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May 2021

Not going to lie, I'm excited about this book in our series from @erikketzan. It's my decades-old Pynchon obsession, of course, but ace cover, too.

Thanks for the birthday wishes, all! Friends and family seemed to think along similar lines of "all the vital food groups" for presents....

And the friend who didn't send me whisky sent me a whisky tumbler...

... And a Catch-22 t-shirt. In Russian.

I've been working to a "45 seconds in 45 minutes" challenge for music. Something new at speed. There are a few cheats - it usually involves a cheeky 303 line punched in quickly and some inane lyrics to give a vocal texture - but it's definitely a fun generative strategy.

Although I am on annual leave, an exciting day at @openlibhums as @elcareless joins the editorial team. Welcome, Eleanor!

I've just seen that a local pub here is accepting bitcoin. It's going to be fun for that person waiting 60 minutes for their pint payment to be confirmed.

My @openlibhums goodbye party is going to a suitably foolish schedule already

We asked people who worked at OLH to come up with its values. Some good things to work for.

I am intrigued to learn that there are people who identify as "collar fanatics" but who are so "fanatical" that they see the brilliance of not having a collar. 🤔

How big a priority were universities and higher education in the UK government's pandemic spending? 0.2% of the total according to today's Research* Playbook.

Right, looking forward to this given my recent research trajectory into early paper, ink, and typography....

I know there was great discontent with the final episode of S06 Line of Duty. I don't know why. The only thing I didn't get was Kate's flight in E06.

My morning's research reading is about the earliest histories of ink. Tsien: "The earliest form of the [Chinese] character for ink (mol) ... apparently refers to a punishment of blackening or tattooing the face rather than to use of a writing fluid".

I note, in our institutional repository, "Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies (OLD)".

Presume there will also be "Centre for Medieval Studies (VERY OLD)".

Two years ago today with my Nan (age 97 at the time) and CLOSE READING WITH COMPUTERS, dedicated to her. To my sorrow, I haven't seen her since 2019 thanks to the pandemic, but will do so twice very soon. Once for my birthday (35) and once for hers (100).

This morning's research reading for me is Mark Kurlansky's Paper: Paging Through History. Less scholarly and more popular than, say, the Tsien I've been reading, but still interesting and useful on lignin cellulose content and discolouration.

Am waiting on a friend to send in the trumpet part (!) for my next record so decided, this afternoon, just to play some music instead. Tried Rekordbox and must say that it is very good. Although its auto-"mix" feature isn't going to be putting any DJs out of business just yet.

"Very often we forget to actually attach the file when we send an email that's supposed to have an attachment. Did this never happen to you? If not, then it will."

I was just looking back at the archive of that first book. In those days I used to save a fresh copy of the work at the end of every day, so I have this book (back to the very start of my Ph.D.) in daily snapshots as it grew.

I then moved on to using git to version things, taking daily snapshots. I now don't really use versioning. Perhaps I should re-instigate this.

I have just now signed the rights reversion agreement for my first book, PYNCHON AND PHILOSOPHY. It will become open access under a CC BY license in the near future! This means that all seven of my published books are now OA. The next three (2x in press, 1x writing ) will be too.

I suppose that the Korean translation of _Password_ is not OA. Not sure I can do much about that though. https://www.kyobobook.co.kr/product/detailViewKor.laf?mallGb=KOR&ejkGb=KOR&barcode=9791196166021&orderClick=JAj

The OLH gang are plotting something. Told me to expect a parcel in the post.

Got excited yesterday. Thought it had arrived. Then saw it didn't say "OLH" anywhere on it. Opened it. Blood test kit the hospital needs me to do. Great.

I am in a pre-recorded talk, ready for my own Q&A, listening to my own talk. I can report that this is excruciating.

It's been a long day already but I'm dosing on the caffeine for 2x Library Publishing Forum talks this evening. Looking forward to seeing people there!

This morning I am reading Richard Leslie Hills, Papermaking in Britain 1488-1988 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). It's useful to my project. It also cost me £90, which is making these footnotes extremely expensive.

(The sort of niche title that would really benefit from OA.)

