A small tribute
As many of you will be aware, the suicide of internet activist Aaron Swartz a few days ago has been deeply felt by many people – see, for instance, Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig‘s posts. As Lessig says, Swartz had been under threat of prosecution by the US Department of Justice for illicitly downloading a large number of articles from the academic journal database JSTOR; the Swartz family has stated that the threat to prosecute him so fiercely “contributed to his death“. As a tribute to Swartz, a number of academics have been posting their own papers online for free, using the Twitter hashtag #pdftribute.
I’m pretty sure I don’t count as a proper academic, but it seemed to me a good time to upload my talk from last year’s Readercon, “Story Terminable and Interminable“. Previous Readercon talks, “And so…” (2010) and “Excellent Foppery” (2009) are also on this site; as the little badge at the bottom-right of this page says, all are Creative Commons licensed.
Graham Sleight 