2021 was another pretty bad pandemic year, in many ways. For those of us with immune system compromise it was alarming to see a near-wholesale return to “normality” among the general population when our lives remained under extreme threat.
In the world of OA publishing, there have been further (not-so)shock waves reverberating this week as Knowledge Unlatched was sold to Wiley. One of the questions this raises is: how was it possible for this sale to go through and what could have been done to prevent it? One of the first points to raise, and one that I have already made on Twitter, is that Knowledge Unlatched had to take a corporate form that protected its founder’s investment.
Today marks a significant milestone for me. All ten of my academic monographs are now – or will be when published – openly accessible and free to download. The books that are not yet out have advance contracts that stipulate open access.
By necessity, the bibliography to my book on Warez must cite a number of unconventional works that are not covered by standard style manuals. In particular, I need to make reference to NFO files that contain ASCII art and other iNFOrmation about the Warez Scene. As noted more extensively in the introduction, one of the primary sources upon which I draw is the DeFacto2 archive. The format of some of these entries should be explained.
tl;dr: use the node.js module html-pdf-chrome to print programmatically, not Chrome’s built-in virtual-time-budget. See my print.js file for an example. My CV is generated automatically from Birkbeck’s online repository. It uses a system that basically generates a paginated version of the CV in the browser, using CSS regions technologies, then does a headless print via Chrome. All the source code is available for this.
We are at an exciting moment for open-access books. UKRI has announced a forthcoming funding mandate, kicking off in 2024. Plan S funders are deciding what to do about books. And much (if not all) of the dissent around the idea of OA monographs has gone quieter. It seems, at least to me, that more and more people are persuaded that OA books are a good concept… so long as the route by which we get there is equitable.
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?
