Flickr flickers out

One of the last bastions of the old-school Web just got ruined, from the point of view of speedy search. Flickr’s bloated and slow “crammed lightbox” style of page display is now mandatory, and there’s no way to change back. It also effects the Creative Commons search. It’s going to make a Flickr search twice or three times as long to do, at least until we get Stylish / GreaseMonkey scripts to force it back to a fast and more user-friendly style. There are no such scripts out there yet, I looked.

An Intimate History of the Arts Scholar

A 30 minute BBC Radio 4 documentary on An Intimate History of the Arts Scholar. The actual history starts at 5:15 minutes.

AOTD

Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD) is a pretty good new search tool. I tested it on “Lovecraft”, an author on whom I maintain a hand-picked list of links to all relevant open scholarly work. While OATD didn’t pick up everything written on the old gent, it still gave a rather good haul.

Timeline trouble

I once looked for decent timeline software, back in 2007. But the software then available was all rubbish, and so I decided it was easier to do a big Web timeline in html and javascript. Which was successful. It’s now 2013 I’m now looking for new Windows software that can do a big side-scrolling desktop timeline with hundreds of items hanging off it. But the software on offer is still rubbish, producing ugly timelines that either look or act like they were designed by a lesser Microsoft intern circa 1987. Can no-one really make a large-scale timeline software, that’s easy-to-use and which outputs beautiful timelines for the Web?

Search Visualiser

A neat new search-visualiser tool, being developed just down the road from me at Staffordshire University… demo shown from 1:00 onwards.

The possibility of restricting a search to only “peer reviewed journals” seems likely to corral students into the commercial systems, and may block out a lot of open access journal articles in the arts and humanities.

College & Research Libraries

The journal College & Research Libraries is now free from 1939-present. Was formerly free after six months.

Humanities ebooks and librarians

“Perception Analysis of Scholarly E-Books in the Humanities at the Collegiate Level” (March 2013)…

* There does not seem to be a consensus among academic librarians regarding what is desirable in terms of humanities book offerings.

* Many librarians do not distinguish scholarly titles from academic titles. Librarians seem to lean toward known brands (e.g., EBSCO, JSTOR), irrespective of the content that these aggregators offer.

* Most libraries are still in the early stages of developing an e-book strategy, and many are unsure of which direction they should take.

* …there is no agreement amongst librarians as to which humanities content is considered necessary, which collections are essential, which aggregators to use or what fields to cover

* Most librarians surveyed believe that the various aggregators and publishers all offer the same (overlapping) content

Hands on policy

Techdirt suggests that commercial journal publishers seem to have ‘captured’ the levers of the UK’s new open access policy.

Added to JURN

Added to JURN…

Utah Foreign Language Review

Architectural Histories

European Journal of Humour Research

PsyArt : An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts

IssueM

A possibly useful journal publishing plugin for those who love WordPress. IssueM is a commercial ($55) plugin that lets you manage a WordPress install as if it were an issue-based magazine, complete with auto-archiving. The suggested page-design is very “American magazine” in tone, but could probably be improved with a few CSS tweaks…

1000

This is the JURN blog’s 1000th post!

Added to JURN

International Journal of Cultic Studies (IJCS) 2001-2003. (Contemporary ‘alt’ cults and extreme sects).

Scripta : international journal of writing systems.

Raritan : a quarterly review (but not added to the JURN Directory, since it has only about 25 selected articles available for free).

In the Glass

I recently mused here about sending tweets to your contact-lens simply via thinking. Here’s a visualisation of what such a world might look like, a world of ubiquitous overlaid information via Google Glass contact-lenses (and presumably, also neural implants)…

New additions to JURN

Newly added to JURN…

Asian Highland Perspectives (the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding areas, mostly ethnography).

Journal of Islamic Architecture.

Haemus (history and archaeology of the Balkan peninsula).

Archaeologia Polona (Polish archaeology).

DANS Studies in Digital Archiving.

