Martin Paul Eve

Tech Lead @ Knowledge Commons, MESH, Michigan State University | Lit Prof @ Uni of London, Birkbeck | Music on tici taci records | My books: https://books.eve.gd

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relay.damus.io

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Last Notes

2026-06-03 11:46:57 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 @nprofile…5dxw old Twitter clients used to do this by default, but I haven't found a nice one for Android (or web) that does it for Mastodon or Bluesky

2026-06-03 11:44:40 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 I believe we publish 36 journals. Not all were for-profit flips, but many are.

2026-06-03 10:17:01 GMT

OLH flips another journal from a for-profit, commercial publisher https://www.openlibhums.org/news/943/

2026-06-03 07:11:05 GMT

Trying out the Web-based Mastodon client https://phanpy.social and I really like it. Still seems no way of bookmarking where you got to, but the clean interface is most welcome.

2026-05-18 14:31:21 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 the wound on the calf is very deep and the tissue is not viable to heal unaided. The new wound that will be created is shallow (small layers of skin taken off - akin to a graze) and will heal by itself.

2026-05-18 13:18:37 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 the bite is on the right calf. They are proposing to take skin from the right thigh to graft onto the calf. This leaves a second wound on the thigh, which must, itself, heal...

2026-05-18 11:41:09 GMT

In hospital today for skin graft surgery on the dog bite wound.
Anaesthetist thought I was complicated due to medical background and discussed in detail.
The surgeon thought it looked quite simple. "Take it from the thigh, whack it on the wound" was the phrase she used, I believe.

2026-05-08 07:29:36 GMT

In her 143-page ruling, Judge McMahon ordered the agency to rescind the cuts while saying the plaintiffs had suffered “irreparable injury.”
“The injury is not limited to the loss of money,” Judge McMahon said.
Gift article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/arts/neh-grants-lawsuit-doge.html?unlocked_article_code=1.g1A.g48z.IlK8B2KtTcYs

2026-05-07 21:31:47 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 thank you

2026-05-07 17:52:28 GMT

I turn 40 this month. I am struggling to think of anything I can do to celebrate. I have to go for dialysis and IV feeding in the late afternoon/evening. I am not very mobile at all at the moment, but now have a fold-up powerchair. We live in Kent on the South-East coast. Any ideas?

2026-05-03 14:30:09 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 I have a bald patch that I dislike. So I shave it off to outplay it at its own game

2026-05-03 10:55:31 GMT

Dropping the fuzz
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/116/510/274/664/783/037/original/10f1f58ae7957544.jpg
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/116/510/275/001/807/389/original/453c64d203aab382.jpg

2026-04-28 19:50:30 GMT

I spoke today with the hospital. They told me that I require IV nutritional support. This, though, will be the slightly lesser version, administered during my dialysis, rather than through a new line. This means I must now go to hospital 3x per week for haemodialysis instead of doing it at home.
This is logistically terrible. So much of my life will be spent doing dialysis. But I feel awful and need to be able to fight this norovirus. Putting on weight is the key to this. So I must go along with the process.

2026-04-28 09:05:41 GMT

I find it very frustrating when people announce new versions of software they have produced, with no information on what the software is or does. Assuming people already know.
"Pleased to announce v0.1.2 of Darkwing. This version brings Capybara integration and Dingbat rollback support!"

2026-04-18 20:54:02 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 Thank you, Mike, I very much appreciate it. I hope it's okay that I keep posting updates and where I'm at, because it helps me to feel I've got it off my chest.

2026-04-18 15:32:10 GMT

I thought I would write with another health update. Thanks to everyone who has wished me well recently. It has been a difficult time. The real challenge that I face is handling an acute problem like this serious dog bite on top of chronic conditions, specifically end-stage renal failure with dialysis and rheumatoid arthritis. As just an example, this has forced my dialysis to come off overnight and into three hour sessions, which means that some days I work all day, then just have ... 🧵1/8

2026-04-18 12:37:38 GMT

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@nprofile…w3h4 ah, thank you! I will put it on the list, anyway!

2026-04-18 10:40:35 GMT

I'm interested in reading Gothic-ey/creepy texts about the creation of artificial life (in whatever form that takes), beyond Frankenstein. Do you have a favourite or other suggestions? Got the contemporary Frankenstein in Baghdad already, too...

