@MrsIndiaBridge and @MrWalterBridge: An experiment in Twitter storytelling.

Evan S. Connell has made his way back around in my reading rotation I’m doing something I’ve never done before: I’m reading Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge together. As a single story.

This is not a new idea. The film–with the ever wonderful Paul Newman–was a beautiful melding of both stories and it was deeply respectful of both books, but a different story with its own merits.

Why am I writing about the books I am reading? Because I want to tell the story in my own way. On Twitter. I was thinking of reading through the books again before I started tweeting through the two accounts: @MrsIndiaBridge and @MrWalterBridge, but I decided that if I did that, I would never get around to actually doing it, so I’m flying blind. I do not know what storytelling tools I’ll be using, whether or not the Twitter accounts will only be of their public personas, or how much internal dialogue to include. How I will deal with naration, since both books are written in the second-person. While I have a few vague points I wish to touch upon, I have no particular goals.

I’ll be setting a leisurely pace, spending a few days on each vignette. Partially because I want to retain a sense of the slow passage of time in the fast-paced world of the Internet. These books are fundamentally about taking time to slow down and examine ourselves in world where the unexamined life is the norm, so I want to convey that. Also, I want to give people time to be able to come back and catch up easily if they aren’t paying attention for a week or two. Finally–and this is the real reason–I think slowly. It takes a long time for me to craft my words, and while others have done this sort of storytelling before, I have not.

Mr. Connel did more to improve my writing than any English course I ever took. Through Mrs. Bridge, I learned to write concise modules of text; each an independent idea, but contributing to a whole story that was greater than a sum of parts. I sincerely hope some of you will decide to read along with me, but it’s perfectly fine if you do not. I hope the story will stand alone. If you do follow along, feel free to read only Mrs. Bridge, do not feel obligated to read both. If you haven’t read either before, I heartily recommend Mrs. Bridge. It is a sad, melancholy, but very beautiful story that is worthy of your time. But if you have not read the books or do not intend on reading the books with me, I do hope you will follow along. I think it’s going to be a fun ride.

Co-op academic publishing: A proposal

Opposition to the traditional academic publishers is more vocal than ever. We need viable, self-sustaining, alternatives that work. While I love the PLoS and all the other open-access publishers, I don’t think they’re the end-all of open-access publishing. Nor do I think are they doing enough to bring open-access to all realms of academic scholarship, especially in the realms of the humanities and social science where authors are not labs, where individuals usually do not have a few thousand to plop down anytime they have something they want to publish. Further, there has been very little talk of open-access publishing outside of journals and textbooks. I want academic books of all kinds, not just textbooks to be openly accessible. While yes, I understand that the whole open-access community is still young, I am an impatient man. I want more and I want it now.

While open-access has grown very much on the web, but it has made little headway in print media. Which—despite the huge growth of digital media—is still where much academic literature is read. While this will change as academic demographics shift to younger generations, digital publications mature, and access increases, I believe that physical manifestations of our work will always have a place in what we do.

More than words on a page

I want a co-op business model for an open-access (mostly) academic publisher. Its ownership would be mostly comprised of the authors, subscribers, editors, and designers/developers (although the last category would likely be dedicated staff if the publishing house became large enough). Its print books would be the product of designers working more closely with the editors and authors than traditional publishing (if we’re printing, the pages better be worthy of the words printed on them). Digital editions would not just be .epub exports of .pdf files. Designers could work closely with authors and editors to create not just ebooks, but applications and webapps that do not just publishing the results, but providing better visualizations, uncompiled code, and raw data.

We must remember that this is not merely a question of academic publishing. This is about scholarly communication. What review model would it use for its journals? (Perhaps the organizers and editorial board of the different journals should decide that.) How would it choose what books to publish? Would it be able to generate enough revenue to keep itself running and grow?