+ the Paideia Archive, around 800 papers from the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy (Boston, Massachusetts, 1998).

+ regional survey papers from the West Midlands Regional Research Framework in archaeology.

JURN is four

Oops, nearly missed this! JURN is now four years old.

Inkling free for academics

Inkling is making its $30m digital publishing platform, Habitat, available free to everyone. There’s even a special academic version, with tight Google Search integration. Inkling takes a 30 percent cut of each sale via the Inkling store, but waives that if you’re a bona fide academic.

It seems Inkling is going free in order to compete with Amazon — Inkling only has around 400 titles in its store and so obviously needs more if it’s going to match Amazon. Might be worth a look if you need to create ePub and HTML5 publications with…

“interactive e-books with HD video, interactive features and 3D content”.

The drawback seems to be that the DRM sounds ferocious, and there’s no mention in the FAQ of the ability to produce a DRM-free ePub. Which seems to imply that you get locked into Inkling as your sole distribution system?

JURN link-checked and repaired

JURN Search has been fully checked for the continuing presence of indexed articles in the Google Search results, via the use of adapted software originally meant for checking SEO back-links. Repairs of astray URLs were undertaken as a result, and there were also about 30 deletions of dead or domain-squatted URLs. Both the JURN Directory and the JURN search-engine are now as up-to-date and free of link-rot as they can be.

New titles added to JURN today:

bCeramics (Quarterly on ceramics, photography, and books).

South Asianist.

Electryone (ancient historical and philological issues).

Journal of Intellectual History and Political Thought.

Dublin Review of Books.

Religion & Liberty.

Art Conservator.

Baconia (Francis Bacon).

Bellagio Publishing Network Newsletter (promotion of books and publishing in the south parts of the planet).

Cultural Survival Quarterly.

Live Design Magazine (project profile features only).

Historical New Orleans Collection Quarterly.

OAH Newsletter (Organization of American Historians).

Post-Soviet Media Law & Policy Newsletter.

Projector, The (film studies at Bowling Green State University).

Sandlapper (history of South Carolina).

Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters (1870-2001).

Wisconsin Academy review (1954-2008).

UCLA Journal of Law and Technology (re: media copyright, censorship etc).

Quarterly Archives, The (teaching of writing).

Weber : the Contemporary West.

Young Scholars in Writing.

Amirani (Caucasology, history of the Caucus region).

Uncommon Culture.

Messing with metrics

Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting.

How to get RSS from a Google+ or Facebook group

How to get RSS feeds from a Google+ group:

1. Install the Feed+ for Google Chrome addon in your Web browser. Authenticate it.

2. Paste in the ID number, from the home URL of your target Google+ group.

3. The addon will then give you an RSS link for FeedDemon (or other dedicated RSS software), and also a link to send the feed to Google Reader.

My standalone FeedDemon software accepted and validated my test feed, and gave me a full list of the posts.

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How to get RSS feeds from a Facebook group:

1. Grab the ID number of the Facebook group from the home URL.

2. Visit this Yahoo Pipes script — feed it the ID number and it will pop out a valid RSS feed for the group.

I’ve successfully used this to plug a Facebook group feed into the sidebars of several blogs.

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How to get an RSS feed for any Facebook fan page:

1. Copy the end bit of your Fan page’s URL. e.g. the end bit from http://www.facebook.com/MyFanPage

2. Paste this onto the end of https://graph.facebook.com/ e.g.: https://graph.facebook.com/MyFanPage

3. Run this new URL in your Web browser. Note and copy the ID number, found in the code that is returned.

4. Use this ID number to replace the ID number in this URL: https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=123456789101&format=rss20

You now have a valid RSS feed for updates on your Facebook fan page.

JURN update

Checked and repaired the JURN Directory today. Please update any locally held desktop copies.

Added to JURN Search, and to the Directory…

International Journal of Healthcare & Humanities

Journal of the Siam Society (Thailand and Thai history, in English)

Journal of Florida Studies