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January 2020

Recently had that British vs American English thing where someone Stateside told me something I had written was "quite good" and I thought they hated it. (BrE: quite = fairly/OKish.) They meant the opposite. (AmE: quite = very.)

I see that baby helicopter-parenting Twitter has never read anything about musicality and the importance of infant-directed speech.

Re. "system requirements" on various software/games. I suspect those with impairments have contended with this for years, but they need /biological/ requirements too. From what I can see, Beat Saber, for instance, requires stereoscopic depth perception (2 synced eyes) & two hands

It's pretty easy to figure out from the advertised site that you need two hands, but the depth perception thing is not clear at all. I have only parallax depth perception/monocular vision and it is not clear at all whether it would work.

Cyborg system requirements.

Other cool Janeway dev work in progress from Mauro! Our journal home page manager will, in the next release, have a visual drag and drop editor for layout.

Had my first evening off in ages - including Christmas - and got playing with the guitars, synths, and some singing. Great fun!

and the harmonicas

We have cool new Janeway things in progress! @ajrbyers has been reworking our editorial decision-making page. Dummy data here is of course inaccurate as I have (seriously!) never missed a peer-review deadline. But how cool does this look?

Thanks to @JohanRooryck for the idea!

@ajrbyers @JohanRooryck This is, of course, work in progress as I believe we still need granularity of decision options on there.

Had a Jane Austen January, reading Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Pride and Prejudice. Also read the brilliant Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk and Robin Robertson's The Long Take.

18 hours into my fasting at 1.30am and I awoke dreaming that someone had offered me a cooked breakfast and, before I remembered that I mustn't eat, I'd scoffed half of it. I awoke in a cold sweat genuinely thinking I'd messed up and couldn't have today's procedure. Eek!

Currently in the phase known as "hangry" where I am both really hungry and as a result "angry"

I was thinking about conferences - particularly big international ones - the other day. Most people enjoy the sociality of these events, but are they really justifiable intellectually and ecologically?

Also, for me with variable but often severe speech perception problems, listening to papers is incredibly tiring. The concentration of listening as opposed to reading is far from trivial and diverts from my engagement with the work.

When most people read their papers and respondents are forced into an immediate "Q&A" mode, the questions and feedback are surely more facile than if someone had had time to properly read and digest the text and then to reflect.

But what about circulating text (in my discipline, most people "write" their papers) and then using the face-to-face time for a more thorough discussion of the work that we have all read, giving truly helpful feedback.

I wondered what an alternative system would be like, with modes of virtual participation and networking. We might select a programme of papers in the same way as before, pre-screening for work of use and interest -- and you could even select which sessions you wanted to "attend".

I know also that lots of career development/networking happens at conferences and that this is important for people. But is this networking (or even just socialising) so important that we, as academics who are supposed to know better, continue using damaging air travel to attend?

I suspect this thread will be unpopular with people who like conferences a lot (I also do quite like conference discos) but, as I said, I'm unclear they are a good or efficient way to do what we want intellectually or in terms of travel/climate change.

And to be clear - we could do that "face to face" digitally! Though this then means we can't go to the pub, I realise (although other people hate the alcohol cultures of conferences...)

🚨Scholarship Sunday🚨

I found a version of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan's short-story collection, Emerald City with material found nowhere else. I pieced together the revision history.

Open access in Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10436928.2020.1709713

@AlbertRolls1 you are cited here :)

Page 1. Cites Bob. @BobEaglestone

This article also has a data appendix https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3253829

Another 28 hours of fasting about to start for a medical procedure tomorrow. It's definitely a case of

Them: you need to stop losing weight.
Also them: please eat only liquids and frequently fast so we can investigate.

😭

There was something distinctive and for me nostalgically pleasing about the physical clunk and neon shine of the minidisc and zip disk that is not replicated in any contemporary format. Zip drives in particular made you feel like an archivist.

Today is lots of @COPIMproject work. Writing data management plans for sensitive under-NDA financial stuff, beginning to plan publisher workshops, clearing ethics etc. Also gearing up for our next hire on the project, on which more in the near future!

Very pleased to say that I have been elected a Fellow of the English Association!

thank you a great deal to whoever anonymously nominated me :)

The NHS offers an insomnia treatment app in which 'Each week you log in and meet "The Prof", your virtual sleep expert'. Not sure meeting academics is going to do anything for my overactive brain at night.

First book typescript due this year: submitted. 😁

Funny: the typescript was supposed to be anonymous. Good luck with that as 1 all the positional identity self reflection within gives us away and 2 because if a reviewer Googles the subject, it's obvious who we are.

Had a phrase rolling around my head last night when I couldn't sleep that included "the person who treats skin problems in elephants is a pachydermatologist".