The top thing about the whole "UK government minister defends inviting holocaust deniers to campus" fiasco is that they have, for years, been telling us that it's lefty academics who are the total relativists without any morals.

At this point, the only two things keeping me in USS are the insurance fallbacks of retirement due to ill health and death in service benefit. Seems the scheme is wrecked.

We're on S05 of Line of Duty and they're really putting the pressure on Hastings

this niche Poirot joke is brought to you by a Tuesday of 5.hrs of video calls

Ah, that's OK then. (It's just that very many of those 10k will be people with conditions like mine...)

My research today has been into a historical question that seems obvious but that actually has a range of answers: why is paper white and when did it become so?

The best source on most of this kind of stuff for the ancient Chinese context is Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, Paper and Printing, Science and Civilisation in China, Reprinted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Here he notes that early bast-fibers of hemp, jute, and flax lead to a light colour. However, it's more involved than that. The shih Ming from around +200 defined "huang" as "dyeing paper" and the practice appears to have been common.

Indeed, on p. 74 he believes that the yellow dye, which was designed to provide insect-proofing but also to ensure a glossy finish, comes from a liquid of the Phellodendron amurense (cork tree).

The earliest surviving example of this (in the Western scholarly literature) is documented by Giles, Lionel, ‘Dated Chinese Manuscripts in the Stein Collection’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London, 7.4 (1935), 809–36, p. 813.

Here Giles notes that an early 26-feet long roll of paper from Tunhuang is dyed yellow but, at the end, the dyeing is incomplete and the original "whitish" colour comes through.

Tsien notes that the names of dyers are recorded (p. 75), thereby demonstrating significant social status or import of the role.

Another insecticide process, however, turns the paper an orange-red colour (wan nien hun) due to the use of red lead. Toxic to bookworms apparently!

However, the ho-thi of the Han dynasty also used red dye for artistic purposes, putting red paper earlier than yellow in the -1st century.

Anyway, that's as far as I've got today. Interesting stuff though!

What's next? Need to read about the development of inks and what this meant, historically, for the color of paper.

We've had to have some urgent repair work done on the house today, so all the windows are open, my door is closed, and it's Masks @ Home™ for me!

"This is Panda from CESPEX group, with 14 years experience producing explosion-proof lighting".

Just what I wanted!

Oh drat. @laurenfklein is speaking at @birkbeck_ETC next week and I can't make it as I am speaking elsewhere. Arrgh!

My research work this morning has taken me to Albert Abramson's The History of Television, 1880 to 1941. This book is extremely detailed about the development of televisual technologies, but there's some exceedingly dodgy prehistory stuff on stroboscopy that seems inaccurate.

A tendency just to gesture to widely-held beliefs about the dates of invention of the phénakisticope, stroboscope, zoetrope, etc.

Had a nightmare last night that I was interviewed by AC-12. The end of the interview went:

"I am going to recommend the immediate termination of your book contracts and all your grant funding too. Have you anything to say to that, fella?"

The amount of money UK universities fork out each year to access paywalled content from Elsevier – the largest academic publisher in the world – could pay 1,028 academic researchers a salary of £45,000 per year. https://wonkhe.com/blogs/open-access-publishing-is-the-ethical-choice/

Rather than focusing on career damage to those who can’t publish with an Elsevier title, we should focus on the opportunity cost in hundreds of lost careers in academia.

Big @openlibhums news! We've frozen basic prices for UK members to maintain international parity, so struggling libraries can still participate. But we're introducing new tiers. If libraries sign up to these, *we will reopen our journal flipping programme* https://openlibhums.org/news/438/

The Open Library of Humanities has now merged with Birkbeck, University of London. I'll say more next week, but this means that we can stay a charity (obviously) but I will no longer have to manage the burdensome overheads of accounting and so forth.
https://www.bbk.ac.uk/news/the-open-library-of-humanities-merges-with-birkbeck

Nothing is going to change in our practices, services, or activities. I'll be writing to member libraries next week.

Birkbeck has been incredibly supportive of OLH from the start. They've handled all of our HR, staffing, and so on. We are independently sustainable, but having the backing of a 200-year-old university is a real plus for stability.