I am frequently asked, by libraries, to provide usage statistics for their institutions at the Open Library of Humanities. I usually resist this, since there are a number of ways in which the metrics are not usually a fair comparison to subscription resources. A few notes on this. We do not have or require any login information. This means that the only way that we can provide usage information is by using the institutional IP address.

On Saturday I found out that Alan Hudson died. Alan was my doctoral advisor at the University of New Mexico until his retirement in 2005, and a source of support after that. I first met Alan when I visited the UNM Linguistics Department in 1997. Alan welcomed me into his office with a broad smile, and asked, “So Angus, have you made up your mind about whether you want to come here?” “Well…” I said.

The big buzz over the past few years has been Data Science. Corporations are opening Data Science departments and staffing them with PhDs, and universities have started Data Science programs to sell credentials for these jobs. As a linguist I’m particularly interested in this new field, because it includes research practices that I’ve been using for years, like corpus linguistics and natural language processing.

2017 was, as with last year, a mixed bag for me. On the positive side, OLH continues to grow, I received a grant for the peer-review project on which I am working, we released Janeway the scholarly communcations platform, and I had a number of publications out. Password was published in Korean and I am about to sign a book contract for my next monograph.

This is partly a therapeutic post to get this off my chest and partly a post to which I can point friends and colleagues to avoid re-explaining everything every time. Since mid-September 2017, when I had pneumonia, sepsis, and a spinal-column infection, I have been losing my hearing. It varies hugely as to how bad this is from day to day.

In September I wrote about how I used accent tag videos to teach phonetic transcription in my online linguistics classes. Since I could not be there in person, the videos provided a stable reference that we could all refer to from our computers around the country.

Scene: a quietly bustling bistro in Paris’s 14th Arrondissement. SERVER: Oui, vous désirez? PIXELBUDS: Yes, you desire? TOURIST: Um, yeah, I’ll have the steak frites. PIXELBUDS: UM, OUAIS, JE VAIS AVOIR LES FRITES DE STEAK SERVER: Que les frites? PIXELBUDS: Than fries? TOURIST: No, at the same time. PIXELBUDS: NON, EN MEME TEMPS SERVER: Alors, vous voulez le steak aussi? PIXELBUDS: DESOLE, JE N’AI PAS COMPRIS.

When I was teaching introductory linguistics, I had a problem with the phonetic transcription exercises in the textbooks I was using: they asked students to transcribe “the pronunciation” of individual words – implying that there is a single correct pronunciation with a single correct transcription.

I’m currently handling a difficult case where a poetry publisher is demanding a royalty for citation of text within a work of literary criticism. They want to know how many “copies” we are “printing” so they can charge us. It is my view that this is totally extortionate and that this use is “fair dealing” under UK law for purposes of criticism and review.

The recent self-censorship by Cambridge University Press in China is billed, by some, as an assault on academic freedom. It is certainly a worrying trend. There are, though, a couple of responses that I wanted to note about this: Following David Price, I note that making material open access with an open license allows for the free, open, online dissemination of scholarly work.