You’ve already heard that Elsevier is evil. That they know this much about you — and that they are selling this data not just to our institutions but to god-knows-who-else — is cause for real, material protest. They may not have a crass loud mouthed billionaire spokesbaby but they’re so, so much worse. Open source, open access alternatives exist. Get them as far out of your life as possible. https://eiko-fried.com/welcome-to-hotel-elsevier-you-can-check-out-any-time-you-like-not ..read more

Spending today tinkering with a combination of ideas that have surfaced in my Mastodon feed over the last several days: Shawn Graham’s use of MkDocs with Obsidian to create easy markdown-based web publishing. Tim Hutton’s script that converts your downloaded Twitter archive to markdown files. Somebody’s suggestion (which I did not bookmark and can no longer find) to publish your Twitter archive via a static site generator like Eleventy. The result: Birdsite, a semi-navigable archive of my various twitterings between 2008 and 2022. Also on: brid.gy ..read more

At some point in the last couple of weeks, a link passed through my hcommons.social feed pointing me to Ben Newton’s post on task-tracking in Obsidian. I loooooooove Obsidian. Love it. I keep all of my research notes in it, as well as a wide range of personal notes (e.g., the list of Christmas shopping I have not yet completed). But I’m super-aware that I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of what it can do. And so with tasks. I’ve had a long-standing morning routine of looking at my to-dos, which I’ve captured and tracked in Things 3 (which I also love!), and transferring my top prioritie ..read more

This morning, I am officially kicking off the process of revising Leading Generously for final submission. As the discussions there will show, I’ve got a lot of work ahead. My hope is that in this revision I might get a good bit more clear about who this book is for, and about the complexities of what I’m arguing. The draft increasingly feels to me as if it’s undecided about its audience but overly decided about its recommendations, and that’s… problematic. So! Last call for comments, I guess. And more from me as I get down into it. Also on: brid.gy ..read more

WP block editor gurus: Is there a way to use styles to create links that use different colors for the link text and the link decoration (i.e., the underline)? I know how to do it using CSS (I think), but styles within the block editor seems to insist that both text and underline have the same color. Also on: brid.gy ..read more

Grounded in a model of individual success that rewards white men and the knowledge they have created for centuries, academia promotes competitiveness, exceptionalism, and ownership of history and knowledge-making. We are primed to believe we “find” history in an archive and therefore own it. We come up with ideas about major processes in society—from colonialism to historical legacies of oppression—and imagine no one else could possibly share similar thoughts, even when these are based on human experiences we share. We hold our critical thoughts and our important insights hostage until graced ..read more

Some time back, I got sooooooper-interested in the work of IndieWeb and what it might do for connecting blog spaces and social media spaces. Things have quieted down since then, though I’ve been syndicating most posts to the bird site and gathering Webmentions from there. A few months back, seeing the handwriting on the wall for the bird site, I got a bit more active on Mastodon, but didn’t cut all ties until this week. So now I’m working to move my syndication links and start pulling Webmentions from my new-ish social media home. Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol to allow for the buildin ..read more

For anyone who might be looking for a bit more information on the situation at MSU, faculty senator Jack Lipton has put together an excellent video detailing the timeline of events that led us to this point ..read more

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That’s perhaps an opening so predictable as to wander blithely into the terrain of the cliché, but it captures all too well the weirdness of the last month for someone who’s trying to write about academic leadership in chaotic times. Part of me wishes everyone and everything would settle down long enough for me to get this book revised and out. And part of me recognizes the altogether — “instructive” might be the most diplomatic word I could select here — examples by which I’m surrounded right now, and the ways that they’re challenging me to ..read more

Edited to add: Uh, whoops. Try Trentacinque Anni Fa. I am OLD. I’m in Florence for a meeting this week. (I know, I feel bad for me too.) I flew out of Detroit yesterday morning, had a four-hour layover at JFK, and landed in Rome this morning at 7:30. Sped through the airport and hopped on a train to Roma Termini1, where I had a coffee and waited a bit over an hour for my train north. Found my way from Santa Maria Novella to my hotel with only minor difficulties presented by my state of delirium. Checked in and was delighted that they had a room ready for me. Collapsed for an hour and a half, a ..read more