anybody who works as a researcher/lec...
The problems for small Open Access journals in terms of digital preservation
So, it looks, with the easy reach of software such as Open Journal Systems and Annotum, as though anybody can create a journal. This is, to a large extent, t...
Finishing a UK Ph.D. within 3 years
I've been asked, by Salma Patel and The Thesis Whisperer to write a post on finishing a Ph.D. under the UK system within 3 years. I have to confess, first of...
Wikipedia Stats Visualized
I have been asked, by an EdTech researcher called Jen Rhee, to share this graphic, which comes courtesy of Open-Site under a CC-BY-ND license, in order to so...
Conference Paper: Thomas Pynchon, Materialism and Negative Dialectics, 28-29 May, 2012, Northumbria University
I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the “Transforming Objects” conference at Northumbria University in May this year. Thomas Pynchon has bee...
Talawa's Waiting for Godot
Yesterday I had the extremely good fortune to see Talawa's production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Albany Theatre in Deptford. It had been hy...
Jake Wilson: "All's Well". Website and Music up!
My incredibly talented friend, Jake Wilson, has composed a series of Folk-Rock songs based on the diary entries of Robert Scott on his ill-fated expedition t...
For ATTN: David Cameron and Andrew Lansley
Seriously, just what in God's name do you think you are doing? I am referring, in this bombastic introduction, to the Department of Health's decision to cont...
Doctoral Thesis Editing: Cutting Words
A quick tip that I think it's worth raising, as it's just come to the fore in my life(!), is that the citation style you employ can have a large impact on th...
Podcast on Open Source, Open Access publishing
I did an interview at the weekend with Mark Carrigan on open source solutions for academic publishing and the potential future role of the library. You can f...
My review of The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon at Berfrois
I have a guest post over at the excellent Berfrois in which I review the newly released Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. The piece is licensed under a ...
Copyright and academia, particularly for Ph.Ds
Yesterday, Tuesday the 21st of February 2012, I participated in a discussion at the University of Sussex Researcher Hive on copyright and academia, with part...
Teaching undergraduates to use secondary sources
In response to the question of why we use secondary sources, one of the most overheard statements in my seminars has to be the perennial student response: "t...
Conference Paper: Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Twenty-First-Century Utopianism, 16-18 July, 2012, University of Lincoln
I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the "What Happens Now" conference at the University of Lincoln on twenty-first century fiction. By the p...
Wordpress for Academics
Ok, so it could really be Wordpress for anybody, but here's the Prezi that I made for a true step-by-step, from the very beginning guide to setting up a new ...
Doing a Ph.D using only free, open source software
Feeling confident of my current level of progress, I think it's worth pointing out that the entirety of my doctoral thesis work has been done using free, ope...
More thoughts on metrics, link-rot, canonical URLs
In my previous post, I flagged up a conversation about DOIs that I had with Geoffrey Bilder on Twitter. It was enlightening in many ways; I hadn't appreciate...
DOIs: What you need to know
Sparked off by a comment on Document Object Identifiers and metrics by Ernesto Priego, I wrote up a brief proposal for the tech side of what I perceived as t...
Project idea/request for comment: OpenDOI
Following a conversation (well, a complaint and a suggestion) with @ernestopriego on Twitter, the following came to light (and is certainly something I've ex...
First draft of my Ph.D is done!
Friday, 27th January 2012: 4pm. 2 years and four months into my efforts. The first draft of my Ph.D is now done! I have 81,000 words excluding introduction a...
Adorno terminology: αρχαί
A guest comment alerted me to the fact that I had missed an entry from my Aesthetic Theory lexicon! αρχαί = origin "In those studies devoted to the aesthetic...
First Fictions Festival at Sussex
Ian Rankin and Martin Paul Eve Last weekend, the 20th to 22nd of January 2012, saw the inaugural event of the First Fictions Festival at the University of S...
I've gone to IPv6
2012 has been designated the year of IPv6 launch and, to do my part, I have tweaked my infrastructure to ensure full, and future-guaranteed, IPv6 connectivit...
Protecting Your Assets: Backing up your Academic Work
I will be running, on the 31st January, a workshop for Sussex researchers on protecting their assets; aka. backing up their work. After the first year of my ...
A Complete List of the Ancient Greek Terms in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory
My Adorno Greek Lexicon project is now complete. Here is the full listing. Page references are to Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorn...
Adorno terminology: ζῷον πολιτικόν
"This exteriorization is, however, practical insofar as it determines the person who experiences art and steps out of himself as a ζῷον πολιτικόν, just as ar...
Joe Orton's Defaced Books at the Islington Museum
I took a detour today, en route to visiting the Freud museum to the Islington Museum, in order to see the collection of library books defaced by playwright J...
Adorno terminology: τοδε τι
"that expressionism was more powerful as an idea than in its works perhaps has its origins in the fact that its utopia of the pure τοδε τι is itself a fragme...
Adorno terminology: τέχνη
"This defines the untruth of any genius aesthetics that suppresses the element of finite making, the τέχνη in artworks, in favor of their absolute originalit...
Adnorno terminology: θαυμαζειv
"Artworks are eliminated along with the youthful θαυμαζειv" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by R...
Adorno terminology: κατ εξοχην
"Fireworks are apparation κατ εξοχην: They appear empirically yet are liberated" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiede...
Adorno terminology: ἀγών (agon)
"The agon of Greek tragedy still gave evidence of this" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Rober...
Adorno terminology: εποχη [and lengthy textual note]
"By its εποχη from the empirical world, new art ceases to be fantastic." (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Tr...
It's not P.T. Anderson, but someone has started an Inherent Vice adaptation
While we wait for news on the Hollywood adaptation, it seems that Jeff Hoyt has taken matters into his own hands and put together an adaptation of the first ...
Adorno terminology: ηδονη
"In the false world all ηδονη is false" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor....
Pynchon Character Etymology: Étienne Cherdlu
With thanks to Roland Clare, a quick snippet of interest (certainly to me, anyway) on the etymology of a certain Étienne Cherdlu, a character featuring, desp...
Adorno terminology: καιρος
"His work is the extrapolation of a negative καιρος" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert H...
Adorno Greek Lexicon project
This is a forewarning for subscribers of a series of posts that has already begun. Apologies if this is of no interest to you, but it will be over in a fortn...
Adorno terminology: θέσει
"The portion of it that is θέσει grew to such an extent that all efforts to secret away the process of production in the work could not but fail" (Adorno, Th...
