In my previous post, I flagged up a conversation about DOIs that I had with Geoffrey Bilder on Twitter. It was enlightening in many ways; I hadn't appreciated that one of the main challenges faceed by Crossref is a carrot and stick approach to ensure that DOIs really do combat link rot.

Sparked off by a comment on Document Object Identifiers and metrics by Ernesto Priego, I wrote up a brief proposal for the tech side of what I perceived as the function of DOIs.

Following a conversation (well, a complaint and a suggestion) with @ernestopriego on Twitter, the following came to light (and is certainly something I've experienced): DOI numbers are assigned by a central organization called CrossRef. For most quantitive metric computations on academic journal articles, you must assign a DOI. Membership of CrossRef (for a publisher with less than $1m profit(!)) costs $275/year.

Friday, 27th January 2012: 4pm. 2 years and four months into my efforts. The first draft of my Ph.D is now done! I have 81,000 words excluding introduction and conclusion, so some cutting needs to be done. Editing this is going to take at least a couple of months (some parts need beefing up, others paring down), by my estimates, but my last AHRC funding installment arrives in June, so I'm feeling confident.

A guest comment alerted me to the fact that I had missed an entry from my Aesthetic Theory lexicon! αρχαί = origin "In those studies devoted to the aesthetic αρχαί, positivistic sampling of material and such speculation as is otherwise disdained by the sciences flourish wildly alongside each other" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2004. p.

Ian Rankin and Martin Paul Eve Last weekend, the 20th to 22nd of January 2012, saw the inaugural event of the First Fictions Festival at the University of Sussex. Having been a key behind-the-scenes organizer I just wanted to post a thank you to all involved for a succesful weekend.

2012 has been designated the year of IPv6 launch and, to do my part, I have tweaked my infrastructure to ensure full, and future-guaranteed, IPv6 connectivity. The following domains now support connections via IPv6: martineve.com pynchon.net excursions-journal.org.uk 2bitpie.net DNS may still be propogating, but all should be 100% within 48 hours.

I will be running, on the 31st January, a workshop for Sussex researchers on protecting their assets; aka. backing up their work. After the first year of my Ph.D I had a nasty scare when my laptop was stolen on my journey home (I had a migraine, effectively passed out and didn't notice someone simply take my bag from beneath me on the train). This could have been dire. Fortunately, though, I take backup and encryption very seriously.

My Adorno Greek Lexicon project is now complete. Here is the full listing. Page references are to Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2004 unless noted otherwise. Links contain additional information about the research process and the context of each term. I hope this is of help to anglophone readers in their pursuit of Adorno's thought.

"This exteriorization is, however, practical insofar as it determines the person who experiences art and steps out of himself as a ζῷον πολιτικόν, just as art itself is objectively praxis as the cultivation of consciousness" (Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2004. p. 317.) ζῷον πολιτικόν = zōon politikon;

I took a detour today, en route to visiting the Freud museum to the Islington Museum, in order to see the collection of library books defaced by playwright Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. The collection was not disappointing!