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November 2025

Oh yeah. And physiotherapy. Forgot that hellish activity. 30 mins of pathetically hauling 2kg weights around to try to regain some strength and mobility. Attempting half press-ups (from a kneeling position). Oh great!

"My leftist values are meaningless and hollow if my praxis doesn’t include masking - not necessarily for me - but for my community. [...] We are nothing without community, without each other. I mask so that I do not disable, maim, or kill anyone else."

On top of giving away lots of academic books just for postage, I'm also planning to sell some that I don't think I will ever use again at very cheap rates. I will probably regret this. But I will use the hashtag #martinsbooks. Please block that if you don't want to know what I am selling.

Given how well received it's been this weekend, I'm hoping to do some more giveaways of books that I wrote next week. These three are in contention!

Copies of three books by Martin Paul Eve: Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History, Open Access and the Humanities, and Reassembling Scholarly Communication

Sunday is also always a big medical admin day. Have to change the dressing on the central line; inject immunoglobulin; sort next batch of prescriptions; check dialysis supply delivery was accurate; send dialysis spreadsheet to nurses; and perform haemodialysis. Fun.

Also, the NHS is changing the allowed makes of immunogoblin, so I have to try the new batch this week, to make sure I tolerate it and don't have any seizures etc. So much fun.

One book I decided to keep was Stephen Miller's /Excellence and Equity: The National Endowment for the Humanities/. The organisation basically doesn't exist anymore, but seems a valuable historical snapshot. Used this during the writing of our book on peer review.

Making difficult decisions about which books to keep and which to dispose of. All of these books get usage every few years, but I have nowhere to store them at home. It's a hateful decision-making exercise.

Lots of boxes in my sitting room

Also, people need to understand false positive rates. If they say it's 90% accurate at detecting AI, that's good, right? No. Wrong. It means 1 student in every 10 will be misclassified. This could be harmless, meaning they get away with AI. Or it could be harmful, accusing them wrongly of using AI.

Very sorry to hear of the death of Tom Stoppard. I have fond memories of performing a playreadimg of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on a bus in Ecuador, 20 years ago.

I see there's a forthcoming remake of Blood. Exciting - one of the few computer games I have ever truly enjoyed. But I also notice that Steam tags it as "Boomer Shooter". They just class everyone around age 40 as a boomer? Has the generational term lost its meaning?

If you can't afford postage, someone else has just offered to donate me more than the cost of postage for theirs, so you can have a copy at no charge. If we don't use this, I'll give that extra to charity.

Just a reminder, as driven home by this medical study I am participating in: the expectation of people with suppressed immune systems is that they are *STILL* shielding most of the time. I am, basically. This never ended "after" Covid for some people (including me).

A survey question that asks whether you are "self-isolating" or "shielding/distancing as much as possible" or have "regular contact with one other person" or "regular contact with multiple people".

Don't get me wrong, being on the transplant list is mega stressful. You have to be at the hospital within 2hrs of a call that can come, day or night, 24hrs per day, 365 days per year. And then it's surgery, there and then. Goodbye any long-term or even short-term life planning!

Had some interesting news at hospital. My BK virus levels have come down from 10m+ copies to 27k copies. This opens a discussion about a transplant when I speak to the kidney team in January. Don't know if that's low enough yet, but could relieve me of the dialysis life sentence.

FFS. This is how I got my electric wheelchair. Not a Mercedes.

But so what if people get a good car on it, anyway? There's an assumption that disabled people and others with benefits must suffer and not have any nice things in life.

Tomorrow, I have 48 boxes of books and some computer equipment being shipped to my house from my office in London. I do not have room for 48 boxes of books. Mrs Eve is going to be majorly unhappy and I'd better get to sorting these ASAP.

The other problem with this is that research is a type of spread bet/lottery. You do lots of it and hope some of it pans out. If we had a perfect way of selecting which small bits of science and scholarship we "need", we'd have solved the funding problem. But we don't know this.

The Guardian has a game where you play Chancellor and put in what you'd do for the budget. I basically taxed rich people a lot and ended up £56bn in the black, with a good poll rating and the markets like me.

Perhaps I should be Chancellor. I didn't even have to hurt any disabled people to do it.

It goes without saying that the neoliberal language of a higher education "market" from which providers will "exit" is bleak. No media organisation challenges it, though. They all just repeat the mantra, as though education could never be a public good.

