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January 2026

Peer Review Funk

It's Saturday night, it's 4 o'clock, don't believe me just watch:

PEER REVIEW TIME
PEER REVIEW TIME
DAAH DA (trumpets)
DAAH DOH DOH DA

OK, I've lost it.

About to find out how the ReMarkable paper tablet deals with a 731mb PDF. Eek.

Re the PDF - a friend sent it - it's his book - and there are many images in the text, which are crucial to its composition. He has not compressed these as a final PDF version should. Hence we have massive high res images taking up a Whole Lotta Space.

I should also note: if you scribble/write on pdfs, it doesn't convert these to text via OCR. You just get a PDF with your scribbles/writing on. This works well for me, mind.

I am really disappointed that the new version of EThOS at the British Library (the service for getting PhD theses) will be metadata-only. I really think we should use such resources, even if they are not books. They are still contributions to knowledge.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/give-phd-archive-attention-it-deserves-british-library-urged

This was a great resource to see how theses have evolved over time or to see the earliest work of well-known (or less well-known) scholars. Their digitization service was amazing, particularly for people who can't travel (say, due to disability). Remember: many historic theses are not digitized yet.

If we just assume that all material of value is available digitally in distributed repositories, I feel we lose much of the function of a national deposit library. It also is a false assumption, as per my previous post in this thread. EThOS's centralisation was just phenomenal.

As per my quote in that article and also as I said yesterday, I do NOT want to dunk on BL workers; I know they have had a TRULY ROUGH ride though the reconstruction process after the hack. But this stuff is important and management needs to resource EThOS, and value it, properly.

It's 3am and I can't sleep. I'm working on a web-based tool for setting crosswords. So far, I've got a grid designer that lets you produce symmetrical (enforced) grids by toggling squares on and off; autofilling the grid if you want; adding clues; and print display.

Ignore the fact there are clearly nonsense words in here; this is what a printout with answers should look like. For submission to an editor, for example.

Anyway, it's very early steps as my autofilling engine is clearly bad!

A crossword grid designed using WordSet - it's empty of words A partially filled crossword grid, with clues below

When people meet me, I often get the reaction: "wow, you are tall!" What people are thinking but don't say is: "wow, you have terrible posture".

It's true. It's been a lifelong problem for me, exacerbated MASSIVELY by rheumatoid arthritis.

So I'm trying the Upright posture corrector device...

It goes on your upper back and buzzes if you slouch for more than 15 seconds. Instead of forcing you into the position required, it reminds you and forces you to build your own core support muscles.

Will see if it helps.

I was bullied so much at school for my bad posture, until I became really strong at around age 16, at which point things got a bit better.

Then they found or made up other things to bully about. God I hate kids who are bullies.

Anyway, never too late* to start working on this.

* actually, it may be too late as my spine has grown curved, but I'll do what I can regardless.

A picture of a figure of a person inside a circle with an indication of whether the person is slouching

Other "academic social media" sites purport to give researchers freedom to disseminate their work. But they are often for-profit, not community or scholar -governed, and just seeking to extract further rent. KC has a different approach...

I was interviewed for this Times Higher piece (registration-walled) on ETHOS (the thesis service) and its replacement at the British Library.

I think the thing I want to emphasize, which is in there, is that I am NOT blaming library staff for this!

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/give-phd-archive-attention-it-deserves-british-library-urged

They've had a hell of a time recovering from the hack. It's the under-funding and management prioritization that is the problem here.

If you are considering writing and publishing a book on any aspect of contemporary writing: just a reminder that I am a series editor of the New Horizons in Contemporary Writing series at Bloomsbury. We'd love to have your submissions and books!

We are open to all forms of scholarship. Digital Humanities stuff? Not a problem.

More traditional but rigorous philosophical and close-reading approaches also, of course, welcome!

