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June 2019

Because what the world needs now is for Blackadder thoroughly to satirise university and scientific expertise. Yeah, sounds a cunning plan indeed.

Update, because I know you all love them: day 3 of cyclophosphamide is still bad. Appalling fatigue and waves of nausea with dizziness.

Day 2 of cyclophosphamide and sorry to report that yesterday's "this isn't so bad" was definitely the eye of the storm. It's bad.

And @Ted_Underwood just told me that cyclophosphamide is a mustard gas derivative. Oh good...

OK, I do now feel a bit as though I have been subjected to some mustard gas :/

So far the cyclophosphomide has been worryingly easy. I feel utterly shattered but the nausea has been manageable. Mind you, I'm told this hits its peak 6-12 hours after infusion... Hmmm.

And thank you all for your kind messages.

Finally about to kick off the cyclophosphomide infusion. Doctors estimate a 3-5 day period of feeling terrible after this treatment, so please don't expect much of me over the coming days.

Beginning IV cyclophosphomide treatment today that should get me back up and running. This drug is not much fun but, quite frankly, my immune system was asking for it. Someone suggested re. potential hair loss that "at least I don't have much to lose".

Not actually that likely at the dose they're using, either.

8am Playbook skewering Johnson on HE: "Let’s not pretend that Johnson’s 2006 pamphlet is a work of academic rigour with a strong evidence base—its primary source of information on higher education is the Thomas Hardy novel Jude the Obscure."

That said, when it asks "Who knows if the Boris Johnson of 2019 feels the same way about universities?" I felt like replying: the Johnson of 2019 doesn't feel the same as the Johnson of 2019, let alone 2006. He doesn't have any core beliefs. So why are we analysing for them?

A friend just complimented me on keeping a sense of humour.

"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness" - Beckett, Endgame

"I knew you were going to quote Beckett at me"

Some good hospital news. It appears there is no permanent damage to my heart at present. It is thought that cardiac symptoms will resolve if cyclophosphamide treatment suppresses the immune response. This begins on Thursday.

Admittedly, as they pointed out, I may still feel terrible until this all kicks in... :/

DOSE ME UP

You can tell that the candidates for next PM are idiots because who on earth would want to be prime minister at this time? The next dominoes to fall under the impossible Brexit catastrophe are lining up.

"Sky News has said it will be forced to cancel a debate between the two men vying to be the next Tory leader unless Boris Johnson agrees to take part". Yes, that is the nature of a debate between two people.

Morning all! Feeling moderately OKish this morning and finishing some article revisions. New chemotherapy drugs this week to treat the systemic autoimmune problems. Expect some more medical tweeting.

"_Journal_ employs a modified MLA style for citations". Why does it do that? WHY? What a great use of everyone's time...

Took advantage of feeling a little better today to get some things done. Like, submitting a final book manuscript(!) Hurrah! Now slowly walking down to the seaside. Might even have an ice cream.

Crashed again now :(

This morning, I have checked 50 pages of bibliography for the edited collection while sitting in the glorious sunshine. I am not as grumpy as this photo makes me look!

Looking forward to the forthcoming ranking/league table of "All Institutions Formally Greylisted/Boycotted by @ucu Ever":

1. Trinity College, Cambridge
2. London Metropolitan University

Pleased to be speaking to the NERL Consortium in Washington, DC later today. Obviously, for health reasons, I am not there as I cannot travel at the moment, so Zoom-ing in. But made me think: this is actually better for the environment, for my health, and for finances.

I appreciate it curtails the social elements, but wish we made better use of this to avoid flying people around the world all the time.

Anyway, back from today's hospital appointment and glad to be sitting down as feeling pretty rough. Doing a bit of work outside. Tough on edited collections. Tough on the causes of edited collections.

The main cause being the erroneous belief that "this won't be much work"

Also tough on Mighty Mouse t-shirts.

We're working on the reference parsing for our Jisc Open Monographs experiment to intersect book citations. Obviously, freeform parsing citations is tricky to identify same endpoint. Where there's a DOI: easy. Where not: hmm.

say, books, in reprinted editions "M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1992)" vs "Foucault, Michel, Discipline & Punish (London: Penguin, 1994)". Using postgres trigram character match seems, though, a really good way to go!

It's interesting the level at which we need to match for this task. It's not the precise edition that matters/the ISBN etc, but the meta-text, the ur-book. It's as though, in addition to chapter-level metadata (DOIs), we also need edition-level, and "book"-level.

a little like "Release Group", "Release", "Track" on MetaBrainz. But anyway, we don't have this, so fuzzy matching all the way.

there have been some machine learning approaches to this. But they really don't work as well as they think they do. Often a simpler scoring/counting approach yields better results.

Reading @EileenAJoy this evening and chuckling at her attention to the etymology of ‘prestige’ in ‘illusion’ or ‘trick’, only later coming to to mean ‘glamour’.

