This is the first of the eight boat stories. There will be more to come, including more engine excitement.

After much searching, I found the boat that I wished to call home. Dawn, for it was she, was moored in Staffordshire. My father and I both booked precious time off work and, after testing the suspension and kicking the tyres, we set off for the week-long journey. Destination: Oxford.

We planned a journey that took us along the Shropshire Union Canal, Grand Union and Oxford canals. There were probably others (it gets a bit complicated round Birmingham). On our journey we passed through tunnels, diversions, and lots of locks.

Barbara Helen Newman was my grandmother. She died aged 99. I would like to write a few things down to celebrate her life, keep her stories going and tell you a bit about her. Of course her personality and presence is what really counts, but I’m not sure I have the ability to adequately distill a description of her character out of the day-to-day interactions I had with her. Her quips and word-play were quick off the tongue but just as ephemeral. She was a linguist and a musician. She played the piano and was particularly fond of Schumann. She had a fierce intelligence and quick wit, a playful relationship with words and bags of character. But rather than attempt to describe her character I shall relate character-forming stories that I remember her telling me.

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.

This blog post goes with my talk at Oxford Geek Nights. It’s about the work I’m doing at Crossref but the talk and this blog post are provided in a personal capacity, and don’t officially represent Crossref. That mostly means I don’t have to use American spelling. Which is fortunate for you, as I’m really bad at accents.

What does ‘scholarly’ mean?

“Scholarly publications” are things published in pursuit of scholarship. That’s mostly articles, but it also includes datasets, peer reviews, journal issues, monographs, books &c.

Which came first?

I am, after a lag of a few weeks, finally writing a few words about my Gemini PDA. As tradition, I’m writing it on the device itself.

I don’t feel that it’s possible to write a fair review after a short amount of time. I’ve had my BlackBerry Passport, my current phone, for about 4 years and I only just feel qualified to start mulling it. My imaginary review, when I get round to it, will say that on balance, it’s a very good phone with a nice keyboard, great sound, and that you should have bought one in 2014. All the best historians wait a decade.

Today marks the release of the Digital Folk report, a study into the way that folk music is being played and shared in the digital age. The report opens with a timeline of some of the tools available and their history. It reminded me that Folk Tune Finder is ten years old this year - the folktunefinder.com domain was registered at half past nine in the morning on the 27th of January 2008. This seems like a good time to look back at the last decade and think about the future.

A couple of years ago I fished a large chunk of wood out of the river. It had a very satisfactory heft, oblongularity and poise. A piece of timber solid not only in body, but in character. In short: a perfect doorstep.

I spotted it floating in a weir and thought ’that would make a fine doorstep’. We shan’t dwell on the story of how I hoisted it out of the river and, in exchange, lost my brand new, favourite, and first ever, pair of sunglasses. Suffice it to say, it took a length of rope, a boat hook and about ten minutes (it also took something else, but I can always get another pair next time I visit Massachusetts).

One of my new year’s resolutions is to try and be more intentional about the way I lead my life. That includes a close look at habits and deeply wired-in behaviours.

Last year I had the epiphany that whilst chocolate, ginger nuts, IRN BRU and sugary comestibles were very enticing and almost unthinkable to give up, I’m far better off without them in my life. I’ve known this for at least 15 years, but last summer I actually did something about it.

My wife sent me an email. It conveyed words to the effect:

It is snowing!

I replied:

Is it now

We make a point of sending each other grammatically ambigious emails.

And that made me realise that in the sentence

“Now it is snowing”

has at least two levels of word-order to contend with.