And can we make a decent open access reading list ?

I recently suggested that it might be able to put together an open access reading list for the classics.

So I did, purely as an experiment. I picked a very random (and very short) list of university classics departments and downloaded their introductory reading lists. Some were fairly short some were more oriented to summer reading (and the suspicion that most students would do little if any). I collated the Exeter, Tufts, Warwick and KCL lists and came up with the following:

Author	Book	Source	Online
Homer	Iliad	KCL, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Homer	Odyssey	Exeter, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Sophocles	Oedipus	KCL, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Sophocles	Antigone	Tufts	Gutenberg
Virgil	Aeneid	KCL, Exeter, Warwick	Adelaide e-books
Tacitus	Annals	KCL, Exeter	Adelaide e-books
Juvenal	Satires	KCL, Warwick	Internet Archive
Plato	Symposium	Exeter, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Plato	Republic	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Herodotus	Histories	Exeter, Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Suetonius	Lives of the Caesars	Exeter	Gutenberg
Seneca	Letters from a Stoic	Exeter	Internet archive
Ovid	Metamorphoses	Exeter	Adelaide e-books
Lucian	True History	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Theocritus	Idylls	Tufts	Gutenberg
Aristotle	Poetics	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Aristotle	Nichormachean Ethics	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Longus	Daphne and Chloe	Tufts	Internet Archive
Thucydides	Histories	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Xenophon	Anabasis	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Horace	Satires	Warwick	Adelaide e-books
Aristophanes	Clouds	Tufts	Adelaide e-books
Aeschylus	Oresteia	Tufts	Adelaide e-books

In the main I found the texts on the University of Adelaide's ebook sitse. Adelaide E-books (ebooks.adelaide.edu.au) is a paricularly good source of texts and in some cases has alternative translations, as well as links to wikipedia etc. It's not just classical texts, there's a good range of English literature texts as well.

All sites allow downloads in both epub and mobi format meaning that the books can be read on a kindle or on a tablet, including one of the cheap no-name Android tablets that can be picked up for less than a $100, in some cases considerably less.

I've made no attempt to assess the text for accuracy, but what this little paper exercise shows is that it is perfectly possible to create an open access reading list.

While you may argue that having to own a tablet is a barrier to access, most (potential) students already have a suitable device, and with a decent second hand paperback copy of Suetonius's Twelve Caesars costing around $10 with shipping we can argue that even if you have to buy a tablet the exercise is better than cost neutral ...

Open classics - a modest proposal

In the sciences one of the great current tropes is open access, ie publishing research papers in journals that do not require a subscription to access them, and equally importantly making research data available for re use and reanalysis.

There are other parallel movements such as open textbooks, open online courses etc.

Classics is also an area ripe for open access. Much of the material revolves around texts and the reanalysis of texts, and authoritative translations abound. I suspect that many classicists only know a number to texts from translations.

Acquiring the key texts and translations is not particularly difficult or costly - many have been around for years and reasonable second hand copies can be picked up through the various online second hand booksellers for a few dollars.

But of course, that does present a barrier for access - first of all one needs these few dollars and scronly one needs the time and the inclination to hunt for decent second hand copies and then wait for the postal systems of the world perform their miracle of nineteenth century technology.

Absolutely fine for a dilettante with a disposable income like me, less so for a student undertaking a course, especially one in a country such as Australia where the classics are most definitely fading.

So, to my proposal:

1. Assemble a list of university reading lists
2. Identify the most commonly listed items
3. Identify suitable online (free) sources where possible
4. Make the resource list available online

A very simple idea, and one that can be extended to other areas, for example medieval studies, English literature etc.

The virtue of this idea is that it works to reduce the cost of access, and also encourages ‘reading around’ a topic, ie don’t just read the set texts, read related ones, and get some understanding and insight.

In a time when books were paper and most university towns had a couple of second hand bookshops stocked with cheap second hand paperbacks, happenstance and reading around could be done very cheaply - forty years ago I used to play a game with myself on a Saturday afternoon - take my spare change after I’d attended to the week’s expenses, count it up, split it in half, and see what I could find in the way of interesting reading for half of what I’d got left of the week’s money.

