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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
A letter to the Editor of the Guardian, who declined to publish it.
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...
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 ...
A recent XKCD caused some amusement: “Vocabulary update: I learned another word today, bringing my total to twelve”.
How do you solve a problem like a séance? With Python and GPT3, is my answer.
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
Excel stores dates in a very odd way: a serial number of days since 1900.
In recent days, several signatories to the Principles on Open Scholarly Infrastructure have taken to performing self-audits of their compliance with the prin...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Pain is a great topic for philosophers. Wittgenstein uses the example of “owning” pain (“I cannot have your pains”) in his Philosophical Investigations. Susa...
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...
LocalStack is a great cloud emulation layer. It lets you simulate interaction with AWS, which is great for writing integration tests.
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Affect Theory
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”? There is some work on this already. For instance, Dougherty, M. V., ‘Defining the Scholarly Record’, in Correcting the Schola...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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.
Evusheld is a combination of two long-acting antibodies (tixagevimab and cilgavimab). It’s a drug designed to protect clinically vulnerable people against Co...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Lots about contemporary computation stresses availability and uptime. It is important, for instance, that the OLH servers for which I have ultimate responsib...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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, ...
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.
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...
I was reflecting this morning on the following 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...
I asked on Twitter for where to start on considering programming languages as languages. Here are some of the best recommendations:
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.
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”...
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...
Some incomplete notes on the introduction to Gaskill, Nicholas, Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color (Minneapolis: University of...
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...
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...
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...
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 “...
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...
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...
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...
Throughout the works of Michel Pastoureau (at least in his books on Black and Green) are sketched ideas of the notion of a “chromoclasm”.
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...
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...
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...
This week, cOAlition S endorsed the Subscribe to Open (S2O) business model.
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...
Do you think that the Subscribe-To-Open model could be applied to new academic presses who have no backlist?
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.
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...
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.
Non-vulnerable people perhaps don’t understand why the government advice to shielders is so frightening. I think I can give a flavour though:
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...
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 has commissioned a report that seems to be their latest attempt at painting open access to research as economically damaging to t...
Today I have written to the University of Leicester tendering my resignation as an external examiner.
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 ...
This week opened with the distressing news that Lord Sumption, supposedly someone whose judgement is entirely sound, having been a Supreme Court justice, had...
I am due up for vaccination in the very near future. This is good news. But it’s tempered.
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...
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.
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, today, submitted the manuscript of my book, currently titled Warez: The Economic Aesthetics and Alternative Reality Games of the Topsite Scene to the...
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, ...
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...
The disciplines that have had it hardest for unwanted appropriation and assumed specialization this year have undoubtedly been various strands of medicine, v...
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...
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 ...
Studies such as my Warez book fall under the rubric of ‘netnographies’; work that attempt to examine ethnographically the principles and characteristics of v...
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...
After a Herculean effort, coinciding with open access week 2020, our edited volume Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Glo...
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...
Today, in the Observer, the Sunday national newspaper of the liberal Guardian Media Group, Will Hutton offered a sobering retrospective of the university cri...
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, ...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
Defining Threat Infrastructures ‘Threat infrastructures’ are platforms that are established or promised to be established solely or primarily in order to cha...
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...
This week for COPIM we are reading Knöchelmann, Marcel, The Democratisation Myth: Open Access and the Solidification of Epistemic Injustices (SocArXiv, 9 Jun...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 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...
This week for COPIM we are reading Bardzell, Shaowen, Jeffrey Bardzell, Jodi Forlizzi, John Zimmerman, and John Antanitis, ‘Critical Design and Critical Theo...
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...
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...
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...
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 life miserable for academic scholars who wish to re-use their images in third-party publications. I am not against paying museums li...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 is a model pioneered by Annual Reviews that basically says that if libraries continue to subscribe, the title will become OA. If libraries ...
Springer-Nature has a new report out on tracking APCs.
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
Some of my draft responses to the UKRI OA consultation.
Since yesterday’s post on The UKRI Open Access Review Consultation Document my inbox has been swamped by journalists, librarians, and publishers asking what ...
These are my notes on The UKRI Open Access Review Consultation Document.
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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. ...
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 ...
The most recent Royal Historical Society document on Plan S says the following about the Open Library of Humanities (OLH):
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 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...
An interesting discussion today with one of my senior publishing technology developers, Mauro Sanchez, led me to thinking about the rights of presentation an...
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...
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...
In the acknowledgements to Close Reading with Computers, I write:
Birkbeck, University of London, my institution, has pulled out of all national league tables. I think this is a good move.
