Dark times at the moment. Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere and censorship regimes become ever more common. None of the material on my blog is particularly sensitive. Some two decades out-of-date information security stuff, posts about English literature, some posts about health, and posts about scholarly communication. It’s not really the kind of stuff that will get me in trouble.
This week, I have started work at Michigan State University, as interim technical lead on the Knowledge Commons project. I'll probably say more about this at some point soon. However, a huge part of onboarding at new digital/software places is getting your head around the stack and trying to get a development environment setup and ready to use.
This week, over Christmas 2024, I have read two pieces about digital preservation: Ian Milligan’s Averting the Digital Dark Age 1 and Ageh et al. ’s “The Preservation of Knowledge in the Digital Age” for Arcadia. 2 It is, in truth, fairly difficult to reconcile these two accounts of the state of digital preservation.
“Content drift” is an important concept for digital preservation and web archiving. Scholarly readers expect to find immutable (“persisted”) content at the resolution endpoint of a DOI. It is a matter of research integrity that research articles should remain the same at the endpoint, as citations can refer to specific textual formulations.
Like most years, a mixed bag for me here. Kidney failure continues to be a truly challenging medical fiasco, with AV fistulas, overnight dialysis, hormone therapies, and much much more. I also continue to feel the severe difficulties of my rheumatoid arthritis, which required a hip replacement in April.
The UK currently has an assisted dying bill going through parliament and I am very conflicted about it. On the one hand, I am a member of DIGNITAS, the organization that supports assisted dying and that runs a “clinic” in Switzerland to which members who are terminally ill can travel to end their lives. I have no desire for the end of my life to be a mess of literally unbearable suffering and nausea, even with palliative care.
People are obsessed with the short-term effects of Covid, prioritising them over the longer-term impacts. “It was just like a minor cold, really”, they say, perhaps not realising that even mild cases of Covid have been shown to cause lasting cognitive impairment. But I also take exception with this comparison to the common cold. Because, for me, a simple cold led to lifelong disability and severe chronic health problems.
This post picks up an argument that I made in [Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Metaphors-Digital-Textual-History-Stanford-Technologies/dp/1503614883/ref=sr_1_1) about facts and copyright. Namely, that although facts are exempt from copyright, factual status is not necessarily stable.
There are lots of things that I have learned about kidneys and their functions since BK virus destroyed mine. Kidneys regulate potassium in your blood; they also control phosphate levels; they remove urea from the blood stream; they take excess fluid out of your body and blood; they produce the hormones that stimulate the creation of red blood cells; and a whole host more. Kidneys are the Swiss Army Knives of internal organs.
Research England has dropped the mandate for OA books in its guidance for the next REF, saying that it will, now, apply instead by 2029. It is hard to see, given the extensive trailing of this mandate, what will be different by 2029.
There’s a movement at the moment on social media where angry academic authors are gathering with the intent to boycott Routledge, who are apparently distributing academic works for training in AI. I say: read your publishing contracts. I believe that Routledge’s default agreement certainly allows this.
