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December 2017

Happy New Year in advance to all on here! I've spent the afternoon playing on synthesisers with my friend Duncan who also made t-shirts for our electronic music group!

All my author royalties, translation right royalties, and so on from that next book to go to @ArthritisRUK, a great charity doing much-needed medical research.

Just signed a contract with Stanford University Press for my next book: Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Manuscript to be delivered in May 2018!

I really wish there was a way that staff at HEIs could flag to HEFCE or a REF sub-panel every time a research manager tried to make selection decisions using publication journal/venue.

If anyone is interested in reading/commenting on an early draft article I'm writing that features a previously unknown Jennifer Egan short story (and digital approaches to textual scholarship in the contemporary), please drop me a note!

So, for those who haven't yet heard, the AHRC Technical College is to be closed from early next year. They just couldn't get enough technical reviewers (I did one review per week last month). Will be moving to a Data Management Plan approach instead.

For anyone based in Europe: we have a 4 to 5 month, full-time, paid opening at the Open Library of Humanities early next year! Should be a good public speaker and be enthused about open access. Drop me an email: martin.eve@openlibhums.org. Please RT!

Urgh, I've tried so hard to sign up for a New Yorker subscription so I can view *one article* in the back archive. Paypal fails. Credit card fails. Their site is a total mess.

Evening before a test for which I have been waiting *months*, hospital phones. Leaves a message because I am in a meeting. "By the way, we may not be able to do the test tomorrow depending on your medication. I'm available for 10 minutes on this number." FFS @royalfreenhs

"This Christmas looks set to be the most fraudulent ever", a Barclays advert warns. I presume this pertains to their alleged rigging of the Libor rate?

How's my weekend been, you ask? My Saturday has consisted of looking up where 376 different words occur in 2 different print copies of texts. It's been that good. #pain

Apparently Password has been published in South Korea. They are sending me a copy but my knowledge of Korean is such that I'll just look at it and admire the typography.

Not sure which @timeshighered sub-ed gave the title to this week's "the REF is mistaken: monographs are not inferior to papers" but it's not very helpful. The problem is managers making that assumption, not the REF.

Though that obit includes this nonsense: "Mr. Gass was widely credited with coining the term “metafiction” to describe writing in which the author is part of the story."

My home WiFi network is called "godot" just for the joke in the phase between entering the password and being connected.