URLlister 0.4

URLlister 0.4.0 (March 2021) is Windows freeware. Manually click through a long list of URLs, as if with a TV remote-control. Each new click passes the next URL on the list into your Web browser, and loads it in a new tab.

No more manual copy-paste needed, for slow and careful ‘eyeball’ manual checking of a list of URLs.

More details on GitHub.

It may not be ideal to have lots of tabs opening and accumulating over time, and you may prefer not to have to manually close them. In which case the Tab Wrangler extension for Chrome-based Web browsers can handle that. It “automatically closes idle tabs after a designated time”.

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See also the Chrome browser extension Load URLs At Interval, which moves through the URL list at a set timed interval. The URLs are loaded into the same tab, rather than a new tab opening for each.

Added to JURN

Antiquarian Astronomer, The

BSS Bulletin (British Sundial Society)

Avar : An Interdisciplinary Journal of Life and Society in the Ancient Near East

Central European Cultures

Historical Metallurgy

Finnish Journal of Linguistics

Dilmun : A Journal of Archaeology & History in Bahrain

Ex Fonte : Journal of Ecumenical Studies in Liturgy

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Caucasiana (nature in the Caucasus)

Geodesy and Cartography

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Seismic Record, The (earthquakes etc)

Added to JURN

Journal of Interactive Books

OpenPhilately (stamps, due in 2023 and inviting submissions)

Journal of Beatles Studies (the 1960s pop band)

Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies

Journal of Festive Studies

Music and Minorities

International Journal of Traditional Arts, The

Journal of NeuroPhilosophy

Philosophy of Physics (due in 2023)

Review of Analytic Philosophy

Journal of Mexican Philosophy

Journal of Spinoza Studies (due in 2023)

Authenticity Studies (the problems of authenticity in archaeological finds and fine art)

Passport : The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (older archive)

Pylon : Editions and Studies of Ancient Texts

After Constantine : Stories from the Late Antique and Early Byzantine Era (takes a while to load, give it time)

Syllogos – Herodotus Journal (Herodotus’ Histories, their world and reception)

Teiresias Journal Online (continues Teiresias : Online Review and Bibliography of Boiotian Studies. Ancient Boiotia, the Greek region around the city of Thebes)

Old World : Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia

Global Antiquities (due in 2023)

Pnyx : Journal of Classical Studies

ITINERA : the Journal of the RRRA (Roman roads)

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Seismica (earthquakes etc)

Journal of Disaster Studies (due in 2023)

Added to JURN

Journal of Dracula Studies (the journal has returned from the dead, and is online again)

Messengers From The Stars : On Science Fiction and Fantasy

Caerdroia : the Journal of Mazes & Labyrinths

Essays in French Literature and Culture

Anglisticum : Journal of the Association-Institute for English Language and American Studies (Macedonia)

Burney Journal (works of the Burney family)

Genetic Joyce Studies (James Joyce, author)

Conatus : Journal of Philosophy

Antigone (Ancient Greek and Roman cultural worlds)

Eurasian Music Science

Bandwagon : Journal of the Circus Historical Society (added to Directory only)

Open Journal of Animation, Film and Interactive Media in Education and Culture

Homo Virtualis (immersive digital media)

Entertainment : Journal of Media and Movie Studies

Interstices : Journal of Architecture and Related Arts

Technology and Regulation

Pacific Journalism Review (was lost, now found again)

Topos (philosophy / cultural studies)

Art Vision (wide-ranging Turkish journal)

Passion : Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions

Asia Marketing Journal

International Journal of Digital Curation

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Oasis : Journal Of Oasis Agriculture (Tunisia)

Plant Ecology and Evolution

Botanica (Lithuania)

Annals of Forest Science (said to be OA from 2022)

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My openEco journal directory has been checked for 404 linkrot and site moves, and updated. Lots of 404s removed, so check if your journal is still on the list.

My JURN Directory has been checked for 404 linkrot and site moves, and updated.

Consensus

Consensus is a new two-man science search-engine, now backed by a small chunk of the Bitcoin fortune made by the Winklevoss twins. Consensus has also just partnered with Semantic Scholar.

It’s live and public to use and to get results from, though I was asked to sign up by a dismiss-able pop-up overlay. A bit slow to return the results, but I was impressed by the results I had. The display format is also pleasing, and desktop-centric.