Nowadays such a game wouldn’t be possible - second hand bookshops are mostly online which robs the exercise of the happenstance element - and happenstance is an important part of learning and discovery.

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A distraction free writing machine

A week or so ago I upgraded my old EEEpc to Crunchbang linux - and I’m quietly impressed with its capabilities as a distraction free notetaker and writing machine.

Since the upgrade I’ve used it seriously for two or three meetings and to write a couple private documents, including an old style put in the mail letter. Performance has been more or less flawless.

With only ReText (for markdown) and AbiWord (for anything pretty) and no mail client other than Alpine for getting stuff off the machine this means you can focus on the text, or when using it as a note taker, on what’s being said. No other email, no twitter, no urge to distract yourself with wikipedia.

And it’s good. It’s fast (and fast to boot), and nicely responsive.

There are some downsides - the browser is a pain to use, though, with the export capabilities of both Abiword and Retext there’s no real need to use external services like MarkdowntoPDF or Cloudconvert.

Basically, documents are written on the machine and then either emailed off to Dropbox if they need more work or to Evernote to archive. I originally didn’t bother installing printing, but I’ve since added printer support just for the ease of producing bullet lists or handouts.

One of course needs to be realistic - it’s a five year old low power machine with a small non standard display - you cannot seriously expect to run anything and everything on it - for example I’d have doubts about running an R session on it, or doing any serious text manipulation.

Or indeed anything meaty written in Java.

But I have other machines for that. What I do have now is a small format machine that can fit in a man bag, has a decent keyboard and battery life, and being small and light can be taken along on a trip as a second writing machine …

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Brisbane Altmetrics workshop

Over the past few months I’ve written about altmetrics and impact for example here and here

Yesterday I went to an ANDS sponsored workshop on Altmetrics and Impact in Brisbane - you can find my meeting notes online here - it’s an evernote share of a pdf, and you may be asked to click to view to get to the actual note.

As a calibration exercise it was incredibly useful - it convinced me that we’re roughly in the right place with altmetrics, namely

• no one has a complete view on altmetrics, impact and engagement
• attempts at quantification are partial at best
• academic publishers are interested and investing in altmetrics due to change in their business model
  
  • attempt is by maintaining relevance and providing specialist services
• impact is increasingly seen as an important alternative to classic citation rates
• impact measurement tools are partial at best

So, altmetrics, bibliometrics or what have you will provide some interesting times. One interesting aside was that someone had used text analysis techniques on a set of pharmaceutical papers suggesting that one company may have an in house ghost writing team. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - having documentation or writing specialists finesse text is by no means bad, although there has to be a question as to whether there may be an attempt to game the system by producing more readily citable papers.

Whether or not it is the case, I found it quite a nice use of the power of open access and being able to reuse documents as data for other analyses …

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Reviving the ookygoo

A long time ago, 2009 to be exact, I bought an EEE pc 701SD linux netbook to use as a travel computer - and because of its kiddified UI we nicknamed it the Ookygoo.

UI restrictions apart it was truly excellent machine, and I used it for both work and recreational travel till 2012, by which time Asus had more or less lost interest in the netbook concept and upgrades to the OS and the installed software more or less ceased, meaning that though the machine still worked, things like the web browser were old, insecure, versions and quite rightly a lot of sites told me to upgrade or bugger off.

So it ended up in a drawer. I bought another windows netbook for travel, and a cheap Chinese tablet and keyboard combo for note taking. Well, the windows netbook has all the Microsoft problems of being slow to boot and pummelled by the upgrade cycle, and the note taking tablet has proved to be a little more erratic than I hoped even though I used it successfully for project scrum notes and client engagement meetings for a whole project.

So I always resolved that before the Eee went to the recycler I’d put a decent operating system on it. So last night I did just that.

Choice of operating system was a little tricky - the Eee has only 512MB (that’s half a gig) RAM, a slow early generation atom cpu, and an 8GB SSD.

