steepholm

Today's Point of View on the nascent culture of data sharing amongst astronomers in the latter half of the seventeenth century was quite well done. For Lisa Jardine, Newton may have been a bit of a bastard in his unwillingness to share credit, but it's Flamsteed's unwillingness to share data that makes him the real villain of the piece. There was nothing super-new here, but it was a nicely-crafted 10-minute piece, right up until the last couple of sentences, when Jardine sought to draw a modern parallel:

There is some anxiety currently in the academic community, especially in the humanities, over Government insistence that publicly-funded research must in future be Open Access. I declare myself to be a strong advocate for collaboration and sharing of data in all fields of intellectual endeavour.

Well, I've yet to meet an academic who isn't an advocate for collaboration and the sharing of data (perhaps it's more common in science), but this seems a very lopsided way of putting the case for Open Access - as if Open Access and free data sharing were the same thing, and the main obstacle in its path were the dog-in-a-manger attitude of humanities academics.

Now, don't get me wrong - Open Access is there to address a real problem. Academic publishers charge a bomb for their journals, meaning that most people can't read them unless they have access to a university library. Why shouldn't the public be able to get at publicly-funded research, after all?

Why indeed? From where I'm standing it seems that the academic publishers are a bit of cartel. They have some costs, of course - for materials, design, production, distribution, etc., but their copy is provided free by academics, and their main quality control mechanism - i.e. peer review - is also provided free, also by academics. So, one approach might be to try to get academic publishers to lower their prices. But those publishers are mostly international companies, and the government has a way of throwing its hands up whenever asked to make an international company do anything at all.

Instead, it's moving to Open Access, which sounds lovely, but is more accurately described as a move from a pay-to-read to a pay-to-publish model. In other words, under Government proposals anyone who wants to publish in a journal will now have to pay for the privilege, or get their institution to do so.

We're not talking a nominal sum, either. When I published my article "Critiqing Calypso" recently, I was given the option of publishing Open Access, but it would have cost me £2,000 - and that, I believe, is at the lower end of the scale. So I declined, and accordingly to read it at the official site will cost you £29.95 / $39.95 / €34.95. Alternatively, you can read an unofficial version for nothing here (because I do believe in actual open access). Yes, this is allowed under the terms of my contract with Springer - the free version has not been set by them - but it means that there are now two slightly different versions of the article out there, which can't be good.

As yet, my institution doesn't have a fund to pay Open Access fees. Perhaps it will, once the system's up and running - I believe they're considering it - but as you've probably gathered, there's not a lot of spare cash around in universities at the moment. It's inevitable that the universities with the most money - Oxbridge, obviously, but also other Russell Group universities such as Professor Jardine's own UCL - will have far more resources to fund academic publication than post-'92 institutions such as my own. Ironically, the result of Open Access may well be that research, far from being easier to access, doesn't get published at all in peer-reviewed journals - not because it lacks academic quality but because the researchers can't afford the fees. (Individual researchers working outside institutions, and researchers working in less affluent countries, will be in an even more parlous situation.) Of course, research can still be put out on the web, but that's not going to count for much when the REF (or whatever it's called next time) comes around. Open Access, which looks on the face of it like an egalitarian and democratic move, may in effect serve only to shore up the privileges of the already-rich. (This is, after all, the Russell Group's raison d'être - and I commend them for finding such a clever Trojan stalking horse on this occasion.)

What we really need, if we can't get reasonably-priced academic journals (seems unlikely) and we can't get properly-resourced Open Access (seems even less likely), is a workers' cooperative: a not-for-profit, peer-reviewed forum, web-based and low cost, that will operate on a genuine open access basis. I'd suggest this could be operated as a charity (hey, Eton manages it), or else funded through low contributions by authors that reflect the actual costs of running such a site - in which case, I would be surprised if that £2,000 figure didn't come down to something more like £20. The problem would then be a) to get academics to want to publish in it, which in itself would depend on b) getting the REF (or equivalent) to recognize its bona fides - a chicken-and-egg task, but perhaps one the Government should get behind?

On top of my Billy bookcases, for they are too large sit on any of the shelves, lie the two folio volumes of Camden's Britannia. This copy dates from 1722, so it's not a first edition, and the county maps have long since been plundered, but it's handsomely bound and looks the part. Moreover, the 1722 editors, in bringing Camden up to date, have helpfully and carefully put brackets around all their own additions, meaning that I get to compare what Camden thought in 1610 with the latest scholarship some century and a bit later. It's fascinating, and today I had a legitimate reason to get it down for research purposes - yippee!