Adorno terminology: άλλο γένος
"Thus what was planned as a bridge between theoretical and practical pure reason is vis-à-vis both an άλλο γένος" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edite...
Adorno terminology: χωρισμός / chorismos
A quick note as I had to look it up and might save somebody else some time. First occurring on p. 7 of the Hullot-Kentor translation of Aesthetic Theory, χωρ...
The only known inscribed Pynchon book with a presentation letter
Pynchon biography sleuth, Albert Rolls, sent me information today of the only known inscribed Pynchon book complete with a presentation letter. Information o...
2011
2012: Year of the PhD Completion / Guardian Higher Education Top 10 posts of 2011
A quick, perhaps egotistic, documentary post to note that the Guardian have published their top 10 posts of 2011 and the piece I wrote with Jennifer M. Jones...
Account aggregation with UK banks and a free software Lloyds TSB scraper
I thought it would be a good idea (New Year's resolutions and all that) to make sure I was on top of my finances this coming year. For that purpose, I began ...
Guest piece in the Guardian: Secondary schools are not adequately preparing students for higher education
A guest piece over at the Guardian Higher Education section: I remain critical of academia's kowtowing to the job market but, in this case, the two coinciden...
meXmlGalley now supporting image insertion (OJS: XML to PDF)
An update on my earlier posts about meXmlGalley, the OJS plugin that allows you to publish PDFs from XML source documents, to say that I began some further w...
A minor correction to Anne Mangel's "Maxwell's Demon, Entropy, Information: The Crying of Lot 49"
This is a brief, and perhaps pedantic, post to bring attention to an essay of extreme prominence in Pynchon studies, Anne Mangel, "Maxwell's Demon, Entropy, ...
Publication: 'Historical Sources for Pynchon’s Peter Pinguid Society', Pynchon Notes, 56-57 (Spring-Fall 2009 (2011)), pp. 242-245
This short piece provides the cumulative textual evidence that Pynchon consulted a single source, Golder, F.A., 1915. "The Russian Fleet and the Civil War". ...
**Support War Child** and see Laurent Gardner/Booka Shade/Leftfield live April 2012
Of the worthy causes you'll see in the world, War Child is surely high up that list. For the uniformed: War Child International is a family of independent hu...
Global and historical reasons why it is utterly innapropriate, even to joke, about killing trade unionists
As surely everybody on Twitter now knows, a certain multi-million pound contractor to the BBC (therefore paid out of public funds) has shot his mouth off wit...
Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2011
Now that the livelihood of those still needed to operate the machines can be provided with a minimal part of the working time which the masters of society h...
First Fictions launch weekend: 20-22 January, 2012
At last, the First Fictions launch weekend, featuring Ian Rankin, Nicholas Royle, Bryan Talbot, Elleke Boehmer, Adam Roberts and many others is available for...
Forthcoming workshops: academic websites & protecting your assets!
Update: Due to my university teaching timetable changing, unfortunately the Wordpress workshops have been postponed. I'll update this post as and when new ti...
.NETIDS development restarted. Participants wanted.
A long time ago, in a different life, I produced a fully functional Intrusion Detection System for web projects developed in C# and/or VB.NET using the .N...
Guest post on Google Scholar Citations
A quick post to point out that I've written a concise synopsis of Google Scholar over at the Sussex Doctoral School blog. Enjoy! Featured image by alles-schl...
Simon F. Davies' Open Educational Resource on Literary Terms
I wanted to draw everybody's attention to the excellent work of Simon F. Davies, one of my colleagues at the University of Sussex, who has produced a fantast...
Brian Lobel: BALL and Other Funny Stories About Cancer
On the 3rd November, 2011, I had the pleasure and privilege to attend Brian Lobel's performance, "BALL and Other Funny Stories About Cancer" on the 10th anni...
A dissenting voice on #AcBoWriMo
This is a bit of a spoilsport post, but I wanted to set down, in writing, some of the reasons that I am extremely wary of the #AcBoWriMo experiment that is c...
Complaint over the closure of the British Library to accomodate a visit from the queen
Send your own to customer-feedback@bl.uk. Dear Sir/Madam, I would like to express my anger at the closure of the British Library, a publicly-funded building,...
Booting Ubuntu from devices invisible to GRUB2
...slightly misleading title; obviously, that doesn't work. I have an OCZ RevoDrive SSD which, although very fast, has some serious problems with my BIOS. Th...
Open Access Week at the University of Sussex
Today is international Open Access Week and, in celebration and to raise awareness, I gave a talk and workshop at the University of Sussex for a cross-discip...
Pynchon's Friends in Gravity's Rainbow
On my latest, but numerically beyond-counting, read-through of Gravity's Rainbow, it suddenly struck me that the Fred and Phyllis referenced on page 711: "(w...
Reading the "My Marxist Feminist Dialectic Brings all the Boys to the Yard" T-Shirt
I had reservations about doing so, but I finally ordered the "My Marxist Feminist Dialectic Brings all the Boys to the Yard" T-Shirt from T-Shirt Hell. I lov...
Donne it wrong: Holy Sonnet numbering confusion
An interesting problem here... Reading for the first year course I'm teaching this week asked the students to read John Donne's Holy Sonnets 14 & 18. The...
Happy 85th Birthday, Michel Foucault
Although arguably a philosopher of his time, Michel Foucault is probably the thinker whose work has had the greatest impact upon me, academically. I first en...
The Werritty Feasel
There was once a man named Werritty, Pal of the defense secretary, But he let down the side, Now it can't be denied, That it's all turned Foxy and Ferrety. F...
The Nobel Prize for Literature 2011 Hoax
About half an hour before the official announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2011 (which was awarded to Tomas Tranströmer) reports started circulat...
Adorno, Benjamin and Wittgenstein (!): knowledge is not property
Increasingly in the course of my academic work, I come to appreciate the fact that thought leads many people, independently, down the same path. For instance...
Academia, EdTech, Blogging and Twitter: Enough with the Meta, Already?
I have some qualms, which have been growing recently, about the vast number of meta- posts that have accumulated on the use of social media in academia. I ne...
Writing a plugin for Open Journal Systems: Part 2
The quest to build a system that allows publishing in PDF and XHTML from a single XML galley within OJS continues and I've made quite substantial progress. A...
64bit GNU/Linux and Webcams (Logitech Quickcam Express)
I've just been playing around with my webcam, which I haven't hooked up in ages, and was unable to get it working under my 64bit Fedora installation. Having ...