I basically think this is the edge of a pretty bad storm of copyright conservatism and a reopening of the license wars (which may make no difference due to transformative use). However, if you put up a paywall to acquire, AI companies have to acquire legally in current court rulings. Problematic.

This is a tiresome writeup. Yes, APCs are bad for the humanities. That's why some of us have spent over a decade working on alternative models. These are barely mentioned.

Good heavens. The Guardian's list of Christmas gifts includes this monstrosity: a croissant tree bauble. Please nobody give me this.

A croissant Christmas tree bauble advertised in the Guardian

One of the things I miss most with kidney failure.

(It's not the alcohol that's the problem, by the way, it's the *pint* of fluid.)

The courts are totally jammed up, but there's still space to waste time in lower magistrates' courts to convict teenagers for £1.67 of accidentally underpaid tax. Pretty disgusting.

Today kicked off with a technical problem on KC that I had to fix. Next up is a peer review, followed by reading PhD student work, topped off with a William Byrd choral concert this evening. Phew.

One of the amusing things Tom gave me was a set of Opening the Future stickers, using the original title that I wanted to use "Backlist to the Future" 😂

Stickers with the text Backlist to the Future in the style of Back to the Future, and the OtF logo.

Good that diamond OA is getting its time in the sun, but 10 years ago (and others probably much longer) I was saying "APCs problematic for the humanities and some other disciplines" - I found photo evidence!

Me talking at a conference in Portugal, with a slide saying "APCS PROBLEMATIC FOR THE HUMANITIES AND SOME OTHER DISCIPLINES"

10 years ago: OpenCon2015. Many friendly faces in this crowd. I'm in there, @gbilder.com, Mike T, Stuart L, Mike E. Lots of others.

A picture of the attendees at OpenCon2015

Looks like an interesting collection. With Close Reading with Computers I had quite a few "failures" and even documented one of them in quite some detail. But that's the thing: if you are doing real experiments, you will often get null results.

Reform's "policy" on health, inferred from Farage's comments, is to abolish the NHS and introduce private insurance. This is catastrophic.

A good piece. It is very sad that there is not more public interest in the British Library. But then, I suppose, most people have never been inside a reading room and don't really understand how research infrastructure works.

But admittedly, that's not "public profile".

OK, even putting aside that doing online searches is hardly "sourcing accurate information", Google is up to the hilt in regurgitating AI nonsense when you search! Its "search" is so contaminated by this stuff that I switched to Kagi, which is *much* better. Very little AI and more relevant results.

Part of my work today has been implementing our search system on the new @kcommons.bsky.social Profile system. There are lots of moving parts in building a system like this -- search via an API into an Elastic index -- but it's slowly coming together.

A search on the new KC Profiles system showing a search for "Pynchon"

Based on "conventional commits" in programming, which standardises the language and form of contributions to a software project.

Urgh. The one thing I am really struggling with, thanks to kidney failure, is weight. I'm down to 9 and a half stone (61kg) and I'm 6 foot 2 inches tall. This is badly underweight but I just can't put weight on. Eating as much as I can, with supplements as well, but the nausea is overwhelming.

This morning's reading was revisiting Jiminez, Christian, ‘Disturbing Parallel: The Shifting Politics of Racial Inclusion and Exclusion in Star Trek: Voyager’, in Exploring Star Trek: Voyager: Critical Essays, ed. by Robert L. Lively (McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2020), pp. 194–210.

A really interesting text on Voyager's representation and punishment of the Holocaust as opposed to its depiction and remembrance of American colonial genocide.

I'm sorry for a geeky rant, but setting up a new Windows install is SO painful. A trillion non-optional updates that require a billion reboots. Endless stupid setup screens. It's basically an advertising ecosystem.

The other thing I was reading yesterday was Dudziak, Mary L., Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton university press, 2000).

Fascinating study of how race interacted with global power and the American image.

PSA: we made a slight change to the XML version of Ketzan, Erik, ‘A Bibliometric Overview of Pynchon Studies: Introducing the Thomas Pynchon Online Bibliography (TPOB)’, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 12.1 (2025), https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.23348

We removed the hyperlinks to defunct https://Vheissu.net

We may, in the near future, also do so in the PDF. If we do so, a publication note will be prepended to the article for everyone who already downloaded it.

Pretty appalling.

But, also, is My Ántonia that similar to Lolita? I don't really think so, but haven't read either for a very long time now.

I think this is *the* licensing issue of our time.

Whether it's prohibiting fascist uses or stopping AI training, liberal open licenses are falling down.