It’s currently only searching 200 million papers, though it has the great advantage of extracting relevant sections from the hit documents and presenting these in a clean form. Kind of like Google Search / Google Books snippets, on steroid-munching AIs. Filtering and faceting look good.

Some of the featured branding seems a bit flaky, with the blog pushing ‘mindfulness’ and even ‘neuro-linguistic programming’. But that may just be an artefact of whoever they have running the blog for them, at a guess.

Worth looking at more closely, and it looks like it may even be useful for conservationists and wildlife researchers.

Battlestir Galactica

Galactica is a new AI auto-writing model, which stirs a pot…

trained on over 48 million papers, textbooks, reference material, compounds, proteins and other sources of scientific knowledge.

So far as I can tell, it’s not yet accepting prompts from the public in a prompt-box. Though some are demonstrated at the main site, and you can install it yourself under Python…

Apparently…

    pip install git+https://github.com/paperswithcode/galai

…is a temporary fix for this PIP install, and of course your Python’s PIP .exe files needs to be allowed to go online to fetch the files from GitHub.

Be aware that it’s likely to churn out plausible-sounding junk science.

Daedalus on the public and the humanities

A useful new issue of the MIT Press journal Daedalus focuses on the “relationship between the public and the academic humanities”. The editorial explains that, in U.S. public surveys, even a basic comprehension of the term “humanities” eludes many respondents. Yet when the public are questioned about the humanities defined as…

studying or participating in activities related to literature, languages, history, and philosophy [then] more than 80 percent of American adults hold very positive views.

This positive response has not prevented precipitous falls in student recruitment and graduation, especially in certain disciplines such as literature and history. Both have been especially badly hit in the USA…

the humanities have greatly diminished as measured by their share of students earning undergraduate degrees” […] “The reasons for the recent declines in humanities majors remain understudied [and] the specific causes of the recent declines in humanities majors remain murky.

That seems rather surprising. One would have thought that university administrators, at least, would be demanding to know such things.

The journal issue is not all woe and hand-wringing. Take the ‘Communication & Media Arts: Of the Humanities & the Future’ for instance. As a 1992 first-class degree holder in Communication & Information Studies I was pleased to hear that communication and journalism degrees are now positively booming…

the remarkable growth of communication studies in the academy. In the latest compilation of degrees conferred by American colleges and universities, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports 110,981 bachelor’s degrees [awarded 2017-18] […] communication enrolments are strong throughout the United States and a media-saturated world is greeting our students warmly upon graduation [while] “an astonishing variety of foundations, agencies, and corporations” are eager to provide project funding in communication research.

The article “Reframing the Public Humanities” also has a more positive stance…

looking at the richness and increasing diversity of public humanities work happening outside the academy […] the best versions of the public humanities — the real ‘grassroots’ humanities — are created by publics, not merely for them.

It offers the optimistic suggestion that universities…

aid local, “bottom-up” (that is, nonacademic and noninstitutional) versions of the humanities with grants. […] such bridges will be built through individual interactions long before we will see any kind of cultural shifts.

But therein lies the risk. If there’s money available and the initial mechanism is “individual interactions”, then the local smooth-talking grant-chasers will be schmoozing up at the university before the real grassroots people have even heard rumours about new funding. Perhaps better to run things differently, I’d suggest. Impartially give the funds to the genuine local grassroots, perhaps via non-political city or regional lottery funds, and then with the funds let them hire the academic or independent scholar who meets their requirements. Ideally with some form of long-lasting training legacy left behind after the academic has departed the project.

The chapter ‘Grassroots Museums’ surveys a positive set of historic U.S. institutions, while ‘The Emergence of Medical Humanities’ outlines another humanities success story…

The flourishing of medical humanities … This remarkable growth offers a counter-point to narratives of decline in the humanities. It is a story of growing relevance…

‘The Positive Humanities: A Focus on Human Flourishing’ suggests new fields around the understanding of what works for “the flourishing of humans”. Fine with me, just so long as “the range of perspectives required” doesn’t allow quack psychology and yogic crystal-waving to slip in through the back door. A reputation for rigorous debunking should be one hallmark of the field, I’d suggest, if it is to gain credibility.