Words in memory of Troy Davis
It is with a heavy and despairing heart that I write this post. It is not particularly well-structured owing to the emotive nature of the content. The state ...
Writing a plugin for Open Journal Systems: Part 1
As promised when I described the problem I was having with the xmlGalley plugin in OJS, I'm going to begin describing the path I am taking to fixing this, an...
Publishing articles in PDF via XML/XSLT using Open Journal Systems 2.3.6
This is a post detailing my experiments with Open Journal Systems 2.3.6 and the current state of producing galleys for an article from a single XML file. As ...
Troy Davis: Innocence and Execution; If This is a Man
The Troy Davis case, perhaps the most controversial of all death penalty impositions in the United States, is growing perilously close to a climax resulting ...
Is it worth presenting at postgraduate conferences?
I've just been asked on Twitter as to whether it's worth presenting at postgraduate conferences and thought I'd share my thoughts in a short post. Answer: i...
Adorno terminology: intentio recta and intention obliqua
Reading Negative Dialectics, I was unable to track down a succinct, suitable definition of the terms "intentio recta" and "intentio obliqua", first appearing...
Installing Zotero on Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10/Beta)
Following on from my previous guide to using Zotero in Ubuntu Natty, I am pleased to present, here, the guide for Ubuntu 11.10: The Oneiric Ocelot. The most ...
Immanent critique of closed access publication
As I ramp up my efforts to bring the critique of closed access journals to the fore I expect at some point to encounter the charge of hypocrisy; I publish in...
Guest post at PhD2Published
In response to George Monbiot's piece yesterday, I have a guest post up at PhD2Published on the issue. Specifically, I wanted to look (in brief) at the drive...
HEFCE board appointments: learning through Argos
On Friday, HEFCE announced its new board members. Here's the rundown: Professor Anne Greenough Professor Anne Greenough is a paediatrician and Professor of ...
Satchmo payment modules
I've been working, over the past few days, on a web store for a client using Satchmo. I wanted to share some of my findings here so that others don't trip up...
Postgraduate Publishing
This post comes as a therapeutic exercise after having spent longer than I'd hoped bogged down writing an academic journal piece. I wanted to write a little ...
Encrypted Partition Recovery on Ubuntu 10.10
The other day I was installing Xubuntu 10.10 onto an old Mac G4 Powerbook and got the keyboard layout wrong. I had encrypted the entire disk and so, with the...
Conference Paper: "Autosubversive Practices in Academic Publishing", UKSG, 2012-03-26
I'm very pleased to announce that I will speaking in the opening plenary session at the UK Scholarly Group conference on March the 26th, 2012 at the Universi...
Conference Paper: 'It sure's hell looked like war': Terrorism and the Cold War in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Don DeLillo's Underworld', 2010-06-09, University of Lublin
In an effort to ensure that I have a complete listing of my conference papers on my site, here is an abstract from the last International Pynchon Week confer...
Britain or America for the PhD in English? Part 2
Having set out in part 1 some of the differences between the British and American PhDs in English, this here part 2 is a guide to applying to America, should...
Thoughts from "Calling All Agents": The first symposium on the work of Tom McCarthy
A quick roundup/review post from the "Calling All Agents: A Symposium on the work of Tom McCarthy" conference, held at Birkbeck and organised, superbly, by D...
Using Elliptical Curve Cryptography in OpenSSH
Having read two great posts on OpenSSH best practices, I decided today that I wanted to upgrade my SSH key architecture to use Elliptical Curve Cryptography....
I have nothing to do with this "dissertation writing service"
Perhaps a strange title for a post, but I was recently kindly alerted by Luis-Manuel Garcia at the University of Chicago that a certain dissertation writing ...
Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon
It now seems the right time to unveil a project which we hope will enthuse and excite a great number of you. We have been working, over the past few months, ...
Change of license: all content now CC-BY
As from July 11th, 2011, all content on this site, except where noted, is now available under the more permissive Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, a...
Britain or America for the PhD in English?
Britain or America for the PhD in English? I recently reached the halfway point in my 6-year PhD program at the University of Michigan, allowing me to ponder...
A Thomas Pynchon tattoo recruit
Met up with my usually Stateside fellow Pynchonite Jesse Sherwood last week when he visited London. While sampling the delights of the city was important, he...
Dropbox: you've missed the real problem
So, here's a short post on the Dropbox problem. I'm sure others have picked up on this aspect, but it merits further coverage. Yesterday, I tweeted at Dropbo...
Is academic work commercial? How does this affect libre licensing?
I've been engaged recently in a discussion on Twitter as to the appropriateness of Creative Commons licensing for Open Access journals wishing to remove perm...
UK HE White Paper day
Today is the day that we've all been dreading waiting for. The final unveiling of the UK Higher Education White Paper. It's expected later today, but here's...
Enslavement Conference, Portsmouth, 17th June 2011
In the spirit of writing up my recent conference visits, I thought I would share a rundown of the conference entitled "Enslavement: Colonial Appropriations, ...
The 8th Biennial Symbiosis Conference: Day 3
A quick roundup of goings on from the final day of the 8th Biennial Symbiosis Conference! Again, the summaries are potted and do great damage to the nuances ...
The 8th Biennial Symbiosis Conference: Day 2
As before, I will present here a brief rundown of the conference panels I attended with comments as they occurred to me! Obviously, in such reductive account...
The 8th Biennial Symbiosis Conference: Day 1
As with my previous posts on International Pynchon Week 2010, I thought I would try to take a little time on each day of this conference to write a few words...
Angry Young Academics: The "Directors' Cut"
After the success of the piece that I co-wrote with Jennifer M. Jones for The Guardian last week, I have had several requests to read the original version fr...
Excursions, Vol. 2, Issue 1: Virus (2011)
The Excursions editorial board are pleased to announce the launch of Excursions, Volume 2, Issue 1: Virus (2011). Issue: Virus See also: Archive / CFP Featu...
CFP: Excursions Journal: States of Emergence, States of Emergency
Call for Papers ‘States of Emergence, States of Emergency’ Deadline for articles: 15th August 2011 ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state...
Conference paper: Geo-specificity of Enlightenment in Mason & Dixon, 2011-06-24, University of Glasgow
An announcement that I will be speaking at the "Symbiosis" conference at the University of Glasgow on the 24th of June giving a paper entitled "Whose Line is...