I still like CC BY-SA, forcing to share derivatives, but am not sure a license change is the technical solution to this social problem.

I've said this before, but I am frustrated by Zotero on Android, because the thing I really want to use it for, most often, is CITING something I'm talking about. There's a button at the bottom that appears to be "cite" or similar. But it crashes the app when I click it 😕

Any ideas, @adam42smith.bsky.social ?

A screenshot of the Zotero interface. There's a button at the bottom that appears to be "cite" or similar.

I spent yesterday working on the Star Trek book, including reading Represent and Destroy by Jodi Melamed. A book about how different phases of capital post-WW2 coopt formal antiracisms for their own advancement. Covers up to neoliberalism, but wonder if we're in a new phase, now.

My physiotherapy involves stretching myself with respect to walking. Yesterday, I managed the furthest distance yet. It's actually such a trivial distance that it's quite embarrassing, but the muscle wastage from kidney failure is pretty extreme. This is progress, though.

This post is made without wishing to criticize any parties involved, but just because it makes a curious case.

I saw a post on Facebook about a new essay written by a well-connected scholar. The post offered a PDF download if people had no access.

There were about 25 requests for a PDF. Pile on.

This is just so wrong. The people requesting PDFs were academics working at prominent universities. If they don't have access, who does? Anyone?

I'm sure that the venue conveyed considerable social capital to the author, but is that enough to choose it when it seems to have no paying readers?

This morning, I got up early and did some work on the Star Trek: Voyager book. This is the most major post-review change point: rewriting a chapter to be about refugees and borders in Trek. To get started, I revisited Hannah Arendt's classic, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Really noticed today the significant difference in leg lengths that I have after my hip op. When wearing shoes, I have a heel raise, so don't see it. I don't have these risers in winter slippers and I suddenly saw how lopsided I am!

Just had two really positive reader reports on my next book (proposal and sample chapter). Some constructive-critical ideas put forward, but it's put a metaphorical bounce in my step.

Our repository developer, Ian, has been building our new stats dashboard for @kcommons.bsky.social. It's looking great! And should be upstreamed to InvenioRDM.

A set of graphs and stats, showing off the features of Knowledge Commons Works

Yesterday's walk in two phases. 1 Robyn lies down and refuses to walk another step. 2 Robyn gets a ride on the support vehicle and doesn't like it!

A medium sized dog lying in the autumn leaves The same dog on a motorized wheelchair with me

Today's peek inside the @kcommons.bsky.social tech lab: whenever we change the site, we have a set of automated tests that run to verify we haven't broken anything that was working before. Some of these test the code, and some test the actual site with a simulated browser. Green ticks make me happy!

A set of GhostInspector tests, all marked "Passing"

Hmm.

Seitz, David K., ‘Mahler and Migrants on the “Final Frontier”: A Contrapuntal Reading in Small-Screen Musical Geopolitics’, Geopolitics, 1 January 2025

makes reference to "Bowleg (2004)" but it's not in the bibliography. I do not know this Star Trek scholarship. Anybody any ideas?

Oh. It's a typo. For Bowring. Doh.

Update on #accessibletravel. They forgot me at the London terminus. Fortunately, fellow passengers flagged down an operative to get the ramp. I've just discovered that the wheelchair will fit in a standard London black cab.

In a small way, the mistaken preview here gives me some confidence... These books look to be preserved in CLOCKSS. Very good practice!

But they do need to fix the open graph preview...

Southeastern trains assisted travel service is working very well today. This is my first trip to London (for hospital, what else?) using the wheelchair and the journey has got off to a good start with ramp available. They are also contacting the other end to say where I am on the train.

Today's progress on our new @kcommons.bsky.social profile system.

Nice photo cropping interface, so you too can become a wise owl!

A photo of me and a stuffed owl being cropped in the browser. The owl as the final photo

Oh boy, reviewer 2 really went to town on my Voyager book. I know it will be improved by all the suggestions made, but it is hard work doing the revisions. Here's my revision letter _so far_. I'm only in chapter two.

An extensive 7-page letter with illegible text, provided to show the extent of changes requested.

A friend made a point to me today, with which I think I agree. Pynchon and DeLillo are often lumped together, but their writings - Ratner's Star aside - are not really very similar, at all. They share a theme of paranoia, but represent it very differently. Late D and late P are both sparser, I guess

Luka just pooed on the floor inside the house in terror at the fireworks outside. These things cause so much trauma to animals. I would have them banned, except at professional displays.