As I count down to the launch of Orbit: Writing around Pynchon, I've been thinking carefully about the mechanisms through which the articles will be consumed. In short: what metadata should be in the PDFs and where should it be. Obviously, I want the metadata to be visible to the human eye, but what about embedding this within the PDF's proper metadata mechanism? Apache FOP, which I'm using to the transforms, has the facility to do this.

The third conference I attended last week was a day called SuShI. The idea was to bring together the humanities and business worlds. It was, from my extremely critical Leftist perspective, a somewhat strange event. I attended talks on advertising and creativity schematising business theorists. I have to say that, although left still not entirely persuaded by the contents of their papers, it was an extraordinary fusion.

I just realised that I forgot to Storify my live tweets from day 2 of this conference... enjoy!

Imagine if you could have, in your pocket, access to the world's research information in an easy-to-navigate, accessible format with dynamic add-ons, customizable aspects and links to other pieces of research. Well, we have a way of doing this. The technologies are called XHTML, HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. The problem is, if academic materials are published in those formats, it is harder for publishers to: Lock down material with DRM.

This Friday and Saturday, the University of Sussex hosted the Thinking Feeling conference on affect, feeling and emotion, attempting to theorise the myriad ways in which this is mapped out.

The second day of the 21st-Century British Fiction Conference at Birkbeck saw an opening keynote from Bob Eaglestone in which he provocatively challenged the unformed nature of the field.

[<a href="http://storify.com/martin_eve/day-1-of-twenty-first-century-literature-conferenc" target="_blank">View the story "Day 1 of Twenty-First-Century Literature Conference at Birkbeck" on Storify</a>] Day 1 of Twenty-First-Century Literature Conference at Birkbeck was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on May 12, 2012.

A quick note to say: come join us for the launch of Excursions volume 3 from 4pm-7pm on the 16th May in the Fulton Social Space at the University of Sussex! Excursions Journal Vol 3: Launch Party was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on May 05, 2012.

I thought it was time for a brief "state of the issue" post for the, no doubt voluminous, hordes awaiting the launch of Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon. One review and six articles are now typeset and going into proofreading. A further review and note are in initial copyediting. Three commissioned reviews are expected in the very near future and these will go into copyediting and typesetting as soon as possible.

Following the success of last year's Pynchon in Public Day, this May 8th will play host to further celebrations of perhaps the world's greatest living author: Thomas Pynchon. I know that there are plans afoot in Munich and New York, but wanted to announce that a Brighton contingent will be meeting at 10am on Tuesday 8th of May at the Nia Cafe.

Today, the SoAS was host to the Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar, marking the release of a special issue of Textual Practice on Martin Amis' Money . The panel consisted of Nicky Marsh, Chris Hartley, Matthew Crowley, Bianca Leggett and Joe Brooker. There was also a conversation with the novelist Alex Preston, but I unfortunately had to leave before this point. This is a brief post to document the seminar.