The entire issue of Daedalus, which I bundled as a single PDF and then searched, has no discussion of “discovery” (discovery and reading of arts & humanities research via online search). Possibly a bit of a missed opportunity there, re: access to research by independent scholars, retired academics and the interested public, and the ways in which this might slowly change public perceptions over time. And not always change for good, perhaps, in terms of causing the brightest students to shy away from a humanities field before even applying to join it.

Word macro to increment the numbers in a back-of-the-book index

Situation: You have a completed back-of-the-book index for a book, perhaps created with PDF Index Generator. You are then required to add a further page to the book, that you thought was finished. Such a change will ‘throw off’ most of the numbers in the index, but not all of them. Only the page-numbers after the point where the new page was added. Do you need to remake the index again? No.

Solution: You use the following Microsoft Word macro to do the required ‘intelligent corrections’ of the changed numbers in the Index.

Use: Copy-paste the kaput Index to a new Word document of the same page size, with retained formatting. Edit the macro’s three variable numbers for your needs and load it. Run it. Copy back the results to the book. Check the new index aligns with the book.

Change the numbers indicated. The first number is the increment, and the other is the page number above which incrementing is done.

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' WORD MACRO - Increment the numbers in the back-of-a-book index by x, only if above a certain number.
Sub Demo()
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
' Change the following number 1 to the increment you need. Number of pages added = the number you need.
Const i As Long = 1
With ActiveDocument.Range
  With .Find
    .ClearFormatting
    .Text = "<[0-9]{2,3}>"
    .Replacement.Text = ""
    .Forward = True
    .Wrap = wdFindStop
    .MatchWildcards = True
    .Execute
  End With
  Do While .Find.Found
  ' Change the next number to the page-number below which all must stay the same.
    If CLng(.Text) > 77 Then
	  ' Page number 2000 is the ending backstop number - change this only if you have a monster book.
      If CLng(.Text) < 2000 Then .Text = CLng(.Text) + i
    End If
    .Collapse wdCollapseEnd
    .Find.Execute
  Loop
End With
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub

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Change the numbers to suit your situation.

Here the above macro is set to increment by 1, any page-number it finds in the index. But only if it has a value between 77 and 2000. You are assumed to have added one new page at page 76. Any indexed page number for page 77 must therefore now become 78, and so on. Numbers are recognised individually, even if in the hyphenated form, e.g.: 99-100 or similar.

Your index is assumed to have no dates or street numbers used as index terms, e.g. “1066 A.D., Battle of Hastings, p. 356”, or “221B Baker Street, p. 73”.

The newly added page(s) will of course need to have their new entries indexed, if not simply illustrations, and manually added to the revised index.

So far as I can tell, there’s no way to do this with a regex.

Affinity Publisher 2.0 adds footnote/endnote support

The new Affinity 2.0 is out, and Publisher has new footnote and endnote support. Affinity Publisher used to be Serif’s old PagePlus, but this was given a huge revamp to make it a slick budget mid-market ‘Adobe InDesign killer’ DTP software for the desktop. The new version is currently discounted down to a bargain $40 as a perpetual licence, and it seems this even includes the new iPad mobile app version of Publisher.

Note that 1.9.2 is said to be the last to run on Windows 7, so Win7 Warriors should take that into account before buying 2.0 for the footnotes. Also be warned that Affinity Publisher on Windows has a fixed UI with tiny fonts and icons but no way to scale it up… you’ll be squinting a lot. The learning-curve is also much steeper than the price-comparable Microsoft Publisher. Affinity Publisher is capable software at a nice price, but is not for everyone. Try before you buy.

Mastodon search?

Despite all the recent hype about the Mastodon social-media service, it doesn’t appear to be that useful for keyword search. For instance a search for keyword “research”, just now, found absolutely nothing…

Turns out that, though search is public (i.e. no sign-up required)…

if you search something in the search box of Mastodon, it will find only users or #hashtags. A more powerful search system will be implemented in the near future.

I did find the third-party service Social Search – Discover accounts across multiple Mastodon servers (‘instances’). This only searches the public account descriptions though. If ‘FluffyTwiddle’ is posting about “open access” but doesn’t have that in their description, you won’t discover them.