Since writing about my intention to digitise the journal, Common Sense, I’ve received support from former editors, Richard Gunn, Werner Bonefeld, Adrian Wilding and Brian McGrail, who between them have sent me the entire run of 24 issues. Using our library’s book scanning facilities, I’ve managed to scan all issue of the journal much quicker than I originally anticipated.
24 issues with around 2100 pages, 200 articles and 104 authors, over 12 years.
The format of the journal changed twice during the course of its life. Issues 1-9 were photocopies of original typed articles that contributors would send to the editors. The first three issues were stapled along the edge of A4 sheets and proved difficult at times to scan because this method of binding did not leave very much margin when pressing the page flat against the scanner bed. Issues 4-9 were easier because they were stapled in the middle of an A3 sheet and would open nicely for lying flat on the scanner. Issues 7-9 were especially easy because contributors seemed to consistently take notice of the editors’ request to leave wide margins.
Notes for contributors: send articles in clean and reproducible typescript, single-space or space-and-a-half (not double-space). Leave wide margins on both sides, and wide gaps at top and bottom of each page.
Issues 10-24 were published in a more conventional journal format and this left enough room at the margins to achieve a consistently good scan and a single issue could be scanned in about 30 mins, half the time that issues 1-3 took.
The journal was scanned at 300dpi using a Plustek Optibook 3600 scanner to create bitmap files of each page. I then used Adobe Acrobat 7 to OCR and create PDFs. This provided pages that are print quality should you wish to print them out, as well as being fully searchable. I regularly cropped pages from earlier issues with the problematic margins using Acrobat to leave a relatively clean page, although at times, you’ll see that there’s barely any margin at all. Without taking the original issues apart, I don’t think I could have done much better.
I’ve also created a website for the journal, hosted here on the University of Lincoln’s blogging platform, with a mapped domain of http://commonsensejournal.org.uk that costs £5/year. I’ve tried to make the journal easy to navigate and you can browse by issue, author and date of publication. You can also search the table of contents across the entire run of 24 issues. I’ve been playing with Google Custom Search, which should provide a way to search the full text of the journal from the website. This largely depends on when Google decides to index the PDFs ((Google allow you to force index URLs but this is no guarantee that it’ll happen quickly or consistently)) though and so I won’t implement this until I know the full text for all issues is indexed.
The original paper copies of the journal will be deposited with either the National Library of Scotland or the British Library, depending on what they currently hold.
Finally, Mike Neary (who introduced me to the journal) and I, intend to write an article which retrospectively discusses the journal and hopefully provides a useful, critical introduction to new readers. Past editors and contributors have offered to help.
I was just asked by our Press Office to provide them with a short comment on blogs and blogging. Here’s what I sent them. How did I do? What would you have said in 150 words?
Blogging takes various forms but broadly speaking it is a form of web-based self-publishing. Prior to the web, it was difficult and costly for people to publish and distribute their thoughts and their work widely. With the advent of the web, it became easier, but still required some technical knowledge to author and publish a web site.
Blogging represents a maturing form of web authoring, where the software makes it easier for anyone capable of using a word processor to author, publish and distribute their thoughts and work to others.
But it’s not simply about web publishing. Blogging is a powerful network – the ‘blogosphere’ – where a multitude of blogs (and therefore people) are connected through a web of mutual references, discussions, links and ideas. The web liberated the global exchange of knowledge. Blogging is liberating the conversation around that knowledge and providing a space for the creation of new forms of knowledge, too.
During some quiet time in the office last week, I decided to install Ubuntu 10.4 on my work desktop. It’s a nice 2009 24″ iMac and during the install process I was reminded of the first time I installed Linux ten years ago, which was also on an iMac (‘Summer 2000‘ model). It goes without saying that Linux on the desktop has come a long way, but it wasn’t until this particular version of Ubuntu that I would confidently say that it’s as hassle-free and useful as running OS X or Windows. For me, Linux is a better experience than either of them.
The first time I installed Linux in July 2000, I sent off for a CD of PPC Linux (no longer in business). USB support was experimental, which was a bit of a problem for Mac users, as Apple had switched to USB as their main type of connector. I spent many hours compiling experimental USB drivers from source. I stuck with the PPC Linux distro for a few months, but then SUSE released a much more polished version of Linux for the PowerPC and I switched to that. There were still problems with running Linux on a Mac and Linux desktop applications were still relatively immature but I was happy to use that for a couple of years until SUSE dropped support for the PowerPC chip. Then, around mid-2001, I made the leap to Debian, traditionally a distro for hardcore Linux users and stepped up my game a bit by running the bleeding-edge ‘unstable’ version – I think it was called ‘Sid’ at the time.