2026-04-18 07:51:02 GMT

How much does it cost to peer review grants? Ie how much does selection cost? This paper has the numbers.
https://f1000research.com/articles/15-534

2026-04-15 13:50:11 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 yeah. I worry a lot that AI systems are going to be the total undoing of all technical understanding and knowledge. Those who had no clue are going to have even less of an idea 😬

2026-04-15 12:57:15 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 lol. If you could see my colleague trying just to turn on his computer, you would recoil in horror at trying to explain "markdown"

2026-04-15 12:30:41 GMT

It's going to become increasingly challenging to identify when, in the authorship and publishing process, AI hallucinations were introduced. Mass-scale publishing leaders are as keen for the technology as other CEOs and it means that reference parsing, for instance, could go through an LLM.
Rigorous versioning is, of course, the answer so that we can do the equivalent of the software engineering "blame" command, to find out where. But most industrial publishing manuscript systems do not store the MS in any diff-able format. It's just a binary.
This will, for now, make hallucination hunting, when needed, a very slow and manual process, involving a human trawling through each version of a file, to see who introduced the nonsense...

2026-04-14 13:10:49 GMT

A good read on the thorny difficulties faced by OA publishers in the face of the current lack of regulation of AI
https://www.openlibhums.org/news/934/

2026-04-12 14:50:26 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 I have emailed someone!

2026-04-11 17:16:39 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 I might email them to ask about this, first. I haven't given them a chance to put it right, yet.

2026-04-11 16:23:22 GMT

I read a lot of Tech news and so decided to pay for a Tom's Hardware subscription. I love the premium content but am surprised that a subscription doesn't remove the huge volume of pop-over advertising that they use. I was hoping to pay so as not to have to wade through these.

2026-04-11 11:02:49 GMT

It is great to see these principles on open monograph acquisition from RLUK.
My only criticism is of "there should be evidence that the initiative is financially viable (or established for at least two years)".
So how are new models supposed to start?
https://www.rluk.ac.uk/shared-principles-open-access-monograph-models/
It seems everything must have at least a two-year grant from a funder. But it's still tricky. I had to sell the benefits of the @nprofile…9t56 model to libraries BEFORE it was up and running and secure investment so that we could start publishing. Our grant from Mellon covered my time but not any publishing activities. So this RLUK policy could well have stopped us being able to launch.
Many new publishing initiatives are in this chicken and egg situation:
"Are you financially viable?"
"We are not, right now, but we will be, if you all fund us."
So the viability is conditional on the payment that can only be given to "financially viable" orgs in the first place.

2026-04-07 19:35:53 GMT

Bombing infrastructure is totally sick. Hospitals, for instance, rely on power and water. Short-term generators can only last so long. Without supplies, they have no meds. You are killing those with cancer, kidney failure, and heart disease - taking away their final moments on Earth.

2026-04-03 07:43:28 GMT

Needed to create a fictional citation showing how HTML tags might end up in someone's user profile... Eve, Martin Paul, '<blink> and You'll Miss It: Doctor Who, Weeping Angels and the Web 2.0 Era' sounds like a great article that I should actually write...!

2026-03-31 12:36:36 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 oh goodness, yes. The NPM mess is just... Urgh.

2026-03-31 12:21:26 GMT

The conundrum for modern software development: the cost to implement vs the cost to verify https://clifford.ressel.fyi/blog/cost-to-implement-vs-verify/

2026-03-29 13:38:28 GMT

This does not inspire confidence. Ask people with disabilities for responses then feed them to AI.
"The DWP will analyse and summarise responses and may use artificial intelligence to assist with the handling of responses - this will be under human oversight and will not replace human judgement"
https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/timms-review-of-personal-independence-payment-call-for-evidence
I can see that they say it has human oversight, but that could easily mean that they will prompt an AI to give a whitewash summary, spinning the response as they want. The human oversight could actually be the most corrupting part of this.

2026-03-26 07:32:19 GMT

LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

2026-03-24 14:11:51 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 that feels totally like how it is.
And the narrator is David Attenborough.

2026-03-24 10:27:12 GMT

It's really excellent that the next version of PyCharm, the awesome IDE from JetBrains, will include uv support. Such a great tool, uv. Hope the OpenAI acquisition of astral does not mess this up.

