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November 2016

Decided it would be ultra-healthy to grate an entire raw red onion into my salad for lunch today. Truly foul but I now feel so virtuous.

Fantastic Beasts was quite fun. But can't wizards apparate overseas? And why do they need a complex death chamber when they have spells?

I mean, yeah, if you carve up the current landmass of the world and give everyone an equal share to begin with then maybe but good luck.

But I hate so much talk of blockchain. I've just read of how inscribing property rights in an immutable ledger is a social justice project.

Actually thought of a legitimately useful thing to do with blockchain yesterday: distributed citation networks/logging. #firstforeverything

There's a "residency model" at @BL_Labs to allow access to material that cannot be shared online for any reason #bbkculturaldata

The point of @BL_Labs is to get people to DO THINGS with the British Library's digital collections says @mahendra_mahey #bbkculturaldata

Giving cataloguers guidance on what granular information they store can help determine copyright status notes Horricks. #bbkculturaldata

"Await claim" items, says Horricks, was a way to mark completely unknown material as open to claim. Bit risky. #bbkculturaldata

CC BY-NC-ND license chosen by Horricks's team to persuade rightsholders to allow digitisation & generate income for museum #bbkculturaldata

.@fredsaunderson asks about challenge of the hoof originality and (c) status of faithful digital reproductions #bbkculturaldata

Clarity around messaging on licensing is really important, says @fredsaunderson. Users need to know what they can do. #bbkculturaldata

Libraries are there to be *used* says @fredsaunderson. Unclear whether this is happening to full potential in digital space #bbkculturaldata

.@fredsaunderson notes that it is policy NOT to digitise material for which large-scale copyright clearance is required. #bbkculturaldata

Saunderson notes that digitisation efforts focused on "low-hanging fruit" in copyright terms. Eg Scottish Historical Soc #bbkculturaldata

First up is Fredric Saunderson, IP specialist at the National Library of Scotland #bbkculturaldata: some nice BL rivalry to kick us off!

.@nd_kane shows (potential hoax) video of apparent guerilla digital scanning of Nefertiti bust. Undoing colonial art theft. #bbkculturaldata

Kane also points out that is often acts of cultural destruction that lead to creation of digital versions for preservation #bbkculturaldata

Comes with problem of ingest of crowdsourced material, of course, says @mia_out. Eg official collection management systems. #bbkculturaldata

Humanities hackathons bring programmers, cultural experts, and academics together to forge connections - @mia_out #bbkculturaldata

. @mia_out talking about crowdsourcing transcriptions but also small fragmented crowd projects; often less invisible #bbkculturaldata

Until we have scholars with computational knowledge about structured data, we won't see users of material. - @mia_out #bbkculturaldata

Challenge for British Library and open cultural data is one of scale. 3 million new items added per year says @mia_out. #bbkculturaldata

Linked open data identifiers help with disambiguation, notes @mia_out. Without, just a series of overlapping strings. #bbkculturaldata

"Metadata is exciting for a very small percentage of the population. Most of them are probably here today now!" - @mia_out #bbkculturaldata

Ha! @mia_out notes challenge of translating open cultural data into monetized "innovation"-esque outputs gov desires. #bbkculturaldata

What we call "data" in cultural space is often less clean than in other spaces. Bad metadata/OCR for example. - @mia_out #bbkculturaldata

. @mia_out points out the gap between reality and expectation in dirty open cultural data. Often not a treasure trove. #bbkculturaldata

Reminds me that "build it and they will come" is the exception not the rule. You have to build it and do much outreach #bbkculturaldata

Sinker: in 2014, 50% of visits to the Tate website were for research. Other 50% were for Kraftwerk tickets? #sorry #badjoke #bbkculturaldata

Sinkers describing "Archives & Access" project. Tate has largest collection of British Art in world. How to allow access? #bbkculturaldata

First up at #bbkculturaldata is Dr Rebecca Sinker from the Tate on the affordances of technology for learning in art history.

Today is #bbkculturaldata! Sold out conference on the challenges and benefits of open cultural data. @VasariCentre @birkbeck_arts

My bad days since the stroke have become fewer & further between. Shattered today though, out of the blue. Seems once every six weeks or so.