The front cover for Douglas Coupland’s Literature and Art: The Extreme Present. It shows a silhouetted face with colored pixellated blocks in front The cover for Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities: Computational Approaches to Style. It shows a rocket taking off from a graph. The cover to Contemporary Fiction, Celebrity Culture, and the Market for Modernism: Fictions of Celebrity. It shows a stylised version of The Thinker statue.

Someone just sent me a picture of my book "Password" (a short foray into the philosophies and histories of passwords), in translation, in Lima!

A bookshelf, with my book displayed!

Big congratulations to @ellenforget.bsky.social, who has just, I see, won a fellowship from SHARP (The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) for a project on “A History of Tactile Writing and Reading”!

Learned recently that I have the highest haemodialysis toxin clearance rates in the whole of my county (Kent). That's because I do it overnight, for 8hrs, every other day. Convenient? No. Good for me? Oh yes.

Hospital dialysis of 3x sessions for 3hrs per week is just not enough for best outcomes.

But loads of patients don't want to hear this last point, apparently, because it's bad enough as it is, without telling them that they should do 8hrs instead of 3.

My favourite line in Paddington: The Musical was delivered by Mr Curry.

"She wants to take Paddington and make him into some kind of tourist attraction. [Turning to audience with a concerned look.] WHO WOULD DO SUCH A THING?!"

Souvenirs available in the gift shop.

😂

If a third-party publisher was involved in this, they deserve to be utterly shunned and lambasted.

I was also thinking: HE is bad in the UK. But it hasn't yet reached "government vetting our textbooks" level of bad.

Although it's really the "non-reuse" of selected portions that is the problem, here, obviously...

This is how to convert from a for-profit Big Deal to an equitable, but professionalised, diamond OA system!

@theblochian.bsky.social and I dreamed of this scale when we launched @openlibhums.org Now, she has done it. Consortial funding, at scale.

Now over to the library community to support it.

OK, day off, but I wanted to share this: https://codeberg.org/gbilder/instead

"Instead" is an intriguing proposal by the super-smart @gbilder.com to give AI bots a pointer to a prepackaged downloadable static version of a site.

Bear with me, as I know this sounds bad at first glance.

The idea is: instead of hammering our site's content and bringing the site down, which is happening to us more and more frequently, the bots just download the one static zip file. This will be a much lighter load. We could easily handle this at @kcommons.bsky.social.

I know that some would definitely prefer to stop AI scraping entirely, but this could be a way to keep our servers up. At the moment we are being crucified by the bots.

Also, producing the dump is an activity that POSI signatories *should* be doing.

The proposal relies on a lot of goodwill, which may not exist. But it relies on good faith actors, which HAS worked for many years with internet protocols (RSS, robots.txt etc). As more AI companies join the fray, we need to find a way to handle this problem. "Instead" could be a viable solution...

If enough people decide it to be so and participate.

So, another cool thing that we make and maintain, here at @kcommons.bsky.social, is the open-source, open-collaborative review platform, Pilcrow. I have been using it, with others, to comment on a document we are working on. It's working really smoothly!

A picture of a threaded discussion in Pilcrow

This morning, I have been working on the new sign up system for Knowledge Commons. During prototyping, there was no email verification, so I've now added that loop. Not a complex task, but a laborious one. Just having a tea break and then it's testing time!

These sound observations about AI coding are relevant: https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2015883857489522876

Yes, I could have handed over this task entirely to Claude. But the types of mistakes it makes on a multifaceted task - add a callback function, handle security, create an HTML email template etc - can be worrying.

This morning, before my tech job began, I had to undertake PhD training at another institution where I supervise. The training is SO bad. Just spent 2 minutes hearing how important doctoral students are to the institution. How does this help me supervise better?

In general, I find this type of training has so much extraneous information about trivial matters that seem important to administrators but are really not relevant to supervisors/academics. Why do we care that you have 3.5k PhD students?