2026-03-23 11:42:55 GMT

Explored a long history of complaints about having too many books and too much work published. Traced back to ancient texts, with perspectives from Seneca, Leibniz, and more. The theme is consistent: it's always felt overwhelming to manage scholarly information. Based much on Ann Blair's "Too Much to Know" which gives interesting insights into this ongoing issue.
https://eve.gd/2026/03/23/too-much-publishing/

2026-03-23 09:49:02 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 this is a MAJOR win. There are also 3 stacked boxes off-camera to the left that are now on shelves. The box that remains is a to-Ebay pile. The rest are now on shelves.
The office remains a tip. :P

2026-03-23 08:20:16 GMT

Book clearance over the weekend. Before and after.
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/116/277/510/981/753/756/original/25693749deb5871a.jpg
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/116/277/511/203/593/897/original/a6e01b23d01069f0.jpg

2026-03-21 14:22:20 GMT

Reflecting on the Covid inquiry. Despite acknowledging key failings in government policy and healthcare guidelines, these reports still insist the NHS "coped" with the pandemic. Over 200,000 Covid-related deaths and countless gaps in care make me question this. It seems the NHS can never be deemed overwhelmed, likely due to political motives.
https://eve.gd/2026/03/20/the-nhs-can-never-fail-there-is-no-circumstance-where-it-would-be-deemed-overwhelmed/

2026-03-10 15:57:01 GMT

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@nprofile…tkx6 imagine if going to the pub was cheaper than the offie. Would indeed be amazing

2026-02-22 16:57:59 GMT

Been reading the history of Portico, starting at Fenton, Eileen Gifford, ‘An Overview of Portico: An Electronic Archiving Service’, Serials Review, 32.2 (2006), pp. 81–86, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2006.03.004
It's important that the histories of these digipres systems are written (including initial funding).

2026-02-17 12:12:18 GMT

Hmm. Agree with SOME of this.
Reading and understanding code is much harder than writing it in the first place. With machine-generated code, the balance between reading and writing is dangerously tilted.
I think *an* answer to this would be that we need to slow down.
https://olano.dev/blog/dangerously-skip/

2026-02-02 10:34:05 GMT

The sad thing is, every time I think about how critical Zotero is to me I remember that most users, even though it's also crucial to them, do not financially support the software (although they also "sell" synchronisation storage plans).
We NEED to find a better way to support such infrastructures.

2026-01-12 11:39:16 GMT

How Markdown took over the world https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/

2026-01-11 08:15:39 GMT

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@nprofile…66xf do you know, when I first learned that it wasn't required to submit data with scientific article submissions, I thought: woah. So you mean they're just telling us stories about what they did and what it means and expect us to believe them on faith? I was actually shocked.

2025-11-03 13:05:55 GMT

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@nprofile…j0re this is that rare occasion where the critique is there, genuinely, to improve the work - and it's getting stronger as a result.

2025-11-02 14:22:51 GMT

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@nprofile…urj0 I hadn't, but have now signed!

2025-10-29 10:29:42 GMT

Help, My Boss Started Programming with LLMs!
https://mo42.bearblog.dev/help-my-boss-started-programming-with-llms/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter

2025-10-29 10:28:57 GMT

Signal chief explains reliance on AWS (very well) https://www.theverge.com/news/807147/signal-aws-outage-meredith-whittaker?utm_source=tldrnewsletter

2025-10-23 08:35:05 GMT

I have spent the last month using Kagi instead of Google for search. You have to pay, but it is such a better search experience. I get webpage results instead of just AI goop and adverts! It's very nice to have a search provider where I am the customer, not the product.

2025-10-21 08:23:39 GMT

Creating this festschrift reminded me of a basic truth: you can do something nice for someone whenever you want. Don't wait until people are dead to praise them. Don't hold out for someone else to do it. Nominate people for prizes. Write someone a note of appreciation. Today's the day.
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/115/411/190/535/777/151/original/348421892d607e0c.jpg

2025-10-18 19:07:51 GMT

Love my last boosted thread by @nprofile…0yr8. (I don't have a quote-boost option yet.)
Such a clever format-shift liberation, though I share his quest for decent local Linux OCR. I don't think it exists.
But Amazon Textract would be a *funny* remote OCR system to use for this purpose...

2025-10-15 09:12:33 GMT

@nprofile…0yr8 sorry if this is a naive question, but did I see rightly that you were doing some kind of "quote boost" option for Mastodon? (Like "repost with comment"?) Sorry if I'd misconstrued this. Hugely missed (by me) feature over here.

2025-09-07 08:22:36 GMT

I am still in hospital with an uncertain path. The pneumonia and pulmonary edema are resolving and I no longer feel as though I am drowning when I breathe.
But my left arm remains paralysed. My hand works but I cannot move the arm. It's this dead, limp appendage. I can't cut up my own food or do anything that needs two hands.
The neurological examination led the neurologist to say she thought there was damage to my c4/c5 nerve roots but she hadn't seen the MRI, then. Having seen it, she now wants to speak to her consultant on Monday, which is ominous. Just hoping there is a physiotherapeutical path back from this.