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...
Today marks the publication of my latest book, Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, ...
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...
The autoimmune conditions from which I suffer are a total pain to describe under the general frameworks within which most people understand illness.
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...
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...
The Sacred Unreadable Artefact: Digital Preservation, Computational Abundance, and Scarce Access
I have a music release/EP out on Tici Taci records today, called The Learning Experience.
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 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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
I have a new article out in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction on how to read redaction in contemporary fiction.
Today, Research England released its final guidance for REF2021 submissions in the UK.
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...
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...
I write to provide feedback in an individual capacity on the Plan S implementation guidelines.
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 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...
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...
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...
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:
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...
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.
Even as worldwide militaries develop autonomous killer robots, when we think of the ethics of AI, we often turn to the Asimov principles:
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...
Some open-access advocates argue that transparency and accountability are key for open access (meaning: the removal of price and permission barriers to readi...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
Let’s assume that we have a Learned Society that fulfills the following conditions:
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 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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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,
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Consortial OA funding models such as Knowledge Unlatched, the Open Library of Humanities, and others are non-classical economic setups. They are susceptible ...
Cheap it is not, but the Folio Society Edition of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker is a beautiful item to behold.
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...
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...
One of the most pleasing, but also most difficult, parts of running the Open Library of Humanities is bringing new journals onto the platform.
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...
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 ...
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...
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:
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,...
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),...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 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...
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 internal draft of the Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework that was requested by FOI last February contained the following clause:
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...
In his recent piece for WonkHE, Chris Husbands, the chair of the TEF panel, wrote in order to “bust” five myths about the TEF.
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...
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.
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...
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...
A fragment of thought:
An email I received today about one of my open-access articles:
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...
I am extremely pleased to say that my latest peer-reviewed book, Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict has to...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In Open Access and the Humanities, I wrote:
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 ...
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...
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...
Today, my peer-reviewed journal article on the publishing history of the two substantially different versions of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was published. ...
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...
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...
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 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...
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 ...
As part of the translation platform we’re building, I needed to implement the following workflow:
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...
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 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....
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 ...
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,...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Dear all,
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
Research Fortnight is running an interesting piece about the REF consultation document that was pulled late last year. Indeed, while the sector is desperate ...
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...
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 (...
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
The Budapest Open Access Initiative statement begins: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good”. T...
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 ...
An article in the Times Higher Education yesterday got me thinking about institutional stability, finance, and the ongoing “reforms” to UK higher education. ...
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...
A central anxiety for literary studies in the era of scientific dominance pertains to the extent to which groupings, taxonomies and classifications are metho...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Dear Sir/Madam,
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Q2: Is there anything else we should be considering in producing the mandate to NHS England?
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...
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...
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...
This post originally appeared in an edited form on Wonkhe.
Thinking more about how book processing charges concentrate costs.
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”, ...
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...
In today’s Research Professional (paywalled) Martin McQuillan asks:
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 ...
Elsevier has just published a response of sorts to the resignation of the Lingua editors and editorial board. The company there claims that:
#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...
Dear Mr. Johnson,
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...
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...
An off-cut from writing.
David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has “named and shamed” several top universities for allowing claimed “hate speech” on campus. Camero...
I feel fairly drained today reading the speech given by the minister for Higher Education, Jo Johnson.
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...
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...
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...
Sigh. More hacking attempts and seems someone did manage to inject a php eval attack into one of my Wordpress installs.
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...
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,...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
If you think carefully about research publication and its economics, a strange (but also obvious) point becomes clear. In university ecosystems where we have...
Some thoughts…
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 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...
The things that concern me about article processing charges (APCs) for open access are not those surrounding quality control, “predatory publishers” or so fo...
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...
The abstract for my paper, to be presented at International Pynchon Week 2015, in Athens on Wednesday 10th June.
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...
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...
The abstract for my talk at Congress 2015, in Ottawa:
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...
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...
I wrote yesterday, in a grumpy state, about the restrictiveness of copyright and licensing of screenshots in academic material. Today brings happier news.
Just a little anger/despair at the state of our cultural industries.
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
I tell people, repeatedly, that publisher brand fuels a strange economic environment for scholarly communications. I also note that symbolic capital (reputat...
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. Even so, 1987 seems unpropitious to a remarkable degree. The academic world in general feels itself to be un...
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...
The current transition to gold open access (OA) through the implementation of an author- or institution-facing charge (an article or book processing charg...
I am reading a most remarkable book.
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.
A map, as of the 28th February 2015, of Chapter Three of the book I am slowly working on.
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.