Unbelievably transparent political jockeying. Starmer literally just blocked a popular, vote-winning candidate from standing because he might pose a threat to his leadership. There is no notion of self-sacrifice or service for the greater good in the man. Just a hunger for power.

I love the band Alabama 3. Chaotic, humorous, acid house fused with country and rock. Sadly, one of their vocalists died a few years ago: the Very Reverend Dr D. Wayne Love. Using AI (I know some won't like this) they brought him back on a new track. It's called Sex Machine Learning.

😂

You probably have heard this band even if you haven't heard of them. They did the Sopranos theme song: Woke Up This Morning

There's some very dodgy defence logic in here.

'“The unemployment insurance proposals risk watering down vital benefits for disabled people – benefits they’ve built up by working and paying national insurance,” said Anne Pardoe, head of policy at Citizens Advice.'

https://www.bigissue.com/news/social-justice/disabled-people-benefit-cuts-citizens-advice/

Errm - what if they haven't "built up" those benefits by "working and paying national insurance"? Surely disabled people who cannot work and never could also deserve just as much support? Benefits should not be earned because you worked; they should be available because you need them. For anyone.

The one feature of smart glasses that I need - facial identification and name popup - is the one feature everyone rightly hates and the one dataset you don't want to give to Meta. Damnit, I'm so bad at recognizing faces.

The story here isn't even that this sounds like very inappropriate uses of AI, but, instead, that people NEED TO BACKUP THEIR WORK.

Hosted at the university that has suspended PhD admissions in English and other humanities disciplines, if I remember rightly?

Am I being unreasonable? Bought some prescription animal meds online for my dog. It was a repeat prescription so ordered multiple vials at the same time. Turns out the items will expire before they can all be used, because they are monthly doses. Should they not refund me the unusable ones?

They KNEW it was monthly doses: the prescription they took says so. I had no way of knowing what the expiry date would be (they don't list it).

Bit of a nostalgia trip selling this on Ebay. It's 10 years, this year, since I began to get some headaches -- but I mean: earth-shattering headaches and light sensitivity -- that landed me in hospital... where they found I had had a stroke. So grateful to still be here, 10 years later.

A picture of Robert McCrum's My Year Off: Rediscovering Life After a Stroke with a picture of clouds on the cover.

Yesterday I was listening to covers of Jim Croce songs.

A really bad trend in these is to adjust the timing of these lyrics:

Yeah I'm lookin' for the king of 42nd Street /
He drivin' a drop top Cadillac /
Last week he took all my money, and it may sound funny /
But I come to get my money back

This is, perhaps, one of my favourite rhyming lyrics ever. It just bounces on the rhymes and resolves perfectly. But there's a trend when covering it to take the delivery off-beat instead of straight and then it loses so much of its power. Anyway, it's from "You Don't Mess Around with Jim".

He _does_ seem to have a bit of a format going on. Jim, Leroy Brown, Rapid Roy (maybe) etc. all center on these character hardmen who are brought down :P

I get all these emails saying "treat your four-legged friends" and "look after your four-legged friends". Well what about our three-legged friend, Robyn? It's dog ableism, I tell you!

A picture of Robyn, the three-legged dog. She is brown and fox-like.

Excited! We'll confirm a date nearer the time, but in April I will be speaking at the LSE on Open Access Books: Rights, Ownership and Control. Other panelists, I believe, will include the excellent @alittleroad.bsky.social.

In case you missed it, here is a set of academic book proposals that I wrote and that succeeded. I do not claim them as exemplars of the genre, but offer them for any interested parties to see what form they took.

Start of today: I have been checking through several hundred dialysis connectors (an anti-bacterial port that goes on the end of the line for infection safety), because there's an urgent safety recall. All of mine are in the recall batch and deemed unsafe(!)

This evening, we watched The Ballad of Wallis Island. It was sweet, without being saccharine. The comedy element was also really well done. I very much enjoyed it. Tim Key was fantastic.

