- Facebook and the New Colonialism (the Atlantic). The articles cites a scholar in post-colonialism identifying traits of colonialist behaviours. Prompting the slightly unsettling exercise of trying to apply said list to other things, such as proponents of Gold Open Access:
Take the six signs of post-colonial behaviour in this article and apply to APCs: https://t.co/bh2HlkFVig
— janeschmidt (@janeschmidt) February 12, 2016
- Several intriguing topics in the Planet Money Valentine’s List episode. Yet another word of praise for Marie Kondo, once again carefully avoiding to talk about the root cause of “clutter”, which is that we need to stop buying so much stuff. But I guess you can’t say that if you’re an economist. But you can if you’re a Star columnist (or you can pin this down as yet another Millenial thing if you’re a minimalist blogger). This brilliant line by Matt Levine: the essence of finance is time travel. And also why we all use Q-tips to clean our ears even though we shouldn’t.
- Early 2016 is brutal to artists. But it’s the news of Umberto Eco’s death that unsettled me the most, and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG echoed that feeling perfectly in his eulogy. Foucault’s Pendulum is one of my favourite novels of all time.
- Last week saw a brief spike in interest from non-librarians towards the “digital divide” in academic publishing (an overly simplistic way to put it would be Open Access vs paywall-model). Besides the fact that none of it is new, this gem of an interaction with SciHub is indicative of how broken the model of the librarian-as-an-information-broker is:
@GaviaLib that is bullshit
— Sci Hub (@Sci_Hub) February 18, 2016
In the midst of all this, this study about how the use of SciHub’s low-tech predecessor #icanhazpdf highlights that there might be a steady demand for open access content from academics, but that they might not be actually aware of the alternate routes to get it. This is also interesting from a purely data-analysis perspective. Archivist Allana Mayer mentioned using TAGS as a way to collect and analyse such tweets, and helpfully shared her search equation.
- Toronto’s Bloor-Danforth subway line (now called line 2) is turning 50 this February. This exhibit looks worthy of a visit.