( Read more... )

Somehow I've gone through life thus far without having written a paper on Margaret Mahy, but that's about to change when I give a talk on "The Librarian of Babel"* in Cambridge next month, where I'll be one of four people paying tribute to that most noble of Kiwis. So far the paper remains unwritten, but it has already expanded from its initial Big Bang moment (which sounded very much like: "SQUEEEEE!") and is forming globular galaxies of notes, with names such as Borges, Tycho Brahe and Dewey. A copy of The Catalogue of the Universe (not Mahy's book but the one her book is named after) is waiting for me at the Post Office. From this ferment, I hope, paragraphs and sentences will coagulate in due course, before springing into elliptical orbit around my brain. If you're in Cambridge, why not pop along for a viewing?

By the way, I knew Mahy had a Bristol connection on her father's side, but I've only just discovered that her grandfather grew up in an orphanage here - which, at that date, almost certainly means the Muller Orphanage, in the grounds of which I live. Having never managed to meet Mahy myself, I find this link - tenuous though it be - exceedingly cool.

* I'm trying out the new public link feature in Dropbox - can you please leave a comment if this one doesn't work for you?

I gave two papers over the last couple of days, one at a conference on Southwest Writing in Bristol and the other at a children's literature conference in London. They both went okay, I think, but it's let me rather tired and (oddly) about two pounds heavier. (Perhaps that's a corollary of being taken seriously by academics: "Does my gravitas look big in this?") Anyway, there were some excellent papers, including a keynote by fjm (this was at the NCRCL in Roehampton).

I also learned a good deal about the Red Book of Bath, the existence of which was news to me. This, I hasten to add, was from a medieval historian at the southwest conference, not a children's literature specialist in Roehampton, though there may well have been mention there of the Big Red Bath Book. The Red Book of Bath is one those compendious and oddly miscellaneous collections of medieval Stuff, like the Red Book of Hergest. In fact, this led to some discussion of whether it was a common thing for cities to have a 'Red Book', and whether the colour had any signification, as in the red letter days of the calendar, or even the sumptuary laws. Also, how did they even make leather red in them days? Was it particularly expensive, as with cloth?

I also heard an exasperated paper from a woman who works at a local media company about the way that Bristol specifically and the southwest in general has failed to gain a national presence, beyond the twin stereotypes of the straw-sucking yokel and Vicky Pollard. A lot of TV and films are made here, but if they're not buying into one of those two stereotypes then the Bristolness of Bristol tends to get elided. There's no southwestern soap, as there is for other English cities such as Liverpool (Brookside), Salford/Manchester (Corrie), Newcastle (Byker Grove), London (Eastenders), Yorkshire (Emmerdale), Birmingham (Crossroads, RIP), and even Chester (Hollyoaks). (I'm not sure whether Skins is very big on its Bristol setting, because I've not really watched it.) Casualty was filmed in Bristol for over 20 years, but never made a point of it: in fact, it called the city Holby, which made it very easy for production to move to Cardiff a couple of years ago. A similar thing happened with Being Human, which was pleasingly Bristolian for the first three series, but then was seduced by the Dark Side and moved to Barry. Bristol streets do a roaring trade in pretending to be London for drama series, but even something as quintessentially Bristolian as Aardman Animations doesn't set its work here: Wallace and Gromit live in Lancashire. And as for the BBC Wildlife Unit, don't get me started...

She also had a couple of stories that suggested that there's a systematic set of stereotypes that govern what kinds of programmes the BBC and others are prepared to set in this area. A radio playwright who'd written a series of plays about the Devon working class, for example, was told that they'd love to make it - if she'd only set it in Wales instead (because of course Devon doesn't have a working class, just a peasantry). And the writer of Mamma Mia - whose hand you'd think people would biting off - couldn't sell her sitcom about two canny Bristol single mums using their wits to get by, because the only places people do that kind of thing are Liverpool (copyright Carla Lane) and London (copyright John Sullivan). In Bristol, apparently, single mums just live placidly on welfare, saying "Yeah but no but yeah but". No.

