This year has happened all at once, and hasn’t stopped once all year. It’s been one thing after another, but somehow all got on top of itself. Nonetheless, here’s my attempt to flatten it out into an annual retrospective. It’s a little less procedural than previous years. If you don’t wish to spectate I suggest you scroll to the bottom and read the last sentence. There’s nothing particular there, at least not yet, but you can at pretend to have read everything in between.

2019

• Programme Committee, PIDapalooza 2019
• Programme Committee, Wiki Workshop at The Web Conference
• Committee, 5:AM Altmetrics Conference
• Keynote talk, Metrics in Transition Workshop 2019. “The role of open scholoarly infrastructure in metrics”
• Talk, PIDapalooza 2019

2018

• Programme Committee, PIDapalooza 2018.
• Talk, PIDapalooza 2018.
• Talk, altmetrics17 workshop.

2017

• Talk, 4:AM Altmetrics Conference.
• Talk, altmetrics18 workshop.

2016

• Talk, 3:AM Altmetrics Conference
• Talk, csv,conf,v2

They say the skies are bigger Up North. I’ve recently witnessed this natural phenomenon first-hand. It’s true. The best theory I have so far is that the sky expands, inching out and pressing down toward the horizon. Meeting abrupt and solid bedrock, it flexes and springs up, vault-like, forming a dome. As any structural engineer will tell you, this paraboloid is capable of supporting and holding back crushing weights. The arch transfers the load deep into its footing, pushing downward and outward. The earth supports it, gentle and sufficient. As long as the horizon remains firm, anchored, the cosmos remains supported and the world still turns.

I presented these ideas at the altmetrics18 workshop. You can read a slightly more formal version of this blog post here.

These five principles are my answer to some of the difficulties and problems I have observed in the past couple of years. In that time I have been collecting the kind of data that altmetrics are built from, and talking and working with researchers. Altmetrics data is derived from the community. I think that community should continue to be at the heart of every step.

Zohreh Zahedi and Rodrigo Costas recently published a comparison of altmetrics data providers. Included in the comparison was Crossef Event Data, the service that I have been designing and building for the last couple of years. I am writing this blog post as a personal response to their study, “General discussion of data quality challenges in social media metrics: Extensive comparison of four major altmetric data aggregators”. We will also publish an official Crossref response, which I will link to when it is published.

I sometimes to go to conferences. Sometimes I talk. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes both.

<tr>
  <td><a href="http://www.crossref.org/annualmeeting/index.html">Crossref LIVE</a><br>
      London, November 2016</td>
  <td>The Crossref annual meeting.</td>
  <td>To catch up with Crossref members and the scholarly publishing community.</td>
  <td>Not speaking (unless spoken to). Showing what the Strategic Initiatives team (that's Crossref Labs to you) are up to.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td><a href="http://altmetricsconference.com/category/3am-bucharest/">3:AM Conference</a><br>
      Bucharest, September 2016</td>
  <td>Discussing alternative metrics for assessing published research.</td>
  <td>To talk to researchers, funders and infrastructure providers about Crossref Event Data</td>
  <td>We need neutral infrastructure to collect data on how research is used and mentioned online. Here's what Crossref's doing.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td><a href="http://altmetrics.org/altmetrics16/">altmetrics16 Workshop</a><br>
      Bucharest, September 2016</td>
  <td>Sharing research and research methods for alternative metrics.</td>
  <td>To talk to researchers, and share and understand expectations and techniques.</td>
  <td>Transparency is important when producing the data that underpins alternative metrics. Here are the transparency principles of Crossref Event Data.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite_2016">WikiCite 2016</a><br>
      Berlin, March 2016</td>
  <td>Talking about how people cite things in Wikipedia and how to improve it.</td>
  <td>Lots of citations on Wikipedia are made using DOIs. </td>
  <td>Here's how much use they get.</td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td><a href="http://csvconf.com/">csv,conf,2016</a><br>
      Berlin, March 2016</td>
  <td>Talking about data, both structured and unstructured.</td>
  <td>To talk about data!</td>
  <td>Here's how we collaborated with Wikipedia to improve DOI use. Here's what happened.</td>
</tr>

What?	What??	Why?	What did/will I say?
PIDAPalooza Reykjavík, November 2016	Discussing persistent identifiers for research objects.	To share experience and best practice about the use of persistent identifiers.	It's difficult when people don't use PIDs to talk about things that have them. I still have to look for them. Here's how.

I think that summer is a far better host to ‘new year’ than winter. If you’re lucky enough to be able to take time out to enjoy it, it offers a chance to stop whatever you were stuck doing for a little while and think about it. A reset, and chance to look backward on the last year and forward on the next. For me, winter is all about hard work, when everything’s an effort. Hardly the time to stop and think. I’d much rather do that basking under the sun than huddled round a fire.

Download the slides for the ‘Unit Testing in Go’, a microslot (exactly 5 minutes!) at Oxford Geek Nights 29 on the 21st November.

Have you just got an exception from Django saying:

IndexError at /admin/mything/

list index out of range

One of the great things about my workplace is that

1. we have unlimited peacocks at our disposal
2. a number of my colleagues are qualified peacock-ologists

Here’s a short video of just one of the peacocks, along with some commentary about their feeding habits and behavioural characteristics (something about baked beans, pretending to be a bike and the thing from Jurassic Park, I don’t know it went over my head).

Don’t worry about the noise at the end, it’s just a peacock alarm (or indeed a peacock alarmed).