"Derogatory until 19c"

I got a bit further with my recent health problems today. I have been diagnosed with Crohn's disease, on top of my rheumatoid arthritis and vasculitis. I am also still waiting for the results of a cardiac MRI for suspicion of heart failure. Systemic autoimmune problems.

Current planned course of action is to begin IV cyclophosphomide drip next week. Though I believe this may be contingent on cardiac MRI result for cardiotoxicity reasons.

I still can't quite believe that the Conservatives' internal leadership contest gets an airing on the national broadcaster as a debate. Mirrors format of election, but without any public say. This mirroring makes it appear as though Conservatives are only political choice.

Springer Nature (Palgrave etc) ran a sizeable survey on academic authors re books and OA. Some interesting results: "The majority of book authors support the idea that all future scholarly books should be open access". Need to read more.
https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-research/journals-books/books/future-of-open-access-books

"Ethical reasons (equality in access) and reaching a larger audience are identified as key motivations for choosing open access for books"

"Pro-open access attitudes are stronger among junior researchers, researchers based in Europe & Asia and previous open access book authors"

On the final re-read/edit of our collection and one of the chapters, by David Pontille and Didier Torny, totally nails the problem with measuring citations: "Highly disparate forms of intertextuality are rendered commensurable".

To the tune of the theme to Happy Days (not the Beckett one), my next week:

Monday, Wednesday hospital tests
Thursday, Friday hospital tests
Saturday, get a rest.

wish there was a theme tune to Beckett's Happy Days.

Already had multiple emails from people -- not academics, just members of the public -- saying how pleased they are that something is being done about open access to academic books. An exciting time. Will write more on my part of the project soon.

Including: fans of the novels of Thomas Pynchon who can't afford edited collections and monographs at £90 a pop; industrial designers; independent researchers.

I just believe there is such a broader audience for HSS scholarship than we usually credit in the academy. I want us to capitalise on this.

I think the "hanging out on Twitter after a grant announcement" phase is the best phase of a project. After the "grind of the application" phase and before the "oh god we've got to get this all to work now" phase.

Yes! We got a £2.2m grant to help transform academic book publishing to models that will let people read the works for free.

I get to work with some great people on this project, from around the world.

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/news/birkbeck-to-play-leading-role-in-project-to-transform-open-access-academic-publishing

Also, important: MASSIVE credit to @Openreflections - she did SO much work leading this bid. I'm leading on one WP here but she did incredible work pulling it together. Epic.

The potential of the internet for generous collaboration is massive and continues to astound me. Just got back guitar parts from my brother for a music track I'm working on.

Rock on, Rich! (far left in this pic)

I did an evaluation for a fellowship scheme at a European University earlier this year and they sent me some chocolate as a reward. Now I'm eating this, I might reconsider my previous arguments that remuneration for peer review comes with more negative than positive effects...

Somewhat disappointed that I will not be able to travel to Rome this week for the International Pynchon Week conference, on health grounds. The first time I've missed this in a decade.

So, in response to yesterday's Q, I specifically asked the radiographer what she'd do after my MRI and MRA if she thought she could see something urgently threatening (for me: carotid dissection). She paused for a long time and then said: I'd recommend you go to A&E immediately.

This seems a sensible balanced approach. I know radiographers are not radiologists or clinicians and should not dispense clinical advice but in the course of conducting thousands of these scans, they often become very proficient at reading them.

I found the idea that somebody - who could interpret these scans and see an immediately life-threatening condition - might not be able to disclose this very very distressing. It was good to hear that my radiographer would not have had this on her conscience and had a plan.

The basic gist of this is that we will properly review this in clinic, of course, but it looks as though my current problems are not the same as the stroke in 2016. So I can sleep easier on that front tonight. I have a cardiac MRI in 2 weeks' time for next steps.

She also said, chuckling: you are the kind of complex patient we dread and hate reporting on!

This arrived in the post today. Congratulations to @michaelbhaskar and Angus Phillips on its release.

Image: A book, The Oxford Handbook of Publishing.

Citing @punctum_books's Twitter feed in a print publication and wondering whether I should leave the "🍸" emojii in. :P

Have the first of several MRI and MRA scans tomorrow. Something I've always wondered that someone medical might know: I know the radiographers aren't allowed to give results, but if they saw something urgently threatening, they would tell the patient, right?

A distant reading of whether papers containing the word "heterotopia" correlate with academic sentiment score that "article doesn't really quite know what it wants to say".

At the Digital Initiatives Symposium at Fordham London and Maryanne Kowaleski is now talking about credit in collaborative digital projects. Reminds me of this.

I could not say that I am feeling at my best, by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm off today to keynote the Birkbeck-Fordham London Symposium on Digital Scholarship. http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/27716

Afraid that there's no text to put up for this one as it isn't written, but the slides should be up in the next 45 minutes. Anyone who's there, feel free to catch me if my face suddenly goes pale and I look as though I might keel over.

Apologies to later speakers if I need to leave early.

Sent a track off to the label today on which I've been working for 6 months. Horrible nerve wracking moment.