Two pointers

As you know, this is where I take out my frustrations by having a good grumble about life, the universe, and everything. Yesterday, in a meeting, we learned of two developments coming to the academic world. In neither case is it an unmixed blessing. I should add that this is in no way a grumble against my colleagues, who foresightedly and openmindedly have told us about what is heading our way so that we can be prepared.

The first, and mostly harmless, concerns publication of research data. No longer will it be enough to say “Contact the author for the data/programs used in this paper”; the data must be available at a specific link published in the paper. It is even claimed that such statements will still be required in papers with no data at all, such as pure mathematics papers.

I do not know whether this is being forced on the humanities as well as the sciences, or whether it is just an anomaly of mathematics being misclassified as a science. In any case, I hope that someone can provide us with some boilerplate text for the purpose. (One of my colleagues suggested something along the lines “No data were hurt in the research underlying this pure mathematics”.)

But how do you publish “no data”? If mathematics is founded on set theory, a file containing the empty set symbol might do the job (an empty file might be problematic). But perhaps the bureaucrats might be happier with a spreadsheet with no entries.

Journals already require publication of funding information; many specify a conflict of interest statement; some need an ethical approval statement. I fear that in future a pure mathematics publication will resemble a beautiful work of art in a standard frame designed by a committee.

The second, more serious because it addresses a real problem, concerns accessibility of lecture notes. Now this doesn’t mean, as you might first think, that we will have to dumb down our lecture notes to make them accessible to creatures of restricted intelligence. Instead, it seems that there is a PDF reader program which reads aloud the contents of a PDF file for disabled students. (No, I am not talking about a lecturer!) It seems that PDF documents produced via LaTeX are not well handled by this piece of software, and so we are to blame and must suffer.

I have spent a lot of time during my career trying to make lecture notes as clear and beautiful as possible. I have always taken the view of conventional typographers, that typesetting is a window through which you see the beautiful scenery, and the best typesetting is the one which provides the most unobtrusive window pane. Now we are told that the programs to fix this problem (the best of which is called “bookdown”, if I caught the name right) seriously degrade the LaTeX typesetting in the interests of accessibility. So the majority of students will be penalised to help the minority. Is this good? This is a moral question I can’t judge.

With a bit less than twice the work, one could produce two files, one a carefully crafted LaTeX file, the other a reader-friendly file. The downside would be maintenance; changes would have to be made in two places, and the files could very easily get out of sync.

Let me interpolate two speculations here; I have no evidence for either of these.

First, it seems highly likely that this PDF reader is optimized for files produced by Word, as a hangover of the Microsoft hegemony. If this so, then we are being punished for using a better product than Microsoft can produce.

Second, this measure (entirely arbitrary, if my first speculation is correct) will delight the bureaucrats. Here is a measure, a number produced by computer and hence completely objective, of our concern for handicapped students. How long until it is incorporated into staff appraisals and disciplinary measures?

Now I have a suggestion here. The great computer scientist Donald Knuth, in the days before the term “web” became synonymous with “internet” in the public mind, devised a system for producing programs and documentation together, which he called Web. A Web document could be fed to two preprocessors called Tangle and Weave, though I don’t remember which was which. One of them produced as output a Pascal program (Knuth’s preferred language at the time; I believe there is a C version of Web now). The other output a TeX document which consisted of the program with documentation. Knuth published two major programs, TeX and METAFONT, in this form as books.

Surely we could have a much simpler system here. An input file (which would superficially resemble LaTeX, to ease the learning curve) could be processed in two ways: the output of one would be a reader-friendly PDF, or means to produce one, such as a bookdown file; the other would be a non-crippled LaTeX file. Both could be made available to students, and maintenance would only need to be done in one place.

Ultimately, like Hamlet, I know where the exit door is, and I know it is not locked. When my previous university brought in draconian rules for staff performance and appraisal, including restrictions on seminar attendance, I decided that rather than stay and fight I would retire and live on my pension; and so I would be doing, had not St Andrews come to the rescue with the offer of a half-time position. I still have the option of retiring and living on my pension. But I am in such a good, friendly and supportive department that I don’t expect this to become necessary, and I would take that door only with great reluctance.