A map, as of the 22nd February 2015, of Chapter Two of the book I am slowly working on.
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 ...
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...
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...
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 environment surrounding open access to monographs was significantly advanced today by the release of a report commissioned by the UK's Higher Education F...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Green open access refers to making academic, peer-reviewed research that has been published elsewhere (even subscription/sales venues) available for anyone t...
The extraction of use-value, exchange-value or surplus-value from academic research at sites distant from the university.
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
New article out in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication: Eve, Martin Paul, ‘All That Glisters: Investigating Collective Funding Mechanism...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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. ...
One of the hardest parts of typesetting articles for scholarly publication in the JATS standard, especially when using homemade tools, is the bibliography. J...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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: ...
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...
A twitter conversation that I had with Michelle Brook this morning. [View the story "Openness for society or for profit?" on Storify]
For my own reference: 0x0020 Apply first row conditional formatting 0x0040 Apply last row conditional formatting 0x0080 Apply first column conditiona...
This article originally appeared, in a shorter, edited form in the Guardian: Is UK humanities research reaching the widest possible audience? Today marks the...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
Martin Paul Eve, Pynchon and Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Thomas Pynchon, perhaps the most important living American author, is famed f...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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 a text-based transcoder meTypeset is, in essence, a transcoder for text. While “transcode” is usually used in a multimedia context, we are transc...
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 ...
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 Project Today brings with it some notable changes to my scholarly article XML (NLM/JATS) typesetter (meTypeset). First off, the project is n...
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...
Eve, Martin Paul, ‘Pynchon and Wittgenstein: Ethics, Relativism and Philosophical Methodology’, in Profils Américains: Thomas Pynchon, ed. by Gilles Chameroi...
Eve, Martin Paul. 2014. "The Means of (Re-)Production: Expertise, Open Tools, Standards and Communication." Publications 2, no. 1: 38-43. This article exam...
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...
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...
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 — a writer or an artist who captures the imagination of a time. Sometimes these philosophers are recognized as such; oft...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 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...
I have a new review of Belfiore, Eleonora, and Anna Upchurch, eds., Humanities in the Twenty-first Century: Beyond Utility and Markets (Basingstoke: Palgrave...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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/...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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" ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
My two spheres of interest -- difficult works of English literature and computer programming (OK, scholarly communications and publishing, also. OK, there ar...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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, ...
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? Dr. Martin Paul Eve, University of Lincoln Paper delivered at conference: 5th July 2013 This work...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
Martin Paul Eve, ‘Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of “Metamodernism”: Post-Millennial Post-Postmodernism?’, C21 Literature: Journal of ...
Co-presented with Dr. Caroline Edwards: "Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Finch: Adorno, Utopia and Open Access Publishing", Lincoln University, 21st-C...
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...
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 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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
Getting this to work has been the bane of my morning, so here's what I did to eventually get it working:
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
'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...
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," ...
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...
There is a proud tradition in many fields of the humanities of critical thinking. Linked to the Enlightenment Humanist tradition, this critique achieves its ...
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, ...
[View the story "Weird Council: #mieville2012" on Storify] Weird Council: #mieville2012 Storified by Martin Eve · Sun, Sep 16 2012 02:22:19 @thecity...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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" ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
'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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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! ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
2nd July, 2012: University of Brighton
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 ...
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...
David Cameron has now launched the end of "compassionate Conservatism", pledging to end the "entitlement culture" of benefits. Twitter has, predictably, expl...
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...
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 ...
Just found one that I hadn't noticed before: The term "commitment" unites Heidegger and Jaspers together with the lowest tractatus-writers. – Adorno, Theodor...
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),...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 second day of the 21st-Century British Fiction Conference at Birkbeck saw an opening keynote from Bob Eaglestone in which he provocatively challenged the...
[View the story "Day 1 of Twenty-First-Century Literature Conference at Birkbeck" on Storify]
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!
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
In which I look nervous and shifty. Please note: this post's featured image is licensed and not shared under a CC license.
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...
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'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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
"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...
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...
"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...
"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...
"Artworks are eliminated along with the youthful θαυμαζειv" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by R...
"Fireworks are apparation κατ εξοχην: They appear empirically yet are liberated" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiede...
"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...
"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...
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 ...
"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....
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...
"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...
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...
"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...
"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...
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...
Pynchon biography sleuth, Albert Rolls, sent me information today of the only known inscribed Pynchon book complete with a presentation letter. Information o...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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, ...
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". ...
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...
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...
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...
