People say you should stand up for what you believe in. They say you should look out for those less fortunate, and speak up for those who don’t get heard. They say that those of us who come from marginalized backgrounds, like TBLG backgrounds for example, but have enough privilege to be out in relative safety should speak up for those who don’t have that privilege.

I’ve been gearing up for quite some time to write about the false labour dichotomies in the academy that seem to be emerging that put “academic labour” as some privileged space of difference from other types. This isn’t that post, which I haven’t had time to work on yet, but it is related. I don’t usually agree with everything that Daniel Allington writes. And that’s fine. Spice of life etc.

At the beginning of June I participated in the Trees Count Data Jam, experimenting with the results of the census of New York City street trees begun by the Parks Department in 2015. I had seen a beta version of the map tool created by the Parks Department’s data team that included images of the trees pulled from the Google Street View database. Those images reminded me of others I had seen in the @everylotnyc twitter feed.

In Open Access and the Humanities , I wrote: OA and the Humanities was published by Cambridge University Press and some asked, given my critique of the prestige economy in that text, why I had opted to go with one of the oldest, most established, and most prestigious presses. The question is not hard to answer: I wanted a broad audience to read the work, including those who do place a high emphasis on the matters I critique.

Academia.edu takes your academic work and puts it behind a privacy-defying signup form, laces it with ads, botches the metadata, and tries to appease you by offering stats and social ranking that promote constant comparison. What’s not to like?

A post today at the Scholarly Kitchen has spurred me to write something that I’ve been pondering for a while. Namely: how helpful is this idea of “paying it forward” as a way of funding scholarly communications? My take: I’m not convinced by author-controlled discretionary funds, with the emphasis of my scepticism falling on the author-controlled and discretionary parts in various degrees.

Somebody, and I can’t remember who (so treat this as a straw argument if you want), argued with me a while back that there was a problem with open access because it was driven by technological possibility. That I wanted people to be able to read things without paying because technology made it possible was apparently a bad thing because, ya know, technology. Now, I’m not actually averse to thinking critically about technology.

I’m a parent. It doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone else, it’s just a category that reflects some facts about me: I conceived a new human with my wife, we are raising and caring for that human, and we expect to have a relationship with him for the rest of our lives. Some people don’t take parenthood seriously, so it doesn’t impact their lives very much, but their kids suffer.

I’m probably not the first to think these thoughts, but I thought I would write them anyway as they are fresh in my mind. When dealing with computational reading methods, it is easy to encounter an aesthetic/teleological opposition to stylometry from some quarters.

Today, my peer-reviewed journal article on the publishing history of the two substantially different versions of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was published. You can read the full article in all its open access glory at the Open Library of Humanities . There’s also a press release about the work on Birkbeck’s main site. The Guardian has also run a great article with additional comments from David Mitchell.