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September 2014

Saw the Inherent Vice trailer. Am still unconvinced the film will be any good. (Of Pynchon's novels, it's among the weaker books.)

A certain nominative determinism in the headline "Conservative MP Mark Reckless announces that he is leaving the party to join UKIP".

Have, though, finished Mitchell's The Bone Clocks while waiting for the AmTrak. Thought it fizzled out a bit in the last part, but v good!

Innovative journal platform for multi-media project was pulled and made into a VC-funded startup. Lesson: temptation to sell out #rwob #argh

Thanks to all at #COASP for an interesting and enjoyable conference. Will be at the final lunch, so do say hello if you haven't already.

Tipping point for #OA in Europe was only last year. Mostly green. Think Aspesi is over-estimating how much change we should have seen #COASP

I'd argue that there are often competing goals for OA movement. Centre-right govs. want it for v. diff reasons to left-advocates #COASP

Aspesi says that he isn't sure what the goal of OA movement is: many different goals. Why should there not be multiple goals, though? #COASP

Aspesi says that subscription publishing remains healthy but that full gold OA poses a large threat to their profit margins #COASP

Aspesi predicts far lower impact from #OA than many claim #COASP (but then he isn't a researcher w/out access, he is interested in markets)

Had a very nice evening with @OpenBookPublish, @gbilder and many others at #COASP - probably geekier than it should have been but good fun!

Pinfield discussing public audience for medical literature. Some claim that this isn't important. Suspect @McDawg would disagree. #COASP

African Journals Online now planning continent-wide OA strategy. Impact Factor does huge damage to African journal publishing #COASP

Extremely difficult to recover costs in any form in African journal economy - APCs and subscriptions both very tightly squeezed. #COASP

RS: "Kinda hard to find advertisers for a mathematics journal" [I'm also not convinced in any way that it's a good idea] #COASP

We're warned that the British Ecological Society will conclude "hooray, but..." on OA. Wonder whether that "but" might be finance... #COASP

Struck by fact that challenges of efficient APC payment mechanisms similar to difficulties faced by Jisc Publication Router #COASP

Attribution is a legal requirement in CC licenses. The question of /how/ to do this is left open, though, says @CarolineSutton #COASP

Begins with analogy by @CarolineSutton on phone chargers; why not standardised? #COASP (answer is, I'd suspect, corporate lock-in)

Putting research data in "cloud" could compound problem says @gbilder. Big dangers in lack of ownership linked to corp. finance. #COASP

Interesting conjunction of OA monographs & textbooks
in @ucylpay's lib. pub. enterprise. Textbooks less, monogr. more, common in hums #COASP

Library-based publishing panel now at #COASP with the great Alma Swan kicking it off. University publishing not new, of course, she notes.

Political/administrative drivers/constraints for SciELO include international environment, access, metrics, IF & prestige #COASP

Paxman writes re. trend to erase national borders (in support of No vote). But he's a Conservative. Current gov has awful immigration stance

One day I'm going to write up the /vast/ amount of behind-the-scenes work that we've put into @openlibhums already. Not today, though.

Fascinating how, wherever OA emerges, you see the same concerns (some valid, some totally misplaced) and similar stages of acceptance.

When I was in my worst phase of rheumatoid arthritis I could barely walk. Got so many dirty looks for taking seat just while my wife stood.

One of the best things about the Guardian's membership scheme is that Daily Mail is now true: you can be a "card-carrying Guardianista".

In other words, I understand it as a phased, considered strategy, not an absolute "everything, now" if that blocks future. @AmSciForum

Listening to Knopfler's Sailing to Philadelphia. 1st time I heard it, by chance, was reading Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, on which it is based.

My train journey home is being vastly improved by The Orb's new live album, The Orb's Further Adventures Beyond Dark Matter.

