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August 2016

Just realised that I was singing "Hungry Like the Wolfgang Iser" to a Duran Duran riff because of a bibliography entry. Lit crit geek.

My wife is out at her book group, so I am having a wild night in. By which I mean: checking a bibliography and writing press releases.

Gonna go file a patent: all current systems of banking are inconvenient. I hereby patent convenient banking. Then wait, enforce, and retire.

Although LOL at: "none of these systems provide convenient interfaces to facilitate the communications between editors, users and reviewers"

It seems to be passing reviews between journals owned by different entities that is the specific, narrow target of Elsevier patent.

Top tip for proofing/reading your own work: change the font, the margins, and print it out. Has an estrangement effect on your own words.

I suppose, actually, the most descriptive title would really be: "Literature Against Criticism". No puns there though.

Book titled: "The Anxiety of Academia: Critique, Legitimation, and Discipline in the Novel after Theory". Should I drop first phrase?

I can find (re-)reading review feedback, even when it's mostly positive and constructively critical, somehow painful.

Do others, when you get book/article review feedback, make a checklist of the points so you don't have to revisit the original review?

(He's right. But I don't necessarily think it's wrong -- an acknowledgement of limited reading labour power, to which "critical non-reading"

Read Amy Hungerford's latest today, /Making Literature Now/. @DavidCWinters had warned me that the Wallace chapter would be controversial!

I buy quite a lot of digital music these days. But I can't remember the last time I bought something that I didn't find through Soundcloud.

I have a dream project if a publisher is interested. I'd like to study rejected manuscripts. The majority underside of the iceberg.

A good day. More OLH signups, great OLH CFP, more OLH announcements forthcoming, book listed at publisher, PhD viva examination invitation.

Right, there's one chapter in this book that I don't like & the reviewers didn't like. Time to bash it into proper shape.

Most gratifying part of provisional acceptance of book: submitted it when at my lowest in hospital in March, a copy escrowed with a friend.

We are hoping, within the next month, to have a video demonstration of our @openlibhums annotation-translation tool based on @hypothes_is.

Received 3 reports(!) today on full manuscript of my next monograph. Some revisions required but it's going ahead & it will be open access!

Re last tweet: The world ended in "April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine". Timothy Morton -- Hyperbojects.

The worst kind of review is: "some [impossible-to-implement] structural suggestions". Vicious reviews are upsetting but I can get over them.

Supposed to be receiving feedback/reader reports on multiple (book) projects this week. Always pushes my anxiety levels up.

Proposal for International Pynchon Week titled “Maybe, but it’s code’s all it is”: Thomas Pynchon, Cow Country, and Computational Stylometry

As he was quite frail, the bouncer asked: "do you know where you are, sir?" He mischievously replied with a faux naivety: "is this London?"

One of my favourite anecdotes about the late Russell Hoban was that, late in life, he went to a heavy metal gig for research purposes.

Logical consequence of this argument is to ask why diff students perform differently under the same circumstances. As though they are robots

Minister for HE damaging his universities again with zero-evidence "mediocre teaching" claim in order to bolster his alt-provider agenda.

I spent about an hour today trying to get access to a journal special issue. In the end, went to British Library. What a waste of time.

New GCSE spec. for 2017 replaces A*-G with 9-1 scale. Teachers start teaching it in Sept. Yet no final grade descriptors that I can see.

Thing holding back preprints isn't lack of infrastructure/repositories. It's academic fear of publisher rejection at credentialling stage.

Can't remember where from but great eg of PoS-tagging semantic probs: "Open the door with the key" / "Open the door with the window".

Killer discovery: eating zero chocolatey things all week and then eating a little more than allowed at the weekend gives massive sugar rush.

I do get the market reasons why books end up being £60 but we also know that beyond a certain point it's a very long tail, no?

If it's closer to £20 for individual academics (this is 5 years after publication), I might opt for the convenience purchase.

Pro-tip for publishers: if your academic book will cost me £120, I will opt for the £5 Oyster fare and make it to the British Library.

One warning: it's currently very slow by design as it does remote lookups of words (rate limited to one hit per ten seconds on dict. site).

The next thing I'm working on is to ascertain whether various stylometric signatures of Ebershoff feature in edited chapter of Cloud Atlas.

LOL. Just had an email that reads (paraphrased): "Due to current phishing attacks, we need your password to protect you".

Now I'm going to do a little bit of writing and then heading off to see a production of Antigone directed by one of my wife's ex-students.

Today's work on web translation software went well. There's now a neat option to move through a page sentence-by-sentence when translating.

This first-edition signed copy of David Foster Wallace's /Broom of the System/ an amazing birthday gift from friends

Ordered: Morton's "Literary Detection: How to Prove Authorship in Literature". Received: Wilson's "Color for Your Winter Yard & Garden".

I don't get panic re non-portability for ECRs & REF. I get the anger - exploitative contracts etc - but what's the hiring disadvantage?

Does anybody know of a machine-readable, good-quality English dictionary file or API that includes first-used dates of words? #dh