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October 2021

Speaking to @ajrbyers just now and we realised that @janeway_systems at @birkbeck_ETC @BirkbeckUoL is the home to over 200 hosted journals. Quite the milestone for a project we started in our spare time at a weekend a few years ago.

I've had a very rough week healthwise, but am pleased to say that I made it into the Shaw Trust's list of 100 most influential people with disabilities in the UK

I've had a great day working on my next book. In addition to some stimulating essays in the new issue of INSCRIPTIONS (on "holes"), I've also been reading Zachary Lesser's Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée.

A reminder, please, to everyone I know of why vaccination alone is not enough and why we need to control the spread. Two doses of vaccine and no antibody response, now confirmed by clinical trial for me. And I'm not the only one.

Postal goodies - the next issue of Inscriptions journal, on the theme of "holes", which looks to be really useful for my work on the history of computational blanks/whitespace.

Today's work for @COPIMproject is playing with the Research Organization Registry (ROR) dataset, in anticipation of Thoth implementing ROR and GRID data.

We have ordered a takeaway/delivery roast lunch, because if we cook one at home Toby sits underneath the oven for two hours, squeaking with excitement and we can't bear it.

I do constantly hit up against difficult discussions with licensing where even those working on titles at presses don't understand. Take this, where the above text totally contradicts the permissiveness of the license itself.

I appreciate that the part where it says that express permission by license will override is fine, but it only causes additional confusion.

Also grateful, with a tinge of sadness, to receive a year's worth of post from work, which a lovely administrator kindly sent to me. It features this programme for a career-high prize dinner that I could not attend as we entered the lockdown from which we've yet to emerge.

I have no idea. Completely no clue. Really, it is such a mystery that having no measures to control an ultra-virulent, deadly pandemic will result in high case numbers and at least 1k deaths per week (52k per year).

A long day already but very pleased to be able to attend the launch event for @mkirschenbaum's Bitstreams, which I read the weekend before last.

A busy day tomorrow after a late finish tonight (we're still going on our @COPIMproject Charleston Preconference), but hope to kickstart Wednesday by getting down to this.

MRI scan results today.

It shows moderate progressive damage to the vertebrae in my neck, causing spinal compression. This is a result of my rheumatoid arthritis. I will now have to discuss it with rheumatology.

The great thing about the months of delay in worldwide vinyl production at the moment is that I get a surprise in the post most weeks of things I ordered back in March and then promptly forgot about.

A new Andrew Weatherall record this week!

Last week's fun postal vinyl was the newly released set of demos of Primal Scream's iconic(ally overplayed) Screamadelica, famously shaped from its original state to indie-pop-rock stardom/success by Andrew Weatherall.

Today was wonderful as my OLH colleagues setup a fantastic, safe visit, some travelling the length of the country. All lateral flow tested, double vaxxed, met outside, keeping distance. They met Toby! It means so much to have friends who make such an effort while protecting me.

Today's reading is Laura DeNardis's Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance (MIT, 2009). A really key text on understanding the politics of protocols. Sits alongside M. Mueller's Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace (MIT, 2002).

The Guardian: "how Nick Clegg became the fall guy for Facebook’s failures".

It's because he is paid £2.7m as head of their comms dept. That's not a bad rate for being a "fall guy".

Me and the Tobes are having a boys night in*, watching DIE HARD: WITH A VENGEANCE.

* only because Mrs Eve has gone to bed exhausted

"Hilary Clinton, she could be the 42nd President"

"And I'm going to marry Donald Trump"

Current view

Exciting times this week as I work on production of my two forthcoming books: THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND LITERARY STUDIES (Oxford UP) and WAREZ: THE INFRASTRUCTURE AND AESTHETICS OF PIRACY (punctum books).

Both will be open access 😀

and huge thanks to the teams at the presses who work on such stuff. When I say I am "working" on it, of course, they're doing most of it.

Excited just now on a call with @kfitz, @KathleeShearer, @ajrbyers & others about COAR/Notify and @janeway_systems. I think we could build something really cool for preprint review structures out of it. Then remembered that I have about a billion other things to do first.

But getting a basic metadata transit protocol working between systems like @humcommons and @janeway_systems would be truly excellent.

This is actually really brilliant and exciting! Sync on the Remarkable now supports Dropbox, fixing my one real gripe with it.

Playing this evening with Thoth metadata and visualizing the books we have in there. Clustered and weighted here by shared BISAC subject codes. @COPIMproject @cmplxtv_studies @ontakragoueke @rupertgatti @joe_dev



Adding in BIC codes on top of BISAC, I am afraid to say, totally overloads my vis.js graphing proc

This evening I'm attending my friend and colleague, @the_blochian's, keynote at @Princeton. She's currently telling us about the significance of the underground settings of hollow-Earth visions of futurity.

Writing about the social complexities of low-level internet tech. For instance, the backroom negotiations on peering and connectivity. This whole world is so shady that there's even a book on it: "The 2014 Internet Peering Playbook: Connecting to the Core of the Internet".

It irrationally irks me when locations in book referencing styles give the state abbreviation ("Cambridge, MA") only when it could be ambiguous (not "New York, NY" but "New York").

I'm grateful that I will receive my third Covid vaccination tomorrow. As I am severely immunocompromised it's still unclear how much protection it will afford me, but it's probably better than zero.

Our new mandatory IT information security training has a password hacking game in it. The best part is that to solve it you have to realise that the named Volkswagen camper van is more important to the target than the name of their child.

Must admit, I'm excited about this afternoon. A colleague/friend has travelled some distance to my house, having taken a Covid test, and we're going to do some socially distanced co-authorship/research planning together outside.

Research planning attire ain't what it used to be.

We've got the scenery

Today I'm making a start on Steven Connor's THE MADNESS OF KNOWLEDGE

One of my favourite choice throwaway witticisms: "For relatively highly developed organisms like human beings..."