Debian was cool and I ran it on my old iMac until March 2007 at which point it was time to move on. I removed the hard-drive, smashed it with a hammer and then placed the whole machine in the bin before hitting the road and never looking back (more or less).
A couple of months later, I bought my first laptop with Linux pre-installed. The Lenovo N100 is a well supported and well built machine – the display doesn’t flop about in the wind like on some cheap laptops. On the whole, Ubuntu on the Lenovo was pretty good although the brightness control never did seem to work very well. When I was given a Dell D430 laptop at work, I took the ‘pesky penguin’ as my wife calls Linux (Lord only knows why!?), off the Lenovo, and offered the Lenovo up to her. No more trouble and strife.
Still with me? Well, as soon as I was given the Dell (about a year ago), I wiped the corporate install of XP (sorry ICT colleagues, but I never have to hassle you for support now, which I would if I was running Windows) and made it a single boot Ubuntu machine. I love this little laptop. Everything works.
Anyhow, the real test was last week when I installed Ubuntu Lucid beta 2 on both the Dell and the iMac. It’s remarkable. Faster than OS X for the applications I use and it uses less RAM overall, too. Ubuntu has ditched the brown theme (about time!) and have adopted a dark default theme with hints of purple. Sounds awful doesn’t it? But it looks slick and everything works great.
Ten years later, with my hand on my heart, I can say the ‘journey’ was worth it. Let it be known, Linux on the Desktop has arrived. I think it’s time that all Educational Technologists in every corner of the world, took a Linux CD to their corporate machine and showed it what a real OS looks like. I guarantee that your day will be more interesting. 😉
For much of my life, I’ve taken leaps from one interest to a seemingly unrelated other. As a kid, life was just a chronic habit of fads that my parents endured with some amusement. In my late teens, I slowed down and have managed to extend my interests over a period of years rather than weeks or months.
Typically, if I have a mild interest in something, I’ll buy a book. Even in these days of the web, an interest is not ‘christened’ until I’ve got a book on the subject in my hands. Here are the pivotal books that marked turning points for me with a brief explanation of why. I’d be interested if anyone else can plot their life in this way.
Incredibly Strange Films
Jonathan Ross presented a series called ‘The Incredibly Strange Film Show‘. It was the high point of his career, if you ask me, and came into my life out of nowhere. I dropped out of college to watch films and work in a video shop. Had I missed this series, I might have ended up being a Civil Engineer.
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
For some reason, I don’t remember why, I left the video shop to study Journalism in London. By the time I ‘qualified’, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a hack. Besides, at the age of 19, I knew nothing about the world. How was I supposed to write about it? I returned home with no plans and picked up this book that my dad was reading. It totally captured me, so I decided to apply to university to study Buddhism. Up to that point, I had no aspirations to go to university and was the first person in my extended family to do so. I got a 1st Class degree because I loved the subject and won funding to study for an MA in Buddhist Studies at the University of Michigan. I studied Japanese, practised Zen for four years, living for a while across the road from a Zen temple in London, and spent a summer in a Japanese Zen monastery. I went on to live in Japan for three years. All because of this book.
Independent filmmaking
Towards the end of my MA, Buddhism had become entirely academic for me and I’d lost the deeply personal motivation that I had for it. Keen to complete my MA and move on, I looked for a distraction to see me through the last few months of study and picked up this book. I borrowed filmmaking equipment from the university and taught myself how to use an edit suite before heading off to Japan for three years. While I was in Japan, I ran a monthly cinematheque for experimental film and video called Eiga Arts and organised exchanges of experimental film and video between Japanese and international filmmakers. It was a blast but it wasn’t going to pay the rent so when I returned to the UK, I studied for an MA in Film Archiving at the University of East Anglia. It’s been paying the rent ever since. I was also able to use a lot of the film I’d shot while in Japan and the US to partially meet the requirements for my MA.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
While in Japan, I had the money to buy a nice new iMac. It came with OS 9 installed, which constantly crashed. I got so frustrated having spent nearly $2000 on on a computer that didn’t work, that I looked for alternatives and found Linux. This was ten years ago and while support for Intel-based desktop computers was still fairly hit and miss, support for Apple machines was a niche within a niche. Still, I persevered and over the course of a year, learned my way around a Unix/Linux OS. It’s the only time I’ve ever worked on something all night. Repeatedly. Learning about the Open Source movement was unavoidable and I picked up this book and knew I’d made the right decision, despite the huge learning curve. It gave social and political significance to a simple act borne out of frustration. I’ve been running Linux on my desktop for over ten years now and have a basic certification in Linux SysAdmin. Open Source opened the door for me to the Commons.
