YaCy

YaCy, a new distributed censorship-hardened search-engine, that’s supported by the Free Software Foundation Europe. YaCy is currently saturated with traffic, as it’s only just been announced.

New report on UK digital literacy

UK students are in danger of becoming “illiterate” when it comes to technology, says a new Department for Education report which is due to be published today…

“Ian Livingstone, president of [video]gaming publisher Eidos and author of a recent report into teaching tech in schools, has called for improvements to computing education ahead of a response to his report due out from the Department for Education today.”

BBC access to journals

The Wellcome Trust recently sent scientist Johann Hoog to the BBC for two weeks. Among other things, she learned that…

“BBC journalists do not have access to any scientific journals except for the journal Nature and New Scientist magazine.”

I guess someone needs to break the news to them about open access?

Citations opened up at Google Scholar

Google has announced it is opening up the citations at Google Scholar.

BBC Radio 3 seeking new arts & humanities broadcasters

BBC Radio 3 are offering the opportunity for arts and humanities researchers based at UK universities to get their research ideas broadcast to the nation…

“Up to sixty successful applicants will have a chance to develop their programme-making ideas with experienced BBC producers at a series of dedicated workshops and, of these up to ten will become Radio 3′s resident New Generation Thinkers.”

Full details here. Open now. Application deadline: 7th December 2011.

Getting to Facebook when you’re blocked

A couple of weeks ago, Iran said accessing Facebook is to be deemed “a crime”. ‎ So… the 17 million Iranians who use Facebook are to be made into instant criminals. One also has to wonder, in the age of nations deeming that their laws apply to citizens even when living abroad, if exiled Iranians could then be prosecuted via international cybercrime treaties? In the West everyone knows Facebook, and it seems ridiculous that we would be banned from using it. Although, even here, the UK’s Prime Minister did consider shutting down Facebook and Twitter during the UK’s summer riots (apparently an off-the cuff notion that somehow reached the press, and which was swiftly rejected). Used for good (friends, info, help, events, political activism, scholarly news) or for bad (bullying, stalking, time-wasting, Farmville), we nearly all do online social networking in one way or another. Mark Zuckerberg’s face is probably familiar to even your most elderly relatives, especially after the excellent movie The Social Network. We rather take services such as Facebook for granted. So what do you do when your workplace, college or even your entire nation denies you access to Facebook? Fume and put up with it, probably. But there’s an interesting new proxy service that caught my eye recently, called ublock Facebook. Using its facebook proxy apparently helps you to bypass what they term “all the restrictions”.

Inklings Forever fixed

Fixed links for Inklings Forever. The university has rather oddly switched from using www.taylor.edu to 17.taylor.edu.

Journal of Visual Culture machinima issue – free

Free access to the SAGE Journal of Visual Culture special April 2011 issue on machinima, through to the end of 2011. It had been free on publication, but was then taken behind the paywall. Now it’s free again. Those seeking more writing on the topic should look at Henry Lowood’s bibliography on machinima, and also my own more recent machinima bibliography which covers publications from 2007-2011.

Open Spires

Open Spires, open podcasts from the University of Oxford. Started in 2009, and now seemingly getting up more of a head of steam. Such a pity that there’s no unified RSS feed, though. The feeds are all for the individual departments and schools. Oxford, please remember that there’s an “In Our Time” audience out there that doesn’t much care about disciplinary boundaries. On the credit side, MP3 downloads are allowed.

Microsoft Academic Search adds arts & humanities

Microsoft’s Bing seems to have radically expanded its specialist academic journal search engine, since the late summer of 2011. It now claims to index over 1,102,000 publications in the arts and humanities…

… however, I found its search results sparse and all paywalled. Judging from a few test keyword searches, it’s only hooks into the ‘big beast’ services of the likes of Informaworld, Muse, and Oxford Journals. Even a search for something quite wide such as gothic + novel gave me just 38 results, all paywalled. I had nothing for Mongolian + folk + song. I would have expected more, considering it’s indexing the likes of Oxford Journals. So for now it seems there’s not much reason to shun your university access, Google Scholar, or JURN. The page design is also a bit ‘Microsoft clunk’, and it demands Silverlight (Microsoft’s version of Flash)…

But… there are some nice touches. Journals have their own pages, telling you what dates are being used by Microsoft Academic Search. You can limit results by knowledge type (i.e.: only arts and humanities) and there is a Google Scholar -like citation index on the page for each result. Academic authors can seemingly get name authority, by bagging their own name and page. That latter point makes me kind of see where they might be going with it. In time, not just a search-engine — but something based more around individual scholars and their work?

National humanities publishing

As university presses stagger in the economic storm, the Australian Book Industry Strategy Group final report (PDF link) suggests a national publically-funded ‘publisher of last resort’…

“Australia needs a National University Press Network to print book and chapter-length research in the humanities and social sciences — research that, being too long for journals and not commercial enough for the struggling publishing industry, might otherwise never see the light of day.”

Personally I would be inclined to get such research out there for free, via blogs and personal websites, Amazon Kindle store, open repositories such as Archive.org, and print-on-demand services such as Lulu or CreateSpace. There seems to me absolutely no excuse for any research “never seeing the light of day” in the digital age, especially if you envisage selling only 50 copies or so. Impact assessment will apparently take little or no notice of where or by whom something was published, in future. So what does a publisher really give you? Proof-reading services, and a little bit of publicity, both things you can buy off-the-shelf from eLance and the like. If you really have to have a proof reader from within the discipline, they can also be found provided you’re willing to pay, among the thousands of humanities lecturers now languishing in unemployment. Even if the ‘buried’ text is somehow still in a yellowing typescript from before the Word processing era, how difficult can it be to pay an undergraduate £50 to scan and OCR it for you?

Snapshot

A sample of just some of the recent search terms that people have used on JURN…

hypomnemata
late antiquity
roman law
ephrem the syrian
pizarnik
roman nummi
leibniz mind and body
apries
fountainhead rand
etica del orador
art of war sun tzu
leni riefenstahl
juan hidalgo artista
robert louis stevenson
galerius
gilgamesh

JURN checked and updated

The JURN Directory has been checked using Linkbot, for dead, broken or moved links. The following journals were removed from the Directory and from the main search index, because either dead or newly paywalled: Intensities, journal of cult media; as-Sikka (Islamic Coins Group); Mapline; Critical Inquiry; Ivy Journal of Ethics; Quaderns de la Mediterrània; eHKCSS, E-Journal on Hong Kong Cultural and Social Studies; Minnesota Review.

Twelve new journals were added to the search index today.

Phil. Trans. of the Royal Society, now free for 1665-1887

The famous Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, are now permanently free online. The London-based Royal Society is offering this great resource in the history of science (1665-1887) to the whole world — you don’t have to be in the UK to access it.