Media piece: "Taking Back the University", The Guardian
A quick post to mark the publication, co-authored with Jennifer M Jones, of "Taking Back the University"; a piece that gives a quick rundown of radical alter...
Upcoming Workshop: Inbox zero and tech-task lists: getting things done
Details of an upcoming researcher workshop I am running on the 28th of June, from 2-4pm at the University of Sussex: In this workshop we will explore the tec...
More Pynchonalia
As seems to be becoming a bit of a tradition, my friend Duncan came up with a Pynchon themed T-Shirt, and Against the Day quoting card for my birthday. Here'...
Six lines to get Sun Java running on Fedora 15 x64
Here's a quick 'n' easy version of another post that uses the rpm instead of the extracting to opt.
A Brief Intro Pynchon Bibliography (Biographical and Gravity's Rainbow)
I saw yesterday that Twitter user WhelanWrites was asking for a basic rundown of some introductory Pynchon criticism. Rather than reply, I thought I'd put a ...
William Gibson, Cory Doctorow, Diane Coyle and Mark Stevenson at the British Library
Last week I had the pleasure to attend the "Who owns the Story of the Future?" even taking place at the British Library, playing host to William Gibson, Cory...
Moving from Ubuntu to Fedora
A the time that I started writing this blog post, I was intending to extol the virtues of the newly released Fedora 15 compared to the trainwreck that is Ubu...
Academic Businesss Cards
I had resisted the concept of having my own, academic, business cards for a long time. It seemed, and still does to an extent, an encroachment upon the spher...
The Rhetoric of "Fighting" Illness and Disability
When I was in hospital the week before last, I was struck by how all-pervasive the rhetoric of "fighting" is when people are coping with illness or new disab...
Using Twitter for Research
Please find, for your delectation, licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license, my Prezi on Using Twitter for Researc...
Osama Bin Laden and Nuremberg Precedent
There has been much discussion of whether the US should have captured Osama Bin Laden alive and put him on trial, as per the Nuremberg precedent set in the a...
Guarding your academic ideas
There was a recent conversation on Twitter's excellent #phdchat hashtag revealing the angst that can be involved in getting the balance right between holding...
Photograph and Interview in the Guardian
A few days late, but this is a quick post to highlight my statements, and photograph, on the Guardian books site. The piece was to highlight events pertainin...
On Pynchon and Privacy
In a fascinating LA Times piece published today, it is remarked, in conversation with a close friend of Thomas Pynchon that: In an era in which a Wikipedia ...
"We've met before, haven't we?": Spatio-Temporal Distortion in David Lynch's Lost Highway
Attached are my lecture notes for the "Genre 2" lecture I gave at the University of Sussex (2011-05-04): Martin Paul Eve - "We've met before, haven't we?": ...
Guardian Q&A Summary: Life After a PhD
A summary of the Guardian Q&A session, 'Life After a PhD' for which I was a panelist, is now available over on the Guardian Higher Education Network. Of ...
My AHEA success featured in RUSTLE
Vanity post alert! I have just been told that my achievement of Associate of the Higher Education Academy has been featured in Sussex's Teaching and Educat...
Romeo Castellucci / Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's "On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God"
If, like myself, you had travelled to The Barbican last night, you would have seen two men, a father and son, on a dazzlingly white, clinical set, a gigantic...
Crossword Helper for Android
A quick plug for my latest Android application, which is now available in the Android Market: Crossword Helper. This is, fairly obviously, an application des...
David Foster Wallace's The Pale King: Bonnie Nadell and Michael Pietsch at Foyles
Last night I had the pleasure of attending an event at Foyles bookstore in London featuring David Foster Wallace's Literary Agent Bonnie Nadell and Editor Mi...
Pynchon in Public Day 2011
Hereby instigating an annual May 8th culture jamming festival to be herein evidenced by photographic, textual, cartographic and video documentation. To prove...
Live Q&A: Life after a PhD [Friday 15th April 2011, 13.00-16.00]
I am very pleased to report that I will be participating as a panelist on the forthcoming Live Q&A this Friday (15th April) on the Guardian Higher Educat...
Publication: 'Review of Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity 2nd edition', Rupkatha, 3, 1 (April 2011)
I have just had a review published in the Open Access journal Rupkatha.</p> Rupkatha is an internationally recognised e-journal with a special focus o...
How not to apply to give a conference paper
Giving conference papers is a crucial part of academic life. It's the prime means of engaging with others in your discipline, getting a face associated with ...
Delay to Report on First UKPN Meeting
This is a quick post to give an update on the report from the first meeting of the UK Pynchon Network. I have had several requests for reports on the day and...
Speaking plainly
Following on from posts by @lizith and @ORGMotivation, this is a brief post to explain my current research in plain English. A quick precursor. In many resea...
Conference paper: “The Driver's Whip is an evil thing”: Enlightenment as Mass Enslavement in the Works of Thomas Pynchon, 2011-06-17, University of Portsmouth
An announcement that I will be speaking at the "Enslavement: Colonial Appropriations, Apparitions, Remembrances, 1750-Present Day" conference at the Universi...
Ubuntu Natty Beta 1: My Upgrade Experience
I thought I'd share here some of the trials and tribulations I experienced in last night's upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04, Natty Narwhal. flgrx driver problems Usi...
Installing Zotero on Ubuntu Natty (11.04/Beta)
I've been playing with the new setup of Unity on Ubuntu Natty 11.04 beta, which now comes preloaded with the forked LibreOffice. This has caused some problem...
Exactly half-way through my PhD timetable
Today marks, by my calculations, day 548 of my PhD. I set myself a target to attempt to finish the thesis within three years (1096 days -- 2012 is a leap yea...
My recent work at Berfrois
Featured image by 1600 Squirrels under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. I was thrilled recently to be asked to write a piece detailing my recent work on interrelations...
Upcoming workshop: "Using Twitter for Research"
Featured image credit: leezfield under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. Details of an upcoming researcher workshop I am running at the University of Sussex: Not tweeti...
Picture This: Postcards Exhibition
A quick post to highlight the wonderful Postcards Exhibition taking place this Friday at the University of Sussex! We received so many wonderful entries to ...
Conference Paper: "The F Word", 2011-04-01, University of Durham
Featured image by duncan under a CC-BY-NC license. A quick post to announce that I will be speaking at the University of Durham on the 1st of April, 2011 on ...
Designing a UK undergraduate English literature course
Featured image by Sarah Ross photography under a CC-BY-NC license. As part of my ongoing lecturer training programme I am required to design a twelve week sy...
