What is the point of a citation? As Anthony Grafton puts it in his history of the footnote, “the culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust them” (233). So the point of a footnote/citation is to be able to lookup and check that epistemic claims are true? Sometimes.

My next book, tentatively titled Star Trek: Voyager: Critical and Historical Approaches to Ethics, Politics, and the End of the 1990s is now under contract at Lever Press (title definitely needs some work). This, for me, is very exciting. An open-access press with an innovative funding model – so there are no author-facing charges – I am really pleased to be working with Lever.

En la última entrada –antes de las vacaciones de verano– repasé el antiguo stemma del Lucidario , notando que el manuscrito B es el más antiguo de los conservados, a lo que se suma el descubrimiento de dos nuevos testimonios, H en 2020 e I a finales de junio de 2023.

Today’s big news is that Crossref has acquired the Retraction Watch database of expressions of concerns and retractions and has made it openly accessible to anyone who wants to use it. I’m waiting for full confirmation of the license or public domain dedication under which it will be released, but this is still a great commitment of Crossref to the POSI principles. The liberation of this database is good for science and scholarship in general.

This morning I gave the third of my keynote talks this week at the Janeway conference: The Lower Decks. It’s been quite a week and I am exhausted with my kidney failure. Indeed, today is a macabre one year anniversary, precisely, since I had the kidney biopsy that revealed my BK Virus Nephropathy and that my kidneys were going to be totally destroyed. Of course, I didn’t know that quite at that time.

Well, it finally happened, as Queen once sang. But I am not going “slightly mad” as the song professes. Instead, I have decided that the time has come where I need a wheelchair to get around. My arthritic hip damage is substantial and painful – and it’s stopping me going places. I rarely want to go out anywhere “for a walk” because the pain is so great. A wheelchair will help with this. But there are some things about it that bother me.

This is a the second part in a two part series of peer commentary on a recent preprint. The first part is here. I ended that post by noting I wasn’t sure all preprint authors were aware of the public nature of the preprint. I am now assured they are, and have heard from the senior author that they are working on a revised version.

One of the benefits of today’s preprint culture is that it is possible to provide constructive critique of pending work before it is out, thereby enabling a rapid cycle of revision before things are committed to print. I have myself benefited from comments on preprints, and have acknowledged such public pre-publication reviews in several of my papers. The below remarks are shared in that spirit.

Excel stores dates in a very odd way: a serial number of days since 1900.

Siguiendo con la última entrada, quiero repasar brevemente la historia de los testimonios del Lucidario . A los siete que mencioné entonces habría que añadir dos nuevos. El primero, descubierto en la Bibliothèque François Villon de Rouen en 2021 y el segundo, hace dos meses en la Biblioteca de la Fundación Bartolomé March de Palma. Resumiendo, tenemos: A, manuscrito base de las ediciones de Kinkade y Sacchi, datado en 1455;