(Wary of that futurology because judgement of a "good" translation is social. Might be possible to gauge social preferences.) #dhcshef

"Intelligence is light: reflection, vivid, enlightened, light, luminary, shine, lustre, glaring, clear, gleam" says @EllenBramwell #dhcshef

Historical Thesaurus of English built from OED and Thesaurus of Old English. Much hand-coding in project, notes @marcgalexander #dhcshef

Now @marc_alexander and @EllenBramwell speaking about @ahrcpress project "mapping metaphor with the Historical Thesauras" #dhcshef

Nesi's project couldn't yet solve IP problems; digitise at-risk maniscripts; transform letters to corpora. #todo #apply #dhcshef

Migrant letter collections span: hardcopy originals, scanned manuscripts, hardcopy transcribed texts, text files and XML files #dhcshef

Nesi says these letters also reveal patterns of migration/settlement and shed light of processes of language variation #dhcshef

Migrant letters span all social classes, express writers' identities & tell us about domestic life of period, says Nesi #dhcshef

Hilary Nesi up first today at #dhcshef on "Digitising experiences of migration: the development of interconnected letter collections"

Cogent OA email: "Ever wondered what other authors are up to when they aren’t writing and researching?"

Me: ha! Like that ever happens.

Stoyanova says objectives of their encoding project is to navigate author design, have bibliographic network of refs #dhcshef

That's not to mention marginalia and intratextuality notes Stoyanova. This sounds like a hideously arduous encoding effort to me! #dhcshef

Zibaldone genre is unsystematized notebook jottings. Shares characteristics w/ encyclopaedia eg cross reference, says Stoyanova #dhcshef

TEI-simple suited to representation of some early modern and modern books. "Printed books by dead white guys" says @jamescummings! #dhcshef

Even customisable down to element level, modifying attributes etc says @jamescummings. "Customised, but documented" TEI #dhcshef

Looking forward to the "TEI Friday" session at #dhcshef. The punning name could only be improved if the session was hosted by Marc Records.

See Sula, C. A. "Digital Humanities and Libraries: a conceptual model", 2013, Journal of Library Administration says @topshelver #DHCshef

Good point from audience: institutions need to facilitate clean url structures on digital projects. Not always the case. #dhcshef #spaghetti

Best practice resources for from Jisc's "Spotlight on the Digital" are available. Should be able to find them by searching! #dhcshef

A collection can be poorly discoverable through trad. channels but have heavy social media use, notes @paolamarchionni #dhcshef

Quantitative & qualitative research. BUT: no access to usage stats for digital collections, says @paolamarchionni #dhcshef

Hearing from @paolamarchionni from Jisc about project between Jisc, RLUK & SCONUL to define and identify discoverability problems #dhcshef

User-corrected OCR is done under license that gives XML as reward to correctors. Wonder how Proquest feel re massively scaling #dhcshef

Advanced Research Consortium does heavy lifting for index on 18th-C Connect, NINES, MESA and others, notes @mandellc #dhcshef

Methotrexate was helpful, but badly tolerated. Then, in last decade, anti-TNF, B-Cell targeting, anti-IL6, anti-JAK. All go.

Really interesting that, for decades after the 1950s, there was no real advance in treatment/understanding of rheumatoid arthritis.

Got so keen writing that blog post on my phone on the Underground that I sailed past King's Cross and had to go back. On my way now though!

Arriving at Cambridge always reminds me of my grandfather who would walk me when I was a child to Trumpington meadows to watch the trains.

Security personnel at King's Cross now "tour" the station, rather than "patrolling" it. Which is so much less militarised and far nicer.

one-way rhetorics of dissemination in #OA sat within histories of Marxism and anti-humanism. Which was fairly pretentious but interesting.

Reading Ranciere on Althusser this morning, and having been reminded of Foucault by @ernestopriego yesterday, I wondered how the...

Royalties on academic books are usually (rightly) tiny but anything I do earn on /OA and the Humanities/ will go to @ArthritisRUK

As part of my work on #OA and humanities & forthcoming book, I'll be doing a tweeted talk tomorrow @cambUP_books 10:30-11:00. #openaccess

This supposed independent Scotland "brain drain" seems to rest on dodgy premises. Like: academics can just move & Eng unis are flush w/ cash

The LSE Impact piece about "humanities: don't moan, just do it" has a point but also seems dangerous for free inquiry & dissent.