"(Un)Reasonable" fees by which metric?
The reason that the coalition government is now panicking over the set to be universal introduction of £9000 fees and desires to financially punish instituti...
Things to do when you get a new Android phone
Featured image by avlxyz under a CC-BY-SA license.</a> A friend of mine has just negotiated a great deal on a new Android phone and she suggested I put...
UK Pynchon Network: Site Up and Programme Announced
I am very please to announce that the conference website for the UK Pynchon Network (and our first conference) is now online! The address is: https://www.ma...
Getting Published in Academia
As I tweeted yesterday, @dhlbrown was attending a workshop on which I participated last year at the University of Sussex on getting published in Academia. He...
The Gaz Pearce Award
Bit of an in-joke, but I think my career has reached a new high with Gaz's recent award bestowed upon me:
Richard Stallman at the University of Sussex
Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Richard Stallman, the pioneer of the CopyLeft movement, at the University of Sussex. Stallman was speakin...
What is Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow about?
As a scholar working on literature, I am often asked to describe my work in potted form. This necessarily involves an introduction to the work of Thomas Pync...
In Dubio Contra Reum: a definition
Featured image by Пероша under a CC-BY-NC license. I am currently reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and came across the phrase "in dubio contra r...
On Daniel Domscheit-Berg's "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website"
Reading Daniel Domscheit-Berg's Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website gives the twofold impression of a deeply ...
Mendeley for Android Update
A few weeks ago, I tweeted that the first beta of Android for Mendeley was almost ready. This post is an update on that status. I'm afraid to say that, about...
Prisoner Rights, Overcriminalisation and Reform in Democracy
Image credit: Still Burning under a CC-BY-NC license. Perhaps one of the strongest arguments for universal suffrage, even among the convicted populous, can ...
Open Hardware: the Netgear WNR3500L
Featured image copyright, and courtesy of, My Open Router. I've been, over the past few years, through about 3 different routers. I had a Thompson Speedtouch...
Russell Hoban in Conversation with Will Self at the British Library
Last night I was privileged enough to attend an event forming part of the British Library's Evolving English series featuring the novelist Russell Hoban in...
The Analytic of Patriotism: On Greg Mitchell's The Age of WikiLeaks
This is my second review of a book on WikiLeaks, a subject which holds almost indefinite fascination for me, the first being David Leigh and Luke Harding's W...
Android and Eduroam
Image credit: Copyright Eduroam, used here as fair use to indicate the network in question. It seems there's a few bugs in various Android variants that pre...
CFP: First Conference of the UK Academic Pynchon Network
Image credit: Robert Burdock under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. This is an announcement regarding the formation, and first UK meeting, of the UK Academic Pynchon ...
David Leigh and Luke Harding's WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy
For all the pains they take throughout to emphasise the vast quantity of editorial resources deployed in the redaction and publication of the most sensationa...
SA4QE2011: The Drops
As part of SA4QE2011, here's three photos of my drop locations (there were many more, but these were the ones I photographed). I'd also like to share this ex...
Judith Butler at Sussex on Arendt, Cohabitation, and the Dispersion of Sovereignty
Anybody reading this weekend's Comment is Free piece by Nick Cohen might have felt somewhat dispirited at the concept of attending a lecture by Judith Butl...
SA4QE 2011: Spreading the Word of Russell Hoban
Greetings! If you've landed here you are either a reader of my blog, one of my twitter followers or, and this is probably the most exciting case, you scanned...
The Big Society and Mythical Structure
Featured image credit: The Prime Minister's Office under a CC-BY-ND license. In their infamous post-World War II, post-holocaust tract, the Dialectic of Enli...
On #PhDchat: Call for Collaboration/History, Overview, Themes and Response
Featured image credit: Rain Rabbit under a CC-BY-NC license. This is the first part of a collaborative writing effort initiated by @jennifermjones, @AndyCo...
Pynchon reference in the Economist
</p> Image copyright the Economist. Too much of an opportunity to pass off for a quick post, the Economist recently featured a humorous take on the ...
A Statistical History of UK Pynchon Doctorates
While browsing the EThOS Thesis collection today, I suddenly became curious as to the history, statistically speaking, of doctorates in my field of literatur...
SSL Enabled
Featured image credit: husky under a CC-BY-SA license. Some will tell me this is overkill, but I believe that, in 2011, we should have the option to read ...
What has social media ever done for me?
This is a re-publication of a post originally written for the Vitae blog's Digital Researcher section, archived here for preservation purposes. Image credit...
Mendeley for Android: Progress update
This is an update post for my progress on Mendeley for Android. I have just committed code that provides almost working background synchronization to the de...
Picture this: Postcards Competition
Image credit: grewlike under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. Picture this: postcards and letters beyond text Postcards Competition – deadline extended! The arrival ...
OCZ RevoDrive on Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI
My Christmas present (I am SUCH a geek) was a lovely OCZ RevoDrive PCI-E SSD, with blistering 540mb/s read/write speeds. Very nice. However, it was not a s...
Rockaby: Mission Statement and Implementation Plans
Image credit: El Waka; Licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-alike This is a post to announce the initial draft of a mission statement and i...
The Botnet: Webs of Hegemony/Zombies Who Publish
Image credit: rodolphoreis; Licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-alike To my great excitement, my initial proposal for the forthcoming book...
BBC News: fathoming financial terms
Surprisingly, I managed to make an appearance in the business section of the BBC News website, of all places. When I returned from lunch at the British Libr...
Getting a custom Sync Service and Adapter to show up under "Data and Synchronization" on Android
As mentioned previously, the two part tutorial on c99.org is a great starting place for people wanting to write their own synchronization service for Androi...
Publication: ‘Local Transcendence: Postmodern Historiography and the Database by Alan Liu’, Textual Practice, 24, 6 (December 2010)
My review of Alan Liu's latest offering, Local Transcendence: Postmodern Historiography and the Database is now available to read in Textual Practice vol. 2...
Mendeley for Android: screenshot of collection display
Here's a screenshot of today's milestone on Mendeley for Android; collection display running in the emulator:
Sussex Research Hive Seminars
Just a quick promotional post to get the word out about the research hive seminars at Sussex. This series presents an exciting opportunity to hear about, and...
Android Rom Update Utility extractor for Linux
As my hobby-geek phase draws to a close and I return well and truly to my PhD, I thought it worth sharing this python script I wrote a while back which will ...
