A few years ago I wrote about incorporating sign linguistics when I taught Introduction to Linguistics at Saint John’s University. The other course I taught most often was Introduction to Phonology. This course was required for our majors in Speech Pathology and Audiology, and they often filled up the class.

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.

Few historical maps of Ghana’s Volta and Oti regions have been invested with so much political and sociohistorical meaning as Hans Gruner’s 1913 map of the Togo Plateau. Gruner, stationed for over twenty years at Misahöhe in present-day Togo, was a long-time colonial administrator known for his ethnographical and historical knowledge of the area.

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?

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