Today I gave my last tutorial of the year and brought home a heavy box of 3,000-word essays, which I have already begun to mark. This is one of the hinges of my year, as I move from a largely sedentary existence to an almost immobile one, and have to invent reasons to get up from my desk. If I'm not careful, a diet of marking, writing papers and applications, and similar opiates will seep by capillary action along all my neural pathways, leaving my mind dull and soggy to the touch. I begin to wish I'd booked to go to Eastercon (where half my friends list is evidently bound), but it was impossible for various practical reasons. I look forward to hearing all about it, anyway.

In this state of demi-torpor I watched television over dinner. On Just a Minute someone claimed that Mary Shelley was Percy's sister (surely that's deviation?). Then came Eggheads, in which Gertrude Stein was described as a travel writer. What was mass entertainment coming to? I was in danger of writing on the screen in red pen. But it was all made up for later, by a programme with wonderful shots of a recently-discovered young mammoth, resplendent with long strawberry-blond hair and orange highlights. Ah, there's a picture of it here.

And here, while I'm at it, is a portrait of Rudy Vallee by the infant Andy Warhol.

And here is a picture of a bed.

Intellectual fashions are often as interesting for their fashionability as for their content.

I've twice found myself thinking about such matters this week, in both cases thanks indirectly to lady_schrapnell. First, I reread a story to which she introduced me, and that I now happen to be due to teach. Frank O'Connor's "My Oedipus Complex" got me wondering about the grip of Freudian theory in the middle of the twentieth century. Its year of publication - 1952 - might stand as the high water mark of Freud's general intellectual cachet, and the story seems at first to be a demonstration of his grip at its tightest: because of the title, of course, and the way it exemplifies classic Oedipal anxieties. In practice, though, naming the story after the Complex robs the latter of its explanatory power. Freud's theory becomes part of the furniture, the framework around which the story is constructed (as a child might make a den by throwing a sheet over a clothes horse that happens to be in the room), rather than something to be revealed as an epiphanic truth by the analyst/critic. The title appears to be a tribute to Freud, but it leaves the door open to an ironic reading of his ideas. At any rate, it directs our attention to the interpretative procedures we bring to the fiction, making us more conscious of what we might otherwise do without thinking - which is, of course, the most Freudian of reading techniques, here applied to Freudian analysis itself. The rest of the twentieth century was, I think it's fair to say, a bumpy, downhill ride for classic Freudianism.

(This is how I read it, anyway. I don't know how O'Connor actually felt about Freud. lady_schrapnell?)

The second intellectual fashion came to my attention from dipping into lady_schrapnell's birthday present, Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica - a book I've previously owned only in selections. Near the beginning, Browne is talking about the various reasons why people shouldn't make unthinking obeisance to the wisdom of the Classical world. Most of these look very reasonable reasons: they were fallible, like us; people always think "the old days" were better, and in future times our grandchildren will look back on this as a Golden Age just as we do on the time of our own ancestors; a lot of Latin and Greek adages are nothing to write home about ("Tempus fugit" - well, duh!). Amongst the rest, though, he spends some time on the mendacity of the ancients' fables, which he explains away as exaggerated versions of more mundane events. ( Here's a taster: )

And there's much more of the same. How could this pack of nonsense have seemed so persuasive to Browne, to the extent that he sets it alongside the more "sensible" comments about the ancient world on an equal basis?

Browne's not unique in this, though. Look at Francis Bacon, who was perhaps more aware than any of his generation of the perils of cognitive bias. (I used to make my students read the section in the Novum Organon about the Idols of the Mind before letting them loose on the Monty Hall problem.) In The Wisdom of the Ancients (1619), a book about classical myth, he showed himself aware of the dangers: "I know very well what pliant stuff fable is made of, how freely it will follow any way you please to draw it, and how easily with a little dexterity and discourse of wit meanings which it was never meant to bear may be plausibly put upon it." Nevertheless, he went on, sometimes one finds "a conformity and connection with the thing signified, so close and so evident, that one cannot help believing such a signification to have been designed and meditated from the first, and purposely shadowed out."

And what were the evident correspondences that his canny lawyer's brain found so incontrovertible? Amongst the interpretations that follow, we learn that the legend of Perseus was an allegory of the art of war, and the figure of Cupid a representation of the atom of Democritan materialism. In fact we can say of Bacon, as Jean Seznec said of Boccaccio's Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (c.1340-1370), that "we find him rejecting this or that fable because of its improbability, and in the next breath accepting some no less absurd fabrication".

