My dissertation focused on the evolution of negation in French, and I’ve continued to study this change. In order to track the way that negation was used, I needed to collect a corpus of texts and annotate them. I developed a MySQL database to store the annotations (and later the texts themselves) and a suite of PHP scripts to annotate the texts and store them in the database.

In my previous post, I discussed the differences between existential and universal statements. In particular, the standard of evidence is different: to be sure that an existential statement is correct we only need to see one example, but to be sure a universal is correct we have to have examined everything. But what if we don’t have the time to examine everything, and we don’t have to be absolutely sure?

This afternoon, after an intense day of writing, I decided that I was finally fed up with maintaining so many different copies of my publication record. I have my institutional repository, my OpenOffice CV document, my Academia.edu profile and, of course, the version on my own site. I decided to do something about this. Allow me to introduce eprintsCV!

As a round-up of the academic stuff I have achieved over the past year, purely for my own benefit and in anticipation of like-minded posts from my Twitter followers with whom I would like to engage in group collective congratulations, here's a list! First, and most importantly, I have been doing my job as a Lecturer in Literature at the University of Lincoln for a year.

An argument by anecdote. My prized Christmas present this year (which I obtained by selling a load of old electronics that I didn't want/need) was a pair of Parrot Zik headphones. They're wonderful. They paired with my Android phone flawlessly and they also connected with superb ease to my Linux installation which is my primary setup. However, I have now spent several hours trying to get them to work under Windows 7. Will they pair?

I was very pleased, late last year, to have been invited by Jim Mussell to contribute to a Digital Forum in the Literature journal, the Journal of Victorian Culture , on Open Access publishing.

Dear "top journal": 1 year and 4 months to review is too long was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on December 20, 2013.

I have a new review of Belfiore, Eleonora, and Anna Upchurch, eds., Humanities in the Twenty-first Century: Beyond Utility and Markets (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) now published in Textual Practice . You can also read the Author Submitted Manuscript version, should you so wish.

There’s a famous story about swans that Nasim Taleb used for the title of his recent book. European zoologists had seen swans, and all the swans they had seen had white feathers, so they said that all the swans in the world were in fact white. Then a European went to Australia and saw swans with black feathers.

Today marked the publication of the Government and RCUK responses to the UK's BIS Committee Inquiry into Open Access.