Greetings readers. It’s been an interesting month for me, what with Toronto dealing with an explosive 3rd wave of COVID, and me trying to get work done while my 5-year-old daughter does ‘school’ from home. Life has been, shall we say, interesting.
Then, two weeks ago my appendix decided it was time to rupture. That put me in the hospital for a few days, and then home in bed for a few more. I’m now almost fully recovered. But my May writing schedule mostly went to the dogs. I’m currently working on a new piece tentatively called ‘The Ritual of Capitalization’. It’ll take a deep dive into all the quantitative regularities that come from the ritual of capitalizing income. Stay tuned for this piece later in the week.
Although I was laid up for half of the month, May was not a total bust. I did manage to complete a little side project of mine. I’ve converted the entire back catalogue of the Review of Capital as Power (RECASP) into full-text HTML.
Founded as an open-access journal by Tim Di Muzio in 2012, RECASP articles have always been freely available online. But until recently, that meant downloading a PDF. Nice-looking PDFs are still the standard format for scientific papers, just as they were 20 years ago. But the internet has changed around us scientists. Today, half of all internet traffic is on mobile devices. And reading PDFs on a phone sucks.
Because the RECASP catalogue has some important articles that deserve to be widely read, I decided to convert them to HTML. For the techie readers, I used Pandoc for the job. I converted DOCX documents to markdown files, which I then edited for the desired formatting. Then I converted to HTML and pasted it into WordPress. Once I got the production line down, the process was surprisingly fast — about 30 minutes per article. With tech like that, there is literally no need for academic publishers. You can do it yourself with better results at a fraction of the cost.
Anyway, the full-text RECASP catalogue is now up here. For your viewing pleasure, I’ve mirrored the content below. Enjoy.
Articles
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Sorry to hear about your appendix, it must have been scary and painful. I hope your recovery goes well and I wish you all the best.
Thank you for all your hard work and writing. I enjoy reading your articles.