I was reflecting this morning on the following propositions: Higher-tier (high prestige, high exclusivity) journals, to which most academics submit their work first, often have extremely high thresholds for admission. They require three peer reviewers to agree to publication and they also set exacting (and sometimes flawed) criteria for novelty.

This morning marked the culmination of a long period of work for the chapter on the history of digital whitespace in my forthcoming book, Paper Thin . The chapter ranges across a variety of subjects, from the history of paper coloration, through visual display unit technologies, before eventually settling on musical (silent) seriality as the best metaphor for how whitespace is encoded and reproduced.

I asked on Twitter for where to start on considering programming languages as languages . Here are some of the best recommendations: Binder, Jeffrey M., ‘Romantic Disciplinarity and the Rise of the Algorithm’, Critical Inquiry , 46.4 (2020), 813–34 https://doi.org/10.1086/709225 Chartier, Roger, ‘Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Text’, trans.

I asked, yesterday on Twitter, whether anybody had written about one of the most prominent verbal tics in humanistic academic discourse: “I am interested in”. This phrase is used to justify critical attention to almost any object while also placing the idea of such scrutiny beyond any challenge. Why should we care that you are interested in something?

This week, I decided that I should move my VPN system that I run on all my devices to use the new Wireguard protocol, replacing the OpenVPN setup. To do this, I used NetMaker for the configuration and setup and I have to say that it is superb. It works a treat on systems that have Wireguard easily installed and you then get a really neat web interface for administering clients.

One of the core plot devices (in so far as there is a plot) in Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel, Gravity’s Rainbow , is the S-Gerät: the Schwarzgerät or “black device”, made from the plastic Imipolex G. While working on another project (on the history of television), I found a curious set of projects from the war, designated Y-Gerät and X-Gerät, which are part of the so-called Battle of the Beams but that, to my knowledge, haven’t been

Some incomplete notes on the introduction to Gaskill, Nicholas, Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), originally a Twitter thread. This morning, I am kicking off by reading Nicholas Gaskill’s “Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color”. Amusingly, I’m reading it on an e-reading device. In black and white.

Some very incomplete and casual-in-tone notes on Monique, Zerdoun Bat-Yehouda. 2003. Les Encres Noires au Moyen Age. Paris: CNRS EDITIONS. Originally a Twitter thread. Pp 3-4: claims that previous studies have been limited to describing colour, shades and broad properties. Wants to add scientific principles that will help to date and localise specific inks. But also to find methods for restoration projects.

For quite some time, I’ve wanted to have an internet system that could fallback to a 4G connection if the primary internet connection failed. This would be helpful for when I need to work/go to online meetings and my Virgin Media connection dies. At the weekend, I found the LBR20 system, which is part of the Netgear Orbi system. It has precisely this functionality.

Giorgio Agamben gets around a lot on literature syllabi. His “What is the Contemporary?” is a staple of theoretical courses, his concept of “bare life” is used to think through the structures of contemporary biopower, and his thinking around “states of exception” and “states of emergency” find a fruitful home in many places. Here’s the problem, though: Agamben has just shown us the logical outcome of his thinking and it’s not good.