2025-07-28 16:45:06 GMT

In a fun technological situation where making the automated tests pass breaks the actual functionality, and making it actually work breaks the tests.
I know, I know: that means the automated tests are bad/wrong. But I inherited them and now have to track down what they are doing.

2025-07-11 10:14:15 GMT

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@nprofile…hujc I'm afraid the PowerPoint online/in your browser is too alluring for me, and I tend to use that. That's quite amazing in its own way. Buy not open source. I have a license through work.

2025-07-11 10:05:21 GMT

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@nprofile…hujc I think that's fair. I don't use it at all, but have not had good results with it when I have tried. Complex layouts from actual PowerPoint are totally mangled etc. But Writer is the total opposite.

2025-07-11 09:56:11 GMT

Re last post: I love OpenOffice / LibreOffice. Have written 11 books using it. Zotero integration works like a dream. It opens almost all Word files I get sent. It's pretty amazing.

2025-07-10 13:19:08 GMT

Wow! I won the SHARP Book History Prize for my last book with Stanford University Press, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History!
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/114/829/134/016/476/848/original/f5bea335c80dfb07.jpg

2025-07-03 06:20:10 GMT

I am now heterosanguinous after my blood transfusion and, wow, placebo or not, I'm bouncing off the walls. Amazing actually to have some energy. Feel pretty darn good even though I'm still anemic.

2025-06-18 10:40:35 GMT

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@nprofile…hujc aww, thanks for remembering this!
Luka is a MUCH happier boy now. He was terrified of me -- and is still not entirely happy with me in the house -- but I go to training classes with him and when we are out and about, he is a different dog. Comes over to me, lets me stroke him, we do all the training classes together etc. We're still working on getting him better at home, but that's a long-term project.
Look how happy he is!
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/114/703/940/438/660/673/original/804a4a80049bc3d7.png

2025-06-15 07:15:40 GMT

As Constellate is being shuttered, there's a new process for full-text requests to JSTOR for text and data mining. They're running a webinar on it https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSewNnOJQAFS57nLzpf043iDpd4uj5R5NaZxgYQspo--RKGd0g/viewform

2025-06-08 15:48:07 GMT

What is a University Press?
On the acquisition of AUP by T&F (and my anger at it), the governance link between universities and university presses, and putting one's labour where one's values are.
https://eve.gd/2025/06/08/what-is-a-university-press/

2025-05-18 10:56:15 GMT

Pleased to say that, as of tomorrow, I will be a full employee of Michigan State University, working as Technical Lead on Knowledge Commons. I've been interim since January and it's nice to pick this up officially.

2025-05-07 14:33:42 GMT

Also, excellent news! Knowledge Commons commits to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI).
https://about.hcommons.org/2025/05/06/standing-by-our-principles/
Our first audit is here: https://about.hcommons.org/about-us/posi-audit-may-2025/
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/114/467/040/259/624/847/original/1f3aef78d3f9cd45.jpg

2025-04-04 06:59:38 GMT

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@nprofile…hujc isn't it incredible how quickly a reputation can be destroyed?

2025-04-02 07:23:08 GMT

Some context here from my years of work on the Open Library of Humanities. Open Journals Collective is the opportunity we need to spread no-APC OA widely. Cancel Transformative Agreements (which aren't working). Use that money to fund this package of hundreds of OA journals.
https://eve.gd/2025/04/02/open-journals-collective-making-open-access-a-reality-at-scale/

2025-03-21 08:34:06 GMT

Yesterday, academic social media went into overdrive as many intellectuals discovered LibGen (“Library Genesis”), thanks to an article in The Atlantic.
Here’s a secondary reading list of some of the material that’s out there on LibGen and other academic pirate platforms.
https://eve.gd/2025/03/21/a-critical-bibliography-about-libgen-the-pirate-site-that-meta-used-for-ai-training/

2025-03-20 08:43:45 GMT

I am making an effort to make grant applications that I have written openly available in case it helps someone else. We're too secretive about this stuff.
So here's a successful Philip Leverhulme Prize application in the field of languages and literature from 2019.
https://eve.gd/2025/03/20/a-successful-leverhulme-prize-application-in-the-field-of-languages-and-literature/

2025-01-24 11:19:12 GMT

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@nprofile…hujc ah, I don't think they're that bothered with minor things like "the law".

2025-01-24 11:05:14 GMT

Went to do USA accessibility training ("Section 508") and the administration has already torn down the course page. Playground bullies now rule the roost. https://training.section508.gov/section-508-what-is-it-and-why-its-important/