Interestingly, for the first time ever, I have had a request to submit an under-contract book manuscript through a manuscript processing system.

I have a pretty cool hat that doesn't fit me any more after drastic weight loss. Are there bands you can get to pad these around the head-rim (or whatever it's called)?

Really excited to have the final typescript for _Peer Review and Institutional Change in Academia_ in my hands! Hurrah! It gets one final proof today before it goes off to Cambridge University Press this week.

the book will be open access when published and is under contract in the Elements: Publishing and Book Culture series.

also amusing: adding perhaps unfairly harsh criticisms of your co-authors' previous work to the draft to see whether they pick up on it ;) @CameronNeylon

January has been a good research month so far. Submitted two journal articles, a book proposal, two sets of proof corrections (article + book ch), aiming to finish next book MS this fortnight, then coordinating copyedits on _Reassembling Scholarly Communications_ for MIT Press.

PLUS, we're really gearing up on COPIM (https://www.copim.ac.uk), I have another two articles half written, a cool digital database project that we're working out how to move forward on, and more.

Makes up (a little bit) for the grim hospital experience.

"Plan S, presumably named after the last initials of its first architects, Robert-Jan Smits and Marc Schiltz [1] ..."

[1] Although one might also speculate that there were 18 other plans tried before ‘Plan S’.

Made the mistake, yesterday, of opening email before having done any reading or writing. *Boom* - a whole day later and none done. Won't make that mistake today. Opened Twitter first, instead... :/

A spectacular trilogy of articles on the William Gaddis archive forthcoming at Orbit, five years in the research and writing. Exciting to see this getting near to its final state.

"Flybe saved after successful last-ditch talks"

"We won't bail out failing universities, says higher education regulator"

I am quite drastically underweight after recent hospital stays. @ajrbyers gets wind of this and sends me a massive bouquet of chocolates in the post on behalf of the @openlibhums team!

Whenever I have to make a slide about Samuel Beckett, the temptation to put an image of Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap, just to see if anyone notices, is, quite frankly, immense.

You know you've spent too long in the research funding headspace when your lecture for undergraduates on 'postmodernism' features an 'incredulity towards grant narratives'.

The thing about F1000 and its platforms for funders was that they were supposed to be the price-pressure threat against big commercial players. I.e. "we'll setup our own competitors if you won't do OA reasonably". Now those infrastructures are owned by a big commercial player.

Nice way to monetize the threat against your own business model.

Now T&F can: 1.) not comply with Plan S demands for its journals; while 2.) profiting from the alternative infrastructures that funders might want to establish.

This might mean that Plan S achieves its goal of ensuring that funded research appears in non-hybrid gold venues.

It also means that T&F win either way.

It doesn't mean a conversion of titles to pure gold OA though.

Revisiting Brian O'Nolan's (Flann O'Brien) early satirical publication _Blather_ and chuckling at the deliberately bad poetry.

Not in public anyway
Don’t give your Mrs
Krs.

Strange but true
The extraordinary thing about cows is
That they never wear trowsis.

Thanks all for the well wishes. I escaped hospital and am home again. We have a plan to get this condition under control now.

Caught up with Dr Who last night and it went a bit like this:

The Doctor: "What do you want?"
The Master: "Kneel."

Us: "Who is Neil?"

"Pro" tip that almost caught me: there's no point having an uninterruptible power supply send a network signal to all devices if your network gear isn't also wired into the UPS.

It also feels brilliant to be writing a piece about OLH that has the heading "Lessons Learned from the First Half Decade"

In light of F1000 news, a good test for your open infrastructure orgs in something I have just written: "Charitable status means that OLH cannot be taken over by a for-profit entity. We have bound ourselves to the Odyssean mast in case of temptation by for-profit sirens."

PSA: I have been admitted to hospital with a bowel obstruction. Extremely painful but the morphine is helping. Surgical appraisal shortly.

My 2020 reading has kicked off with Jane Austen's _Emma_ and Svetlana Alexievich's _Chernobyl Prayer_. Worlds apart to say the least.

Probably the single best thing that can be done for public education. Where's the first place you go for information when sitting round a table with friends and you want to check something? https://x.com/HoneybHighton/status/1212766179892367365

perhaps a mild exaggeration. I mean, free university education, properly funded schools etc. are probably higher up the list. But still important.

Morning all. On home turf here preparing a lecture for this term's The Novel module at @birkbeck_ETC on postmodernism and Angela Carter's _The Passion of New Eve_ (1977).

I love that I get adverts for "Chris Hadfield teaches space exploration", as though I'm going to read "Spaceflight for Dummies", watch these videos, then launch a rocket from my shed.

One of those "my inbox is being spammed by @CameronNeylon's Google Doc co-author critical comments" evenings. Could be worse!