Well, it's always easier to see other people's biases at work than one's own (or so I am assured by a popular Althusserian meme inhabiting my own head), but these are cautionary tales indeed. Browne, Bacon and Boccaccio were far from being fools - any more than many a convinced Freudian of the 1930s. From our vantage point we can see that there was a strong motivation to find hidden messages in the classical myths during the Renaissance - for how else could a Christian prince or Pope justify hanging all those pictures of naked pagan gods on the walls? Allegory was the bulwark of classical civilization against the fanaticism of the Reformation (both Counter and Great-Tasting Original). Seznec told that story long ago in The Survival of the Pagan Gods, and it's the one I learned as an undergraduate - although perhaps by now the story's changed. (Come to think of it, it has a rather counter-cultural feel that might have made it appealing to my 1960s-educated lecturers.)

One thing these theories have in common is that they're about ways of reading stories and situations. But then, so is the theory of memes itself, which has such an appeal to our own age (and, I'll freely admit, to me). Will people look back in a century or so and wonder how we became so besotted with what is, after all, only an analogy with gene theory, rather than a "proper" theory with a body of evidence behind it?

Probably, but at least I've the comfort of having anticipated them.

If you're a member of the ALCS - the body that licenses educational institutions to copy and use writing for academic purposes - you should probably take a look at this.

In brief, the Government is proposing to scrap all fees for educational copying, and hence all licensing income for authors. Since most journals do not pay their authors, and the amount of paid time officially allocated for research for academics* is about a quarter of that actually spent (judging by my own case), the annual cheque for £120 or so has been very welcome, not least as a reminder that someone out there is reading and using one's work.

It used of course to be said that academics were "paid in promotion" for the time they put into scholarship. Well, twenty-one years, two monographs, two edited collections, a scholarly edition, numerous articles, chapters and introductions, an international research project, and six novels later, I'm still waiting to see the truth of that one. Not that I'm bitter...

* Of course, by no means all the authors of material copied by universities and other educational institutions are paid to do research at all.

Possibly I was too self-effacing to mention this here the first time it was broadcast, but those days are gone...

Radio 4 recently repeated John Waite's programme on Alan Garner, The Return to Brisingamen. It's available on iPlayer for a few more days, and features a snippet from me at around 6:45. It's only one sentence, but it continues for 60 seconds. Perhaps I was afraid someone would hit me if I reached a full stop.

My first-year students are obliged to read both Poe's 'Masque of the Red Death' and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby this term. Today, one of them noticed that Prince Prospero has a lot in common with Gatsby - each of them building a house and a world according to their high-end designer tastes, each throwing lavish but meaningless parties, each trying to shoo the insistent, dolphin's-nose bumping of mortality from their shins. Is Gatsby Prospero in West Egg, in truth? And, if so, who is Caliban? These are deep, deep questions.

Last night I fell asleep 50 pages short of finishing The Great Gatsby. I'd read it before, but a long while ago, and had completely forgotten what happened in the final section of the book, if anything (action-packed denouements being by no means guaranteed in classic twentieth-century novels).

So. As I may possibly have mentioned here before, ever since I was very young I've had a happy recurring dream about travelling to a seaside resort - by bike through a wooded valley, on foot over a land of short sandy grass and flitting swallows, or even in a small steam train across water meadows. The resort, when I eventually arrive, is modest and old fashioned, and over the years I've judged all real seaside places by how far they resemble it. Last night I had one of these dreams for the first time in a long time. But somehow Gatsby had leaked in, and with it several other fictional characters, including Tristram Shandy's Uncle Toby, Arriety from The Borrowers, and not a few Homeric warriors, who proceeded to hack at each other in a recreational way on the beach. Eventually, somebody (and it may have been Toby) suggested that, rather than fight now, they should reconstruct a totally different argument they'd all had years before, and he would take it on himself to distribute parts and scripts. Everyone agreed enthusiastically, and my dream faded out with the final words of The Great Gatsby: "And so they all stayed there happily for ever. Well, most of them."

I awoke shortly after, and quickly ploughed through the last fifty pages to see how accurate my dream had been. At a crude surface level I think I must conclude, "Not very." But for what it's worth, I offer my dream as an honest contribution to Fitzgerald studies.