In the past couple of weeks I’ve had a number of emails about the styleguide for the Open Library of Humanities. Queries range from “my discipline does things differently, is that OK?” to “why bother maintaining your own style guide, why not just refer to a named style like Chicago?” Both good points. My own thinking actually goes further, though.
The following is the slightly revised text of my keynote at the Action Writing: The Politics of US Literature, 1960-Present , held at Birkbeck College, University of London on the 3rd July 2015, organized by Catherine Flay and Pippa Eldridge.
If you think carefully about research publication and its economics, a strange (but also obvious) point becomes clear. In university ecosystems where we have tuition fees (and probably in those without) we determine how much material can be published through the frame of reference of teaching. This can be seen if you accept that research in the academy serves the dual function of dissemination and assessment.
Some thoughts… What can it mean to think of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as a conservative text? Its author, certainly, does not come across as a political Conservative and is more likely to grace the pages of the Guardian than the Daily Mail . Mitchell is also no backwards-looking Luddite;
A quick post to help anyone else, as I couldn’t find this info easily on the web. In the middle of the night, I was awoken by my Nexus 6 announcing an “Incoming call from unknown number”, despite the fact I had priority mode on and it shouldn’t have said anything.
Vint Cerf is one of the few people in the world who can viably use the phrase “my internet” in a talk and it be true. Tim Berners-Lee developed the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which underlies the transfer of hyperlinked documents on the World Wide Web. This is an Application protocol, meaning that it sits at the highest level of the internet.
The things that concern me about article processing charges (APCs) for open access are not those surrounding quality control, “predatory publishers” or so forth. Given that we want the services of publishers, their labour costs must be met. If we want to have open access and then the material can’t be sold, an author-side payment mechanism looks the most obvious.
At this year’s Canadian Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences I had the pleasure of attending a talk by David McClure in the digital humanities strand on his visualization tool, TextPlot . I won’t go into the technical details of what TextPlot does, because David has done so adeptly in a series of posts on his blog.
The abstract for my paper, to be presented at International Pynchon Week 2015, in Athens on Wednesday 10th June.
Applications to attend OpenCon 2015 on November 14-16 in Brussels, Belgium are now open! The application is available on the OpenCon website at opencon2015.org/attend and includes the opportunity to apply for a travel scholarship to cover the cost of travel and accommodations. Applications will close on June 22nd at 11:59pm PDT.