Right. Now it's down to some peer reviewing. Foreseeable weekends for the next 5 weeks or so are dedicated to this activity. I try to say yes when I can, but the volume of review requests is substantial. (Please don't "invite" me/us to review! It's something you are asking of me/us!)

Yay! The hard copies of Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities arrived today. It was a pleasure to write a chapter in this about pirate infrastructures and shadow libraries.

The cover of Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities with the top words in yellow and the bottom in red

Yesterday was quite bad. Discussion re kidney transplant was not hopeful. We're going to ask the virologists, but the docs seem downbeat, despite my kidney-destroying virus levels being at an all-time low. Dialysis until I die is the prognosis.

Then the car broke down on the way home from hospital.

Also very much looking forward to reading Petrushka: Proceedings of a Conference on Severe Epidemic Phytonic Syndrome (SEPS). A fiction about a real conference about a fictitious illness that causes people to turn into trees. Or so I have been told.

The cover to Petrushka : Proceedings of a Conference on Severe Epidemic Phytonic Syndrome (SEPS). It's red and looks faded.

The QS University Rankings are such crap. I have had emails from about 5 or so other universities asking if I can be contacted for their reputation surveys. Meanwhile, my university has asked for my contacts so they can contact them. It's all a ridiculous game of subjective opinion on prestige.

The Office for Students has launched a “stakeholder survey to better understand how it is viewed by the institutions it regulates”. That's going to be fun feedback for them to read!

Quality journalism from the Guardian. If you are wondering how a columnist gets to write this, it helps to be married to the editor.

A newspaper headline that reads: I've been thinking a lot about dog poo, by Adrian Chiles

I really should publish book *proposals* I have written over the years on my site. However, I feel a little embarrassed by the ones that differ so radically from the finished book. That's the way books grow, though.

One of my resolutions for the year is to keep in better touch with friends, colleagues, and heroes. Every kidney failure appointment that I attend is a memento mori and nobody can tell me how much time I have left. You can survive quite a while on dialysis, but it is life support. Carpe diem.

I have been on the ward, having dialysis, when another patient had a heart attack. Another week, someone just didn't come back. They had dropped dead over the weekend. So I am looking at what matters and concluded that: it's people.

Had an x-ray recently. It showed multiple healed pelvic and rib fractures and patchy sclerosis throughout the axial skeleton keeping with a renal osteodystrophy.

Kidney failure. The illness that keeps on giving. My bones are withering and fracturing inside me.

The scraping of Spotify by the shadow library, Anna's Archive, has made it into Private Eye, where the hypocrisy of Spotify - which originally was a pirate scraper site - is brought to light.

A Private Eye article that reads: POP EYE Spotify’s corporate team was outraged when it was hacked in December. “Spotify has disabled nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” its press release thundered. “Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are working with industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.” Er, but that’s not quite true. As Liz Pelly detailed last year in her carefully researched book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, back at “day one”, in 2006, the early versions of the Spotify platform utilised unlicensed music scraped from the founder’s personal music libraries as well as from illegal sites such as the Pirate Bay. Heaven forfend that others do the same!

I'm getting back into my morning writing and reading routine now, after the Christmas break. Currently working on a commissioned book chapter on AI, Copyright, and Open Culture for a Handbook on Critical AI and Library and Information Science.

I have a request, please, friends of Bluesky... I have written an app for Android that helps you find crossword answers. I need 9 people, please, to test it on their devices for a couple of weeks (Google's policy). It will cost you nothing and I will be eternally grateful if you can help. Please!

My crossword finder app working on t?unne and giving a set of anagrams

Booked train assistance with @serailway.bsky.social on the 16.37. Got to the platform by 16.32. They wouldn't let me on the train and said there wasn't enough time. I miss being able to just turn up for a train without masses of planning. And hacked off, when I booked this, that they weren't ready.

