The big news for me this month is that the British Academy has agreed to fund me to produce an introductory online statistics resource for students in the humanities under its Languages and Quantitative Skills initiative<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The first challenge is how introductory is introductory? We have all come across books entitled \u201cX for beginners\u201d or \u201cAn introduction to Y\u201d which have us lost by the second page. They may be introductions to X or Y, but they assume that their readers know all about A, B and Z. We see statistics books with an introduction on page 1 and a plethora of Greek letters on page 2. We see \u2018teach yourself\u2019 language books which begin with grammar guides discussing nominatives, vocatives , instrumentals, perfect and imperfect tenses etc., etc. A couple of months ago this sketch from French and Saunders came back into my memory. A man sues guitarist Ralph McTell because he is unable to play anything from McTell\u2019s \u00a0\u2018100 Easy tunes for Guitar\u2019, due to a lack of chord diagrams. Writing a book or developing a resource for beginners to be used without a teacher is a dangerous business.
\n