The Occasional Pamphlet

Observant followers of the Pamphlet will have noticed that I have taken up with Twitter over the last few months. A feed of my tweets is in the pane to the right as “Pamphlet says…”. ⇒

As I get a hang of the medium, I’ve been tweeting on a wider range of topics than covered by the Pamphlet, but still hope this will be of interest to those of you who read the blog. So feel free to follow me (pmphlt) on twitter, and urge your friends, acquaintances, family members, pets, and hangers on to follow as well. And while you’re at it, a plug for the Pamphlet would be most welcome too.

I assume that readers of the open access discussions on this blog are familiar with the state of play in the area, but just in case, here’s some background.

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This blog presents occasional writings on whatever I’m interested in at the moment, which currently includes topics such as:

• scholarly communications and open access, and other university matters
• computer science topics of various sorts
• language, linguistics, and computational linguistics
• pedagogy and writing

I expect that in the near term, I’ll primarily be commenting on open access issues.

I’ve avoided having a blog until now because in the past I’ve been constitutionally incapable of presenting my thinking in any kind of interim state. This blog is my attempt to change this archaic aspect of my personality, and to provide a venue for writings of a more exploratory or ephemeral nature. Still, I expect many posts will be relatively long as compared to a typical blog, though short compared to a scholarly article and more topical.

I chose the word “pamphlet” to describe these writings, as I was inspired to experiment with this style of writing by the pamphlets of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). The use of the word “occasional” under both of its first two senses was intentional.

The opinions expressed here are my own. I am not speaking on behalf of Harvard or any of its constituent parts, or on behalf of anyone else for that matter.