Throughout the works of Michel Pastoureau (at least in his books on Black and Green) are sketched ideas of the notion of a “chromoclasm”. The proposition that Pastoureau seeks to advance is that the austere aesthetic favored by Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, and Luther – linked to the avoidance of graven images and varying levels of iconoclasm – reoriented the color spectrum around a ‘black-gray-white axis’ (p. 124). Yet the challenge here lies

I’ve spent the past few weeks tracking down answers to the questions: “When and why did paper become white and why was white paper so valued?” for my work on Paper Thin . Here are some of my very abridged findings. This sounds as though it’s a trivial question. Obviously, we think, it must have something to do with contrast and ensuring the best legibility. This is definitely not the case.

It’s an exciting time in the OA book world because many experiments are coming to fruition. We’ve seen MIT’s recent D2O offering; Michigan has a new membership programme; punctum books and Open Book Publishers are on the go; Springer is piloting a scheme with Berkeley;

This morning I have been looking at the UK government’s so-called “Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill”. The politics of this are extremely complicated, but suffice it to say that when the Minister for HE ends up having to say that the legislation will help get Holocaust deniers onto campus, it doesn’t exactly look great. As I have noted before, academic freedom is actually very hard to define and varies between jurisdictions.

This week, cOAlition S endorsed the Subscribe to Open (S2O) business model. This group of international funders is committed to a complete transition to open-access publishing. To date, critics have claimed that the cOAlition has been too wedded to the (inflationary) Article Processing Charge business model, although Plan S is theoretically neutral on this matter.

I posted, a short while ago, about the reprinting of OA books under CC licenses. This is, of course, totally legal and allowed under the more liberal Creative Commons licenses. However, it will, I feel, alienate academics from OA. I think that they will consider it derogatory treatment of their work. In any case, I have now contacted Saint Philip Street Press and asked for my attribution to be removed. This has now happened and it worked.

Do you think that the Subscribe-To-Open model could be applied to new academic presses who have no backlist? Yes. The Open Library of Humanities, which I run, does not have a backlist but works on this model. It’s a great deal of work to set up and articulating the value proposition is more challenging, but it’s still doable. Thank you for your presentation.

I love my Moog Minitaur synth. It’s a great little bass station that packs a punch. However, I have been facing some issues using its full functionality. Namely, there’s a software plugin that enables you to tweak all the settings from the DAW. It controls the synth over midi via USB.

I was thinking idly today – and probably in a wildly unoriginal way – about some of the disputes about subscriptions to software and the politics of this model. It’s no secret that Richard Stallman, perhaps the core philosopher of the open-source software movement, is a problematic figure, most recently so in his comments about Marvin Minsky.

A friend chucked me an old Crumar Bit99 synthesizer from the 1980s. It’s a beast! Lovely bass sounds. Totally unusable interface. See figure A. However, when I received it, the unit was in a bad state. Terrible fuzzy white noise sound along with every note. It sounded as though it was totally wrecked. It’s actually, though, very easy to restore.