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May 2017

Literary talk this afternoon on symptomatic reading approaches & post-critique through the metaphorical lens of "metadata".

please tell me that Trump pulling out of the Paris Climate agreement was just some late-night tweeting typo

Had the nicest email about the piece I wrote on being seriously unwell in academia. Sender told me she has it printed on her desk & rereads.

Two literary talks next week: on the metaphor of "metadata" for reading redaction & computational approaches to Cloud Atlas

Conservative election campaign in a nutshell is: half-bake some policies, hide the PM, and slander the opposition leader.

A non-Euclidean monster of a birthday present from @the_blochian and @iainrobertsmith. Looking forward to this!

One of the pains of sharing a name ("Orbit") with International Journal on Orbital Disorders is that we get submissions on eye surgery :/

Although my colleague Joanna didn't know it was my birthday, the generous gift she gave was darker than most I received

Brilliant birthday at the Birkbeck #DystopiaNow17 conference. Intellectually stimulating and great to be among friends. Party tomorrow!

I always wince a little when people don't point out that Foucault noted that the disciplinary era may already be over #DystopiaNow17

Just walked past an advert that read "share opinions, win prizes" and I'm sure it wasn't even for "men on the Internet".

Tomorrow I will be spending my birthday at our #DystopiaNow17 and chairing @the_blochian's keynote. Because that's how I roll.

Also giving a talk today at the Birkbeck Institute for Data Analytics on the challenges of humanities texts as data.

A busy day today of meetings, PhD supervisions, OLH admin, and then to the British Academy for the launch of that report!

Think Birkbeck should instigate an Eric Hobsbawm Memorial Prize for Small Animal Rescue. Our woodpecker deed could be the first award.

Did a good deed on an otherwise miserable news day. Helped my colleague David McAllister rescue a woodpecker baby.

Before you retweet claims of "my relative is missing" in Manchester check the account carefully. Group of trolls posting fakes and laughing.

Pretty terrible day: migraine and Virgin Media wrecked my internet connection and won't fix until next week. Both quite debilitating.

Most of Britain likes Corbyn's manifesto but dislikes Corbyn. Concurrently, they apparently dislike May's manifesto but don't mind her.

The Tory manifesto proposes charging companies a 2k fine per non-EU worker hired. Including hospitals & universities, I presume?

Now seeing Jane Seaton, Ben Worthy and @the_blochian speaking on: Will 2017 be 1984? Rethinking Orwell's Dystopia.

Currently hearing about Virginia Woolf's teeth from @PeterFifield as part of @birkbeck_arts Arts Week. Packed room!

"We've come up with some great new metrics for ranking unis! Wealth, age of institution, respectability, name brand-value."

"Our university league table is looking odd. Wrong unis doing well. No-one will believe it."

"Add spend-per student."

"That's better."

Specialist vet advice is to mash up Mary's food with baby veggy paste & boiled bottled mineral water. Our evening.

Also pleased to report that my paper, co-authored with the neural network trained on Textual Practice, was accepted!

4. On determining whether Thomas Pynchon is the author of Cow Country using authorship attribution techniques at La Rochelle

2. on symptomatic reading and metadata in Mark Blacklock's I'm Jack and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, at Bucks

I'm doing some fun literary talks in coming weeks. 1. this Thursday at Birkbeck, on politics in post-60s US literary fiction.

If attack on NHS is targeted and not just a generic worm, it's sickening and really trashed any faith I might've had in humanity.

Replace the word "smart" with the phrase "personal surveillance computer" in any tech product and you've about got it.

I can safely say that today is the best I have felt, health-wise, in well over a year. Since before I had my stroke. Good stuff!

I see Amazon is putting a permanent homeless shelter inside one of its facilities. Nice to see a company help its under-paid staff.

The problem with Leftfield playing Leftism in its entirety is that Release the Pressure is such a strong opener that it's hard to recover.

Myers-Brigss stuff may be nonsense but Cambridge soc. media profiler labels me as INTJ (introversion, intuition, thinking, judgment).

I mean that quite literally. This is going to have taken me a whole day by the time I finish, I'd estimate.

I'm doing one right now. If every library that supports us was this detailed, we would need extra staff to complete them, raising costs.

An interesting point from my experience. Library evaluations of resources are important, but they take so much time for small publishers.

I've been doing a comprehensive overhaul of OLH finances today; serious spreadsheeting. Just as I finished the sheet, we got another signup!

Hmmm, UCU threatened with an injunction and damages by London Metropolitan University (LMU) over boycott advice apparently.

For the 0.0001% of my Twitter followers who care: I fixed it. Unetbootin is a godsend. Boot-repair knows its stuff.

This evening's "fun": managed to wreck a kernel update due to no device space on disk and removed all other kernels. #repairing