Actually, I'm maligning SWORD. It's eprints's implementation that doesn't follow the spec, returning incorrect response codes.

It gets better, though. It has nonetheless created the record and uploaded the file. But doesn't return the new record receipt/address.

Managed to put in 2007 so far. It's going to be a long and painful process. Depositing full markdown of all posts along with metadata.

Health scare earlier this year made me wonder what would happen to my decade of eclectic blogging if I died. Begun depositing them in IR.

Right become v good at adopting the language of the left. If you're racist and called out on it, apparently "victimised". Now "safe spaces".

May stop ranting soon. But so annoyed by continued liberal humanist narrative for HE when we don't make our work available to read.

Historians: if only people would learn from history. Historians: there are so many issues with letting people read our work for free online.

"How did you counter the flood of fake news on the Internet that anyone can read?" / "I published my research in a £20 per article journal"

Had a blast at #KUOASymp16 with some great people. Thanks so much to the organisers. Now a long trek back to London via Detroit.

Just heard scepticism re scholar-led publishing b/c they are up against giant corporations. But don't UPs face same challenge? #KUOASymp16

Wonder whether thinking re "network effect" of ScholComms domination by few entities could be profitable theoretical direction. #KUOASymp16

Forgetting the microphones are still on & that I have a VERY loud voice, just broadcast my chocolate addiction to the room #KUOASymp16

. @AprilHathcock put this SO well. OA & APCs are the problem/fault of the Global North. We have the problem that needs fixing #KUOASymp16

A question: even if it's at the core of WHY we do OA, should /strategies/ to get OA attempt to fix the social ills of HE? #KUOASymp16

With much discussion focusing on success of OA in Global South, question for me is: what's blocking uptake of similar models? #KUOASymp16

But the labour to provide, support, preserve, and index those new forms is not abundant. It's tied to scarce economics. #KUOASymp16

Been thinking about Neil's beyond APCs/beyond the PDF conflation. This strikes me as a challenge of the digital #KUOASymp16

. @CharlotteRock asks for a longer genealogy of academic publishing. For whom was it built and whom does it privilege? #KUOASymp16

Saw /The Man Who Knew Infinity/ on the plane yesterday. Obviously heavily romanticised & far from unproblematic but Ramanujan story is great

Something that I'm really looking forward to discussing at #DAHRG this evening: third-party rights clearance and OA for Art History.

So far today: submitted two book chapters that I have been writing; inbox zero; PhD supervision; OLH finance work. Later talk on OA & OLH :)

Quote a while back... Something like "article w/out data is just marketing". Can anyone point me to source? @McDawg @mbeisen @Protohedgehog

Been building back up very slowly from virtually nothing (being able to walk for 3 mins) to this over 8 months. Feel good though.

Stroke recovery has gone v. well. Now up to 50 mins either step climbing (60 SPM) or 50 mins stationary biking (interval) 3x per week.

I'll be giving the Digital Art History Group Keynote at the Courtauld Institute on Monday. Hope to see some of you there. #DAHRG

I know it rarely is -- because: profit -- but if it were, would more clearly focus on the labour in providing publishing services.

Have an amazing money-making plan to place a series of £100 bets against everything I believe and hope for in politics.

There's also forthcoming news that I have heard of fee-waivers and scholarships for asylum seekers at Birkbeck. This is such great news.

It's actually painful, particularly sweet things, and totally overwhelming. Very difficult to describe. It's like it just keeps amplifying.

One of the weirdest things since my stroke: my taste occasionally feels amplified to a painful degree. Like "brain freeze" on my tongue.

I receive several requests per week on this & I simply do not have time to provide detailed instruction beyond what I have already written.

Also, with my regrets, my 2012 guide to starting an open-access journal now kindly asks that you please do not email me for help on this.

This morning I discovered that there is a whole field on history of accountancy and financial record keeping. Shouldn't have surprised me!

The best thing about flying to Gatwick is that you can increase the length of your journey by a third waiting for your bags to arrive.

Critique of taxpayer argument for OA from @Stephen_Curry: "but many of our citizens, particularly the wealthier ones, are not taxpayers".