At last, the First Fictions launch weekend, featuring Ian Rankin, Nicholas Royle, Bryan Talbot, Elleke Boehmer, Adam Roberts and many others is available for...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
...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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
About half an hour before the official announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2011 (which was awarded to Tomas Tranströmer) reports started circulat...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
Reading Negative Dialectics, I was unable to track down a succinct, suitable definition of the terms "intentio recta" and "intentio obliqua", first appearing...
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 ...
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...
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...
On Friday, HEFCE announced its new board members. Here's the rundown: Professor Anne Greenough Professor Anne Greenough is a paediatrician and Professor of ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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 ...
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, ...
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? I recently reached the halfway point in my 6-year PhD program at the University of Michigan, allowing me to ponder...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In the spirit of writing up my recent conference visits, I thought I would share a rundown of the conference entitled "Enslavement: Colonial Appropriations, ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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'...
Here's a quick 'n' easy version of another post that uses the rpm instead of the extracting to opt.
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Please find, for your delectation, licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license, my Prezi on Using Twitter for Researc...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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?": ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Hereby instigating an annual May 8th culture jamming festival to be herein evidenced by photographic, textual, cartographic and video documentation. To prove...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
An announcement that I will be speaking at the "Enslavement: Colonial Appropriations, Apparitions, Remembrances, 1750-Present Day" conference at the Universi...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Bit of an in-joke, but I think my career has reached a new high with Gaz's recent award bestowed upon me:
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
</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 ...
While browsing the EThOS Thesis collection today, I suddenly became curious as to the history, statistically speaking, of doctorates in my field of literatur...
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 ...
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...
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...
Image credit: grewlike under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. Picture this: postcards and letters beyond text Postcards Competition – deadline extended! The arrival ...
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...
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...
Image credit: rodolphoreis; Licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-alike To my great excitement, my initial proposal for the forthcoming book...
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...
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...
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...
Here's a screenshot of today's milestone on Mendeley for Android; collection display running in the emulator:
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...
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 ...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Yesterday, I attended an event facilitated by the Research Information Network and hosted by Sage Publishing as a roundtable discussion of the complex issues...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
There has been a trend, in recent days, of moving towards providing tweets under various licenses; most prominently, Creative Commons Non-commercial Shareali...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The following constitute a preliminary note-taking/synoptical exercise undertaken for my own benefit, but shared in case anybody finds them useful. I should ...
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...
09:00-10:30 Session IX chair: Sascha Pöhlmann Paweł Stachura (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań), Literary Spaces in Pynchon...
... International Pynchon Week, Day 2 (continued from previous post). 09:00-10:30 Session V chair: Paweł Frelik Huei-ju Wang (National...
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...
30575816-Columbia-University-Press-Catalog-Fall-2010.pdf (6182 KB) </div> According to the Columbia University Press Fall Catalogue, th...
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...
So, it transpires that the Oxford University Students Union have had their freedom of information request rejected on the grounds that it is schedu...
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...
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...
2009-03-12 - Arts and Humanities Research Council Funding Application.docx (18 KB) </div> Applying for a Block Grant Partnership Doctora...
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...
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...
One of the long running debates regarding the British Library reading rooms has resurfaced this week. Upon entering the library this morning I was...
The abstracts for International Pynchon Week 2010 are now online! Of course, I would thoroughly recommend my own paper, which will focus on terro...
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...
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/...
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...
The result of a humanities discipline map for Digital Researcher 2010 at the British Library!
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...
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...
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...
Introducing sshsplit sshsplit is a GPL-3 licensed application that multiplexes ssh dynamic tunnels. </img> For example, you might normally run: ssh -D ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
Just been asked some further questions about the DataExecutor class on FreeNode and thought I'd give some usage instructions/clarification here. Howto: Fill ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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-...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
DataExecutor.cs:
I was interested to see in a XSS/CSRF exploit the following lines:
After much testing/tweaking the first release of .NETIDS is upon us! Featured in this release: automatic String.fromCharcode conversion and detection new an...
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,...
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...
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/...
Just a quick note to announce the start of dotnetids, a port of phpids to the .NET Framework. http://code.google.com/p/dotnetids/
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...
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...
Enter JavaScript in the box below and press "encode": alert('test'); Encode
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...
ha.ckers are reporting that their book on Cross Site Scripting has finally been released! Buy a copy at Amazon!
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
Just a quick note to point out this invaluable resource for those interested in XSS attack vectors; rsnake's XSS Cheat Sheet.
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
A proposed extension to the currently supported set of ...Request objects is JSONRequest, interesting from a security point of view because the proponents of...
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...
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...