11 Friday Dec 2009
Posted in New titles added to JURN
Added to the JURN site-index today:—
Nordic Journal of Architectural Research
Revista de Historia da Arte e Arqueologia (Brazil)
Danza e Ricerca : laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni
Barroco (Association for Hispanic Baroque Studies)
11 Friday Dec 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
FORA.tv – Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, a worthwhile one-hour lecture and Q&A with Ken Auletta — who has a new book out, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It. Sadly, the publisher Penguin doesn’t offer free sample chapters, the book is not “limited preview” on Google Books, and Amazon UK doesn’t have a single customer review more than one month after publication — I wonder how much those three facts are hurting pre-Christmas sales? Is this a publisher that’s “doing its job”?
And why is the MP3 download version currently more expensive on Amazon UK than the Audio CD Audiobook version?
09 Wednesday Dec 2009
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
“The Indexing of Scholarly Open Access Business Journals” is an article in the new issue of E-JASL…
“In order for the increasing number of open access business journals to achieve credibility and flourish in the academic and professional environments it is not enough for them to simply be published and freely available on the Internet. Researchers need a means to be able to systematically search across the broad spectrum of business journals, and retrieve the articles in their particular areas of research and study. […] It is vital that open access journals be indexed in open access databases because in North America they are often the only databases available to business professionals working alone or for smaller organizations, and even for many policy makers in government. Furthermore, in developing countries, OA journals and OA indexes may be all that universities can afford.”
09 Wednesday Dec 2009
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, My general observations
I’ve made a little script to automate a regular and tedious aspect of blogging — the hand-coding of a web link followed by a selected quote.
To use my script you highlight/select the quote you want to blog, then right-click on your desired quote. The script does all the linking and coding for you, and outputs a link/quote to your clipboard in the following manner:—
D’log :: blogging since 2000 » Trees will have their own blogs wrote…
“Maybe that’s what LOLcat is for, in the long-view — to give us a form of language that will differentiate human from non-human on the web?”
As you can see, it grabs the title from the page title, and it retains working links inside the quote. The basic format is:
Page link + Page title / wrote… / blockquote / “your quote” wrapped in html quote marks / close blockquote
Installation:
To install it, first install the Firefox addon ContextMenu Extensions for Firefox. Then restart Firefox in the usual way.
Then to install the script in Firefox go to: Tools / Addons / ContextMenu Extensions / Options / Custom Scripts / New Items. There you can create a new right-click menu item. Title it “Auto Blog”. A blank code window will appear. Into this code window paste the Auto Blog script (.txt file). Press Apply / OK, then exit the ContextMenu options panel, and also exit the Firefox Addons list.
Use:
The script should work straight away. Highlight a quote, then right-click on it. On your browser’s right-click menu you’ll have…
I also made a slightly different scholarly version, for use with long-form essay-style posts on academic blogs — when you perhaps want to do some basic referencing but don’t want to get all strict and Harvard about it. “Auto Essay Quote” (.txt file) which, on highlighting and copying, returns a quote/link/date to the clipboard thus…
“My argument here is that the major works of Moore’s career actively pursue the articulation of an historiographic vision, one that is roughly similar to the narrative Moore describes in the interview above, but that in his actual artistic output is a great deal more complex and ambivalent. While Moore in interviews describes history as an unstoppable progressive tide, as inevitably bound to redeem us and improve our lives, in his comic book writing he is concerned with how history is made by human beings, with how history happens.”
[ Source: The Tides of History: Alan Moore’s Historiographic Vision – accessed on 9th December 2009 ]
There’s no way for the script to grab author names unless they’re in the page title. Your milage may vary, in terms of how well a large quote line-wraps when it’s pasted into your blogging software. But both flaws are trivial matters to correct.
(Related on Jurn: OCR from Google Books pages)
09 Wednesday Dec 2009
Two new December 2009 reports from the UK’s prolific RIN, part of a cluster of five such reports…
1) Overcoming barriers: access to research information (PDF link)…
“This report finds that many researchers are encountering difficulties in getting access to the content they need and that this is having a significant impact on their research.”
“technical limitations such as log in/authentication problems (26%) or problems with proxy servers and off-site access (a particular problem for researchers [seeking to access ejournals] – a majority in the humanities and social sciences – who spend significant amounts of time away from their home institution)”
“The proportions of those who felt the impact [of unavailable ejournal content] as having a ‘significant’ impact on their research were higher in the arts and humanities“
2) How researchers secure access to licensed content not immediately available to them (DOC link, Word)…
“emailing the author directly […] creative searching online, primarily using Google Books and Google Scholar […] accessing cached content; and signing up for free trials with publishers […] buying books online, usually second-hand, when they are unable to get access via other routes.”
[ Hat-tip: Open Access News ]
09 Wednesday Dec 2009
Posted in New titles added to JURN
Added to the JURN site-index today:—
LANX (Journal of the School of Archaeology at the University of Milan)
+
Green Places journal (No TOCs, but 620 PDFs articles are online at www.landscape.co.uk/files/PDF/ . Added to the JURN directory and not the index – since the index to these PDFs is dynamic, via keyword site-search only, and this means that Google only indexes two of the PDFs)
08 Tuesday Dec 2009
In an age of 24″ widescreen monitors, why do many people stick with a long scrolling page format for search results — more suited to the age of the accounting ledger?
When the results could look like this…
How? Here’s my recipe:
The Firefox web browser, with the GreaseMonkey addon. Then add the Google 100 GreaseMonkey script, and set it to show 24 results per search page. Add the GoogleMonkeyR script, and set it up to show three columns (and to remove clutter such as “Related searches” and “Sponsored Links”).
You’ll never scroll on search-results again.
I’m assuming you already have AdBlock Plus installed on Firefox, to remove all Google text ads. The GreaseMonkey script New Google Ad-block may also be of interest, to block the page-integrated ads that Google is now adding to results.
08 Tuesday Dec 2009
Posted in New titles added to JURN
Added to the JURN site-index today:—
Contagion : journal of violence, mimesis, and culture (1994-2004 – thereafter commercial. Journal of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion)
08 Tuesday Dec 2009
A new Firefox + Greasemonkey script: Google Scholar H-Index…
“This rough, yet useful, Firefox GreaseMonkey script will enable you to automatically display some of the most known citation indices (h-index, g-index, e-index) for any author queried on Google Scholar. […] The script currently processes just the displayed result page, and, as such, does not currently work for persons having enormous (h or g)-index (h or g > 100).”
I have to admit I’m not entirely sure how such measures work. But I assume that ‘more is better’ in terms of the starting citations needed to take a measurement. So possibly someone will hack it so that it works through 1000 search results, rather than the current 100?
Another new script of interest is Google Scholar Citation Explorer…
“An enhancement for Google Scholar that lets you see which citations a set of papers have in common. Select a group of related papers, even from across searches, and see which papers cite the whole set (or a subset of it).”
07 Monday Dec 2009
Posted in JURN tips and tricks
Google announces on-the-fly mobile-device versions of all Google Custom Search Engines. When visiting the plain vanilla version of JURN on any mobile device, you’ll now be automatically sent to the relevant mobile-optimised version.