What role should it play in metascholarship, outreach, and policy? It seems obvious to me that any such organization has a duty to not preach to the choir, but must also reach out to researchers, professors, colleges, and universities to carry its publications, but also encourage them to support open-access publishing in its faculty. It is also obvious to me to have lasting policy results, organizations need to be actively and consistently lobbying for pro-open-access policies to go against the lobbying efforts such as the Association of American Publishers. Such a co-op could also spend its resources not just publishing and lobbying, but also building tools to promote open scholarship, such as by contributing development time and code to projects such as the Open Journal Systems.

Would giving a financial stake and ownership to its contributors and readership allow it to stay objective and true to the spirit of open-access? Would having policy power? Perhaps the most important part is still institutionalizing an open culture that outlives its founding constituencies. No matter what form the future of academic publishers take. We need to change, the old models–which have done much for us–are now holding us back. Could current academic publishers change to help serve us better? Yes, but they aren’t. So it’s our job to figure out where to go next.

Tasty bits for the ubuntu server using Apple junkie (and other stuff).

Whelp…after sudo aptitude upgrade late Thursday night, Wittgenstein kernel panicked after the second reboot (why not the first? I don’t even want to know). Actually, it first forgot the RAID arrays that contained the kernel and all other services, then after I fixed that, it kernel panicked. Instead of trying to fix the whole mess, I decided to start fresh with a new Ubuntu server 11.10 install, which I’m not going to talk about here (it’s a basic install with lots of RAID1 partitions and a giant RAID5…boring stuff). Aside from being my home development server, Wittgenstein is also my home media server. As an entirely Apple household, I prefer to use AFP for local file transfers, which means Netatalk.

Netatalk on Ubuntu and OSX Lion

Aside from being my home development server, Wittgenstein is also my home media server. As an Apple household, I prefer to use AFP for all my tasty media sharing. After upgrading to Lion, Netatalk stopped working for a lot of people, me included. Most people said that you needed to upgrade to Netatalk 2.2 which requires building from source. In actuality, you don’t. (It may be required to run Time Machine, but I don’t see why it would. I’m not sure about that since I use an external harddrive connected to an Airport Express for Time Machine, that way I can have my TM backups with me whenever I travel as well.)

As background, I am using a base install of Ubuntu 11.10, however, this worked for me in 10.x systems as well.

Install netatalk

I prefer to use aptitude instead of apt-get. In this case, the differences shouldn’t matter too much.

sudo aptitude install netatalk

Configure

Use your favorite text editor to edit /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf I’m not hardcore, so I prefer nano.

sudo nano /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf

add the following line to the end of the file:

- -udp -noddp -uamlist uamsrandnum.so,uamsdhx.so,uams_dhx2.so -nosavepassword

Save and exit.

Edit /etc/init.d/netatalk and check for the following:

CNID_METAD_RUN=yes
AFPD_RUN=yes
AFPD_MAX_CLIENTS=20
AFPD_UAMLIST="-U uams_dhx2.so,uams_clrtxt.so"
AFPD_GUEST=nobody
CNID_CONFIG="-l log_note"

ATALKD_RUN=no
PAPD_RUN=no
TIMELORD_RUN=no
A2BOOT_RUN=no
ATALK_ZONE=
ATALK_BGROUND=no

Most of these are already set in the default configuration and you can futz around with most of them, these just happen to be my settings.

Set up your volumes

Edit sudo nano /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default with what folders you want to share. (More on configuring shared volumes: HowTo: Make Ubuntu A Perfect Mac File Server And Time Machine Volume.)

Install up Avahi-daemon (Bonjour)

This is optional, but useful if you want your server to advertise itself across your network:

sudo aptitude install avahi-daemon

Configure Avahi

Create a new file in /etc/avahi/services/ called afpd.service

sudo nano /etc/avahi/services/

copy and paste the following and save:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?>	<!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
<service>
<type>_afpovertcp._tcp	</type>
<port>548	</port>
</service>
<service>
<type>_device-info._tcp	</type>
<port>0	</port>
<txt-record>model=Xserve</txt-record>
</service>
</service-group>

Restart services and go!

Restart netatalk sudo service netatalk restart as well as avahi sudo service avahi-daemon restart and you’re done!