Shelter
After finishing my MA in Film Archiving, I landed a job as Moving Image Archivist, with the British Film Institute. I stayed there for a couple of years until I saw that Amnesty International were advertising for an Audiovisual Archivist. The focus at Amnesty was on digital archiving and Digital Asset Management and so I found myself moving into the more general profession of Information Management. The problem with this, for me, was that I became removed from the physical aspects of film. It was all bits and bytes, storage and standards. After a couple of years at Amnesty, London was feeling oppressive and we saw no future for us there. I got talking to my Mum and Dad about how we could help each other out and we decided to build a house in their garden (my Dad was a builder but he died before we got planning permission). The deal was that we got the land for free (so making the whole thing affordable), and with 30 years or so of earning ahead of us, we’d look out for them financially as they headed for retirement. We wanted to build something modest but exceptional and I bought this book which is still a huge inspiration to me. It’s full of illustrated stories of people that have built their own, often mad, places to live. As it happened, planning restrictions meant that we had to build a fairly conventional stone cottage style place, which is great, but I still have aspirations to build a geodesic dome or a house raised on poles some day.
Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today
Between March 2007 and February 2008, we had a baby daughter, moved to Lincoln two weeks after she was born, got married and built a house. I was also lucky to spot an advertisement for a job working part-time on a JISC funded repository project at the University of Lincoln, which connected nicely with my work on digital archiving at Amnesty and my interest in the Commons. When the project ended, I applied for the job I’m in now, as Technology Officer, looking at how technology might be used to support research, teaching and learning. I love it. Last summer, I started to think about the problems of technology and one that seemed obvious to me was the relationship between energy consumption and technology and how a future energy crisis and climate change legislation might impact the use of technology in Higher Education. It’s an area of research that I’m still pursuing, but the most significant effect it’s had on me is to open my eyes to the political dimensions of energy and the economy. Holloway’s book was suggested to me and it had a similar effect as reading the book on Zen. In particular, the first chapter which talks about ‘The Scream’, resonates for me with the central Buddhist idea of suffering. There have been other connections, too, not least the metaphysical aspects of Marxist theory, which often remind me of the metaphysical aspects of religious philosophy.
These are slides to accompany an eight minute ‘Lightning Talk’ for the dev8D conference in London, 24-27th February 2010. Each slide is a link to a blog post I have written on ways to use WordPress and WordPress Multi User, that are not about blogging.
Yesterday, I submitted a proposal to Talis under their Incubator fund. If successful, I would have the pleasure of working with Paul Stainthorp, E-Resources Librarian at the University of Lincoln, and Casey Bisson, Information Architect at Plymouth State University. The bid is to develop an idea which I’ve posted about before, based on Casey’s work on Scriblio and our adventures with WordPress MU, in particular, JISCPress.
Anyway, rather than re-iterating the bid here. You can read it in full by clicking here.
Comments are very welcome. Thanks.
UPDATE: We made it into the second round of judging but were unsuccessful in the end. Here’s the useful and fair feedback we received.
like the idea and how, like the Moodle repository, it can help open up existing content through data sharing. The same question as for others remains of how and why institutions would subscribe to the service.
I like this but I think it significantly underestimates the IP issues around library catalogue records which has been a major stumbling block for other activities in this area. That said, I think it is worth taking forward at this stage. The team looks very strong.
Ambitious in scope and technology, but /feels/ right for the innovative approach of this fund.
“Imagine that a significant number of UK universities and colleges… chose to make use of such a platform.” This type of language frightens me, indicating that they have no partnerships established, where other proposals already do. The point on issues with catalog records (above) should not be overlooked.
The use cases won me over. Not without risks ( as they say) and some major challenges
this one strikes me as particularly promising, because it has such strong ties to UK institutions and could connect to things Talis does