Automated CPanel Backups with SCP
Originally from V-Nessa's site, I thought I would share the PHP script that I have now modified to include Secure Copy (SCP) support.
Mendeley Android Client: now implemented as a user account with sync
As I made rapid initial progress on the prototype of the Mendeley Client for Android, I started to think about the design. In order to minimize hits on the A...
Mendeley Android Client Progress (w/ Video, Source and APK!)
Before anybody non-techie gets excited by the heading there, I'm not claiming this is anywhere near production-ready. In fact, it's not even functional. Howe...
OAuth for Mendeley on Android: solved and a bug
Thanks to Clemens' comment on my last post, I have managed to track down the problems that I was having with OAuth for Mendeley on Android; it's all callback...
2010
Using Unison to synchronize and backup your work [Part 1]
Everybody yaks on about backup all the time, but few people actually have a viable setup. They say: "yes, I copy stuff to a USB pen". So, if you do that once...
Mendeley Android client; first preview and OAuth problem
In the last day before I head off for a bit of a Christmas break, I decided to take up a recent proposition to start work on an Android client for Mendeley. ...
Using Producteev to manage overbearing Inboxes
I typically have (well, had) about 200 emails in my Inbox, which was just as a result of trying to keep on top of things that I needed to do at some point in...
The 'net was never free from commercial interest; it's not a "new" threat to democratic speech
In recent days, given the furore over Amazon's decision to no longer host Wikileaks, it has become common parlance to declare that the web is now subjected t...
Our Duty to Minorities
This is a quick, personal post to express my disgust at the government's recent proposals to "reform" the Disabled Living Allowance and scrap the Independent...
Djiscography: a Django-based discography generator
This is a quick post to announce the first code drop of a project I worked on yesterday. It's called Djiscography and it generates nicely formatted javascri...
Converting Zotero Documents to Mendeley
One of the best things about Mendeley is that, the second you mention their name on Twitter, a horde of helpful and informative community liaison team member...
Wikileaks is about capitalist paradigm shift, not single government overthrow
Julian Assange has just conducted a brief Q&A on the Guardian website and he gave one statement that clearly indicates his fierce intelligence and compre...
Rockaby refactoring and abstraction
I've used the snow so far this morning to start some pythonic refactoring of Rockaby. As I mentioned in my project announcement, Rockaby started life severa...
Researchers, Libraries and Publishers: What does the future hold?
Yesterday, I attended an event facilitated by the Research Information Network and hosted by Sage Publishing as a roundtable discussion of the complex issues...
Alternative/Complementary Medicine and Mass Anecdotal Evidence as Theological in Structure
This post is probably only good and original in the sense (allegedly) framed by Samuel Johnson. Nevertheless, it came out of a discussion I had the other nig...
Fixing headphone jack on Toshiba Satellite C650D under Ubuntu Linux Maverick
There is an annoying bug on Toshiba Satellite Machines running Ubuntu Linux (seems variants up to Maverick) which means that plugging in to the headphone jac...
Vince Cable's Orwell-esque doublethink
Just a quick post to point out that, aligning with my teaching last week, Cable's recent announcement that the Lib Dems have not broken any promises on unive...
Userspace responsiveness .bashrc alternative (Ubuntu 10.10: Working)
Recent discussion on the lkm has lead to Linus giving the go-ahead to a large kernel patch that massively increases responsiveness when multi-tasking on Linu...
Rockaby: text annotation software [GPL, alpha, announcement]
till in the end the day came in the end came close of a long day when she said to herself whom else time she stopped -- Samuel Beckett, Rockaby Today marks ...
Wireless when housesitting (airmon-ng)
This weekend I was house- (and dog-) sitting for a friend and had been told that I could use the internet while at their place. Sadly, however, the way this ...
Online crossword helper: http://ana.grammatic.org
I've been a big fan of cryptic crosswords for several years now. For those who are unaware, these are crosswords in which the clue consists of both a definit...
DEMO 2010
While I do not normally attend rallies, demonstrations and the such like, I am making an exception tomorrow for the NUS' demonstration against the implement...
The Problems of Copyleft, Twitter and Tweets
There has been a trend, in recent days, of moving towards providing tweets under various licenses; most prominently, Creative Commons Non-commercial Shareali...
A few notes on some of Jacques Derrida's writings
At the beginning of last year, I was involved briefly in a reading group at the University of Sussex, the topic of which was the writings of Jacques Derrida....
Problematic indexing in Paul Rabinow's edited Foucault volume, "Ethics"
Just a brief scholarly note for the benefit of anybody reading Foucault's "What is Enlightenment", contained in Paul Rabinow's edited volume, "Ethics" (volum...
Using British Library wifi when DHCP fails
Sometimes, the free wireless service at the British Library goes pear shaped and, if you are accustomed to using it, this can make research quite hard. Occas...
Notes and Presentation from my Open Access talk
In the spirit of the event, I am hereby releasing my presentation materials for the talk I gave at the University of Sussex's Open Access Week on the 20th of...
Where to start with Thomas Pynchon?
In the course of the last day I have been observing, and engaging with, an ongoing Twitter discussion (see: Dystopia2009 and MarkKohut) as to which Thomas Py...
Speaking of Open Access...
This is a quick post to point out that I will be speaking at the University of Sussex's contribution to International Open Access Week on the 20th of October...
Picture This: Postcards and Letters Beyond Text
Another post plugging a conference I am involved with, I'm afraid! A conference at the University of Sussex March 24, 2011 – March 26, 2011 Confirmed speaker...
First Fictions conference
FIRST FICTIONS Festival and Academic Conference Update: 2011-01-18 9-12th June, 2011 Please note the date of the festival has now changed to: 19-22...
Conditional CSS in Open Journal/Conference Systems
One of the most tedious aspects of establishing a uniquely themed Open Journal or Open Conference Systems site is in getting the CSS to work as you would...
Upcoming journal publishing workshop
Just a quick publicity post to advertise a workshop I am running at the University of Sussex on the 15th of September from 11.30-13.30 on the use of Ope...
HTC Wildfire Stage 1 Soft-Root
UPDATE 2013-06-30: I'm afraid that I've had to remove the below files as my host thinks they are a virus. Great. Anyway, this method has easily been surpass...
Plagiarism by Semiotext(e) translations?
I have just read the disturbing case publicised by Arianna Bove in which, she alleges, Semiotext(e) essentially plagiarised her work on Foucault's transl...