There’s problem with some of the early SSD’s whereby they are quite prone to ‘fading’ after a lot of repeated write and delete operations, which means that using them for something very churny like a swapfile can bring on this ‘fading’ effect quite quickly.

When the Eee first came out, a lot of people put together dedicated distros but these are all long gone or hopelessly out of date.

After some googling I settled on Crunchbang, a distro I’d used extensively on a Virtualbox VM. I chose it because it was debian based, and debian has good in built support for the Eee 701, and has a very low memory footprint, meaning that you are unlikely to start swapping just running the window manager - and as it was a 2009 model I suspected that the SSD was probably a bit more robust that the SSD in the original 2007 version.

However, to keep things lightweight I decided to go distinctly old school - nano as a text editor and alpine as a mail client. My reasoning was that as a note taker, and given that I write most notes in Markdown, nano would be just fine. Markdown is so simple that you could write it using vi, but these days I find vi a little too hard core for day to day work - can never remember the bloody buffer commands. With a local install of pandoc I could generate odt and pdf versions of documents if necessary, and that alpine was good enough to email documents to myself - reckoning that it reality most notes get cleaned up before being circulated or archived.

Using Dropbox is an option but that adds to the memory usage. Using just nano and pine the machine is probably going to hardly ever swap, and of course it’s distraction free, leaving you to concentrate on what’s being said.

Installation was straightforward - it basically just worked.

I downloaded the iso of 32 bit version for older machines, used dd to write it to a USB drive and booted the Eee from the USB to test if everything (including wireless) worked.

Then I restarted it and ran the installer - there’s a bug in the installer which means that all you get is a flickering line when you start it - it’s a known Debian bug and the fix is nicely documented on Crunchbang’s website . Installation took around 45 minutes plus another 45 or so to apply updates, install pine and so on.

I havn’t used it in anger yet, but the machine seems stable, so the next step would be to give it an outing, and see just how useful it is in practice …

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Yosemite ...

Normally I'm very cautious about OS upgrades but this morning I felt wild and impetuous and upgraded my work Mac to Yosemite, Apple's latest version of OS X - one of the advantages of living on the dark side of the world is we tend to get first go at updates.

The process basically just worked, although it took a bit longer than Apple claimed, and the system was pretty unusable during the post install optimization phase - budget at least a couple of hours, or perhaps a little  longer.

A few things needed nudging:

• Dropbox needed a reinstall - just like after the 10.9.5 upgrade
• Amazon Cloud drive broke and needed a java install
• GanntProject (admittedly I was running quite an old version) broke and needed an update

Everything else seems to work, although switching between apps and app start times seems slow, but then it was with Mavericks, but once running everything seems reasonably responsive on what's now a four year old MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM.

My only real gripe so far is the use of Helvetica Neue as a system font - yes it's legible, but it's a bit too heavy for my taste, but if that's the only annoyance, things are not too bad ...

University rankings and altmetrics

I was on holiday last week, and we drove down to Victoria for a few days. On the way there I listened to the radio and someone (I forget who) was talking about the THES rankings and making the very good point that individually the various ranking tables don’t mean a lot as they all use different algorithms and tray and measure different things. but that if a university scores consistently high in a number of these tables it suggests that in some way it is better than one with either inconsistent scores or consistently low scores.

Better here means that its is good at teaching, good at research, and is effective in promoting this.

So with altmetrics, impact rankings and the rest. Individually the various scores don’t mean a lot, but collectively they are an indicator of engagement. I’ll say engagement because this is still a nebulous topic. There are people who publish highly cited research but don’t promote it. Typically these people are well known in their discipline. Then there are those who communicate well about their field and have an impact through teaching, through social media, and the rest. And of course there’s some people who are somewhere in between.

Like ranking tables, high scores are good. However before dismissing inconsistent scores (high say on social media, low on research impact) we need to actually ask a very difficult question: What are we trying to measure, and how will we know we’ve measured it ?

The first part is probably relatively simple to answer, the second one rather less so, as we need to decide on what we will accept as evidence and what it tells us about engagement …

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