In fairness, it does say "arrive 20 mins before departure", but this is not how life works with trains...

A very successful haemodialysis night with NO ALARMS. It's an eight-hour miracle and it's happened twice in a row.

(I normally get at least one venous low pressure alarm as my blood pressure changes when I go to sleep. If you roll onto the line, that's another alarm.)

These alarms are trivial, but there are also serious alarms - like air bubbles detected. So every time an alarm goes off in the night, you have to check to make sure it's nothing serious. So you have to totally wake up. Hence why it feels miraculous when I get through a whole night with no alarms!

In a fit of rashness, I bought the domain https://scriven.ing this morning as an additional access point for my web writing/blog (which turns 20 years old next year!) The only problem is that now I "prefer not to".

Also, Home Assistant is so excellent. I've got it hooked up, now, to my Octopus Mini smart meter and it can measure our electricity and gas usage and then look at the local grid to work out low-carbon use.

Four circles in a chart of energy distribution. The top left circle is green with a leaf and says 3.52kWh. It is labelled "Low-carbon". The bottom left circle, connected to the green, is labelled "Grid" and has a pylon image and says 6.22kWh. The bottom right circle says "Home" and has a picture of a house with the text 6.22kWh. This circle is connected to the bottom left circle with an arrow from left to right. Finally, the top right circle is red with a flame and labelled "gas". This says 37.8kWh and is connected to the bottom right, "Home" circle.

Just saw a review of Windows 11 that rated it last of all recent Windows OSes. One of the failing criteria was that it used up much more RAM and this site immediately sprang to mind. Free memory is wasted memory and all modern operating systems pre-cache many things for speed.

https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

For my last post, I will get a bunch of people lecturing me in my mentions, telling me how bad for-profit publishers are and recommending I read up on "open access".

"Oh jeez, I know nothing about that and haven't written a book about it. No sir. Please tell me more."

Here's a post on the "Anna's Archive" reddit forum. Literally, someone saying they would pay a subscription for access to a pirate site.

Boy do I have exciting news for them about how traditional scholarly publishing is organised! (though they do say "not for profit")

This is kindof insane, though. If you are willing to pay for a site that violates copyright, what is it that makes you averse to paying a subscription - say to a not-for-profit publisher - in the first place? Comprehensiveness of coverage? Price level? The illegality (jurisdiction specific) itself?

There's something of the piracy culture that I described - of high-level pirates - in my book, Warez, here. It's not about the stuff, but the eliteness of access that matters. https://punctumbooks.com/titles/warez-the-infrastructure-and-aesthetics-of-piracy/

But this also ties in with the sustainability efforts of shadow libraries, as I was writing about the other day. https://eve.gd/2026/01/01/the-lineages-and-inheritances-of-shadow-libraries-and-their-documentation/

Text that says: "I'd personally be in favour of a subscription model - not profit-making - just to help maintain operational (and potential legal) costs.

Been working hard on my physiotherapy and I can now sometimes, on a good day, do a very short walk. However, it's demonstrating quite clearly that my left hip and left knee are going and will probably need replacing at some point soonish. The hip: I know what that's like. The knee: this worries me.

I haven't posted anything about Venezuela - because what difference will my howl make against the corrupt colonising forces of immense wealth and power? - but I feel I must say something. So, I will just say: I feel sick and furious at this evil of unjustified war, which will harm so many people.

This will come across as egotistical, I am sure, but I do not get why people pick PhD examiners who are experts in the field but inexplicably are not cited in the thesis. It almost immediately highlights to the examiner that the bibliography is partial.

Great how "The Traitors" has basically picked a bunch of people who are SO self-assured and confident. All of them think they are excellent at lying and great at reading other people. Nobody on it says "actually, I don't think it's easy to spot liars and 'read' people and I'm not good at it".

Why a "trek"? What are the connotations of this word? (Hint: they're not all good.) How did the term come about?

Adam Roberts has it covered.