Some brief thoughts on Slavoj Žižek at LSE
The following constitute a preliminary note-taking/synoptical exercise undertaken for my own benefit, but shared in case anybody finds them useful. I should ...
My navy days with Thomas Ruggles Pynchon
Courtesy of Mr. Duncan Stringer, my birthday yielded me a T-Shirt with the Tristero post horn and a card with one of the following images on it. Obviously, I...
International Pynchon Week 2010: Day 3
09:00-10:30 Session IX chair: Sascha Pöhlmann Paweł Stachura (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań), Literary Spaces in Pynchon...
International Pynchon Week: Day 2
... International Pynchon Week, Day 2 (continued from previous post). 09:00-10:30 Session V chair: Paweł Frelik Huei-ju Wang (National...
International Pynchon Week: Day 1
Today (June 9th 2010) marked the start of the 9th International Pynchon Week conference, a biennial event that, this time around, is hosted in Pola...
New David Foster Wallace book Fall 2010
30575816-Columbia-University-Press-Catalog-Fall-2010.pdf (6182 KB) </div> According to the Columbia University Press Fall Catalogue, th...
Running Zotero on Ubuntu Lucid
I have just upgraded my work machine (laptop) to Kubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.4) and have to say that I was mightily impressed with the ease of upgrade; 99% flawle...
OUSU Freedom of Information requests
So, it transpires that the Oxford University Students Union have had their freedom of information request rejected on the grounds that it is schedu...
PoC Code for Facebook Friend Profile Gatherer
The code on this page iterates over Facebook profile IDs, employing the CSS History Hack to determine whether each profile has been visited by you. Much of t...
Upcoming performance: Lucy and Martha: Fine Bone China
Once and for all we have caught it: the ingredients for the most perfect teatime moment. We want to present it to you, to re-construct it for you exactly, p...
Applying for AHRC BGP Doctoral Grants
2009-03-12 - Arts and Humanities Research Council Funding Application.docx (18 KB) </div> Applying for a Block Grant Partnership Doctora...
Using tech to help with structure
I wanted to write a blog post today containing a tip that I employ for structuring long pieces of academic prose. One of the main difficulties th...
Implementing COinS
After the Vitae Digital Researcher workshop at the British Library, I decided to ramp up my web presence to a slightly more professional level than it had p...
Undergraduates in the British Library reading rooms
One of the long running debates regarding the British Library reading rooms has resurfaced this week. Upon entering the library this morning I was...
International Pynchon Week 2010 Abstracts
The abstracts for International Pynchon Week 2010 are now online! Of course, I would thoroughly recommend my own paper, which will focus on terro...
David Foster Wallace archive material
I've just, a few days belatedly, checked out the Howling Fantods website and caught up with the news regarding the Harry Ransom Center aquiring the...
Can we avoid the S word regarding David Foster Wallace?
The London Review of Books has just published a blog post entitled Wallace v. the Terrible Master. You can read the full article here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/...
British Library usage made clear
It's only really during the mass exodus of a fire alarm that the sheer scale of operations daily at the British Library become clear. Here's a picture I sna...
Humanities Map
The result of a humanities discipline map for Digital Researcher 2010 at the British Library!
Dark cloud looming
Tomorrow I plan to attend the Digital Researcher seminar day at the British Library. It promises to be an excellent day providing insights on how researcher...
Thomas Pynchon critical bibliography Zotero group
In the spirit of social networking/research interaction, I have established a Zotero group for researchers working in my field; the novels of Thomas Pyn...
sshsplit featured
My first attempt at Python got a slot on the Ubuntu opportunistic developer slot. Check it out here: http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/06/the-grand-app-wr...
sshsplit: a dynamic tunnel multiplexer
Introducing sshsplit sshsplit is a GPL-3 licensed application that multiplexes ssh dynamic tunnels. </img> For example, you might normally run: ssh -D ...
2009
Fixing scp completion in Ubuntu 9.10
Currently, owing to a bug, scp in Kubuntu and Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) does not allow you to autocomplete remote directories (when you have a passwordless ...
Installing Office 2007 on wine 1.1.24
The latest version of Wine (as of 2009-06-23: wine-1.1.24) fixes an important regression that makes it far far easier to install Microsoft Office 2007 on Win...
FTP URL FastSnap Parsing in .NET
Sometimes, the built in functions of a framework are good enough for your purpose and there is no point in reinventing the wheel. Fine examples of this are t...
Dual Stage SQL Injection Attacks
I came across quite an interesting SQL Injection scenario today. The software in which the vulnerability resides will remain anonymous until fixed, but an ab...
2008
Fetching files via echo, FTP in a non interactive shell environment
Once you have basic, non-interactive shell access to a Windows box, there are a limited number of ways in which you can transfer files to the remote host. Th...
Bypassing firewalls using SSH Reverse Forwarding
Sometimes you will find yourself on a machine that has no inbound connections allowed, which can make even the most basic task a complete pain. Never fear, i...
SSH Key Based, Password Less Login
It can be very handy to be able to login to an SSH shell without supplying a password. Here's how. Firstly, on your client machine, generate a keypair. If yo...
Convert Excel to Serif Webplus SDB format
Just sharing something that might be of interest to anyone with a similar problem. A non-technically minded friend is attempting to use Serif WebPlus to crea...
The importance of weaponization in exploit development
A while back (quite a long while back now I suppose) I entered SmugMug's "competition" to "hack" their system. As it was hardly impenetrable I succeeded and ...
Creating an IRC front/back-end from a C# web application
This lengthy howto will show you how to hook up C# to an eggdrop IRC bot. I've taken this approach because it avoids the overhead of managing a fully fledged...
C# DataExecutor class again
Just been asked some further questions about the DataExecutor class on FreeNode and thought I'd give some usage instructions/clarification here. Howto: Fill ...
Expanding a treeview to a specific node in WPF
I've been exploring the dark alleyways of the Windows Presentation Foundation this week and found no way in my trawlings of the net to expand a treeview to a...
Building a robust, SSL, CRC-Verified server/client solution in the .NET Framework with C#
Quite a lengthy post here with a lot of code in the hope that my experience of building an integrity-checking SSL (text-only for now) communication system wi...
C# MemoryManagement Class
Well, first off, this is the first post using the new blogging solution! Let's hope it works! I'm presenting here a low level memory management class I wrote...
Binding to RadioButtons in .NET Windows Forms
Well, it's not security related, but I thought it was worth sharing my solution for all those people who are having trouble binding either ApplicationSetting...
