My incredibly talented friend, Jake Wilson, has composed a series of Folk-Rock songs based on the diary entries of Robert Scott on his ill-fated expedition to the Pole. I thought it worth pointing out that the website for this is now up. Opportunities to purchase the album to be added in the near future, but for now you can listen to all the songs.

Seriously, just what in God's name do you think you are doing? I am referring, in this bombastic introduction, to the Department of Health's decision to continue to defy the democratic right of the population to see the transition risk register for the proposed NHS shakeup. Let me tell you a few truths about democracy and a few points about risk assessments.

A quick tip that I think it's worth raising, as it's just come to the fore in my life(!), is that the citation style you employ can have a large impact on the number of words over the course of an 80,000 word thesis. I have been using, until today, the Chicago style with a full note on every page.

I did an interview at the weekend with Mark Carrigan on open source solutions for academic publishing and the potential future role of the library.

I have a guest post over at the excellent Berfrois in which I review the newly released Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. The piece is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license, so I could post the entire thing here, but I'll let you read the entirety over at their site.

Yesterday, Tuesday the 21st of February 2012, I participated in a discussion at the University of Sussex Researcher Hive on copyright and academia, with particular emphasis on doctoral researchers, joined by Sarah Robins-Hobden, Liz Thackray and others. This post will attempt to document some of the ideas we discussed.

In response to the question of why we use secondary sources, one of the most overheard statements in my seminars has to be the perennial student response: "to back up your argument". Last week, I formulated a concise way of thinking about this that dispels this argument and also makes it clear where the space for originality lies.

I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the "What Happens Now" conference at the University of Lincoln on twenty-first century fiction.

Ok, so it could really be Wordpress for anybody, but here's the Prezi that I made for a true step-by-step, from the very beginning guide to setting up a new Wordpress-based website. We also covered the beginnings of the information you'd need to customize the site and the benefits of self-hosting. The Prezi is probably only really of use for those who want a basic guide to setting up a new wordpress.com blog.

Feeling confident of my current level of progress, I think it's worth pointing out that the entirety of my doctoral thesis work has been done using free, open source software. I wanted to write a quick overview of my system, explain where it falls down and give an honest appraisal of how it went.

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.