Image credit: Robert Burdock under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. This is an announcement regarding the formation, and first UK meeting, of the UK Academic Pynchon Network, to take place on Friday the 1st of April, 2011 at Durham University. The format will be fairly informal, mainly a discussion group inviting work in progress, papers, ideas, chapters etc.

For all the pains they take throughout to emphasise the vast quantity of editorial resources deployed in the redaction and publication of the most sensational scoops of 2010, the impression one gets reading David Leigh and Luke Harding's WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy is that some of those editors should have been deployed upon the book itself. It has, obviously from the timescale, been put together in a rush.

As part of SA4QE2011, here's three photos of my drop locations (there were many more, but these were the ones I photographed). I'd also like to share this excellent image of the ephemera distributed by Twitter user @Dystopia2009 as part of his event: Drop #1 Somewhere between Enfield Town and Seven Sisters. Drop #2 The British Library Cafe. Drop #3 Somewhere in the British Library.

Anybody reading this weekend's Comment is Free piece by Nick Cohen might have felt somewhat dispirited at the concept of attending a lecture by Judith Butler, who was invited to Sussex this week (2nd February, 2011) to speak as part of the Hannah Arendt Lecture in Modern Jewish Thought series.

Featured image credit: The Prime Minister's Office under a CC-BY-ND license. In their infamous post-World War II, post-holocaust tract, the Dialectic of Enlightenment , Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno set out the central premises of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. In this work they made two key and inseparable claims.

Greetings! If you've landed here you are either a reader of my blog, one of my twitter followers or, and this is probably the most exciting case, you scanned one of the QR codes that I left, printed on yellow paper, in various locations on Friday the 4th of February 2011. What's it all about?

Featured image credit: Rain Rabbit under a CC-BY-NC license. This is the first part of a collaborative writing effort initiated by @jennifermjones, @AndyCoverdale, @FlyGirlTwo and myself (@martin_eve) which aims to discuss, interrogate and critically reflect, from an immanent position, on various aspects of the postgraduate community falling under the Twitter hashtag, #PhDchat.

Image copyright the Economist. Too much of an opportunity to pass off for a quick post, the Economist recently featured a humorous take on the US map.

While browsing the EThOS Thesis collection today, I suddenly became curious as to the history, statistically speaking, of doctorates in my field of literature: studies on Thomas Pynchon. It emerges that, on record since 1978, there have been 23 doctorates awarded in the UK on, or in part concerning, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon.

Featured image credit: husky under a CC-BY-SA license. Some will tell me this is overkill, but I believe that, in 2011, we should have the option to read whatever we like on the web without ISPs, WiFi hotspot providers and their ilk able to see what we do online.

This is a re-publication of a post originally written for the Vitae blog's Digital Researcher section, archived here for preservation purposes. Image credit: leezfield under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. Much of the rubric surrounding social media is, to my mind, somewhat de-humanising.