IE7 Remote File Access
Just a quick post to draw attention to Ronald's excellent article at http://www.0x000000.com/?i=525 where he has pulled off a very interesting remote file ac...
Firefox 3 disallows cross-site XBL
Well, I decided to play around a little with Firefox 3 Beta 3 today and discovered that it looks like the ever popular -moz-binding css attribute is now rend...
wp-aspxrewriter alpha test
Well, today I deployed an early version of my wp-aspxrewriter component to my personal blog. This component is an ASP.NET HttpModule in conjunction with a Wo...
An XML based XSS PoC platform
Well, long time no post. Been in hospital. Been busy with college. Life gets in the way of hacking. Usually when one wast to illustrate an XSS vulnerability ...
2007
Right-To-Left and Left-To-Right characters
There's been a fair bit of discussion going on at slackers on the security implications of the Unicode characters U+202D and U+202E which switch the left-to-...
IE7 Javascript - modify the DOM without crashing the browser
One of the biggest problems faced when writing Javascript that modifies the DOM is the fact that the poorly written IE7 crashes because it hasn't finished lo...
XSS for the common good - GreaseMousey
I know I haven't posted anything here for a good while, but that's because on top of uni work I have a surprise up my sleeve in the not so distant future. I ...
Obfuscated fun
Just thought I'd share the following script vector with you all that I came up with while stressing PHPIDS today: l= 0 || 'str',m= 0 || 'sub',x= 0 || 'al',y...
Some evil stuff from sla.ckers
There's such a wealth of new XSS vectors coming out of the work on phpids that I couldn't resist sharing a few of the tastier morsels here. The original thre...
JavaScript internal numerical representations
Whilst working on the next release of .NETIDS I came across some interesting info about the parsing of numbers within JavaScript - information that is of par...
HttpOnly cookies in .NET 2.0
This is a well known trick that I just wanted to share as it is so crucial in preventing effective XSS attacks in Internet Explorer (and hopefully soon FireF...
C# DataExecutor class available
One of the questions I see most frequently on Freenode's ##csharp irc channel is how to use a MySql Database in .NET. I've therefore provided the class that ...
.NETIDS v.0.1.1.0 released
Just a quick note to announce the release of .NETIDS v.0.1.1.0 - a small update that adds some valuable features: Fixed bug of empty Report.Tags object Adde...
C# MySql DataExecutor class
DataExecutor.cs:
CSRF being used in latest IPB vuln – what about PHP web request?
I was interested to see in a XSS/CSRF exploit the following lines:
.NETIDS v.0.1.0.0 released
After much testing/tweaking the first release of .NETIDS is upon us! Featured in this release: automatic String.fromCharcode conversion and detection new an...
.NETIDS can now detect fragmented XSS
Today I made some large commits to the .NETIDS project to enable detection of fragmented XSS attacks. For an example of what a fragmented attacks looks like,...
Firefox nested comment fragmented XSS
Following on from a post on sla.ckers it emerges that Firefox has a vulnerability/bug that is very difficult to filter against and allows a fragmented XSS at...
A bad day for browsers
Today there were 5 flaws for Firefox and IE6/7 unveiled - 2 for IE and 3 for Firefox. Michal Zalewski disclosed 3 at http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2007/...
dotnetids
Just a quick note to announce the start of dotnetids, a port of phpids to the .NET Framework. http://code.google.com/p/dotnetids/
(C)SRF one-time token bypass using AJAX and XSS
This morning I knocked up some proof of concept code to illustrate the retrieval of one-time authentication tokens. The situation in which this is handy is w...
XSS Tutorial
This page is designed to give an overview of Cross Site Scripting attacks on web sites, how they come into being, how to exploit them and how to protect agai...
String.fromCharCode Encoder
Enter JavaScript in the box below and press "encode": alert('test'); Encode
Bypassing Same Origin Policy using Mash-Ups
GNUCITIZEN has been going on about this for some time now, but the truly devastating impact of what he has been saying only actually hit me today when readin...
RSnake + Jeremiah Grossman's Book Released
ha.ckers are reporting that their book on Cross Site Scripting has finally been released! Buy a copy at Amazon!
XSF: Cross Site Flashing
Stefano Di Paola presented an interesting paper on Flash security at OWASP 2007 which highlights the dangers of HTML being rendered from within Flash via GET...
MOSEB month of search engine bugs
Purpose of this Month of Bugs is a demonstration of real state with security in search engines, which are the most popular sites in Internet. To let users o...
heise Security reports backdoor in Artmedic CMS
As the title says, heise Security have found a backdoor in the Artmedic CMS system. The interesting question is how this backdoor was implanted - giving the ...
XSS in eXceSS: A "learn-XSS tool"
kishord today presents a tool, called XSS in eXceSS and hosted by .mario that will allow you test attack vectors against a page in different contexts. On top...
XSS Cheat Sheet
Just a quick note to point out this invaluable resource for those interested in XSS attack vectors; rsnake's XSS Cheat Sheet.
PHP IDS
For those who haven't yet seen this, .mario and christ1an over at sla.ckers has been working on a PHP Intrusion Detection System and the results are fairly p...
JavaScript eval String.fromCharCode encoder
Here is a nice tool for encoding JavaScript into eval(String.fromCharCode(x,x,x)) format. A full HTML page is listed here, or you can try it out live at the ...
Amendments to the British Computer Misuse Act
pdp has an interesting post from last month about amendments to the British Computer Misuse Act that specify the illegality of "making, supplying or obtainin...
Bypass ASP.NET XSS Protection in Internet Explorer
ASP.NET comes preloaded with some default XSS protection which is actually pretty nifty. However, it turns out that the system can be circumvented by a varie...
httpOnly Cookie Detection
Admittedly of limited use, here is a JavaScript function I wrote to detect the presence of httpOnly cookies. In Firefox the function will overwrite the real ...
Evaluating the security of the JSONRequest object
A proposed extension to the currently supported set of ...Request objects is JSONRequest, interesting from a security point of view because the proponents of...
JavaScript Referer Scripts XSS Injection
Many sites use JavaScript methods to inject a hidden form field into 404 pages to trace the original page that points to the invalid link. An example of this...
Firefox XBL-JS Loader v1.0
Today I wrote a simple tool to illustrate the binding of a Javascript document to a page using Firefox's XBL support (-moz-binding) in an XSS context. The pr...