Thursday, June 03, 2004
Open [Source] Scholarship discussion continues
It is a sign of how far the biblioblogs have come, and in a very short time, that there are enough of us to have a discussion with several participants. This thread began with Deinde's Paul Nikkel's Why is Open Source Scholarship So Threatening? and has featured useful contributions from AKMA, Stephen Carlson and Tim Bulkeley. For a summary of the discussion so far with links, see Tim's Open Scholarship or Free Scholarship? and then note two more recent contributions since then, Paul's An Open Return and Tim's Back to the future? Paul Nikkel and the "threat" in Open Scholarship. One thing I would like to return to, since Paul brings it up again, is the language of "threat" and "fear". He asks repeatedly why it is that scholars, like Darrell Bock and John Oswalt quoted in his original post, find Open Source Scholarship "threatening" or "frightening". I suggested that this is not actually the right language. It is not that scholars find open source scholarship threatening; rather they are concerned by issues related to the quality of a given product. So in the specific case of the WEB (World English Bible) which was originally under discussion, Bock is presumably trying to point out that the NET Bible is of superior quality because it has a group of recognised scholars with credentials working on it. I don't think that he is threatened by the WEB, much less frightened of it. Rather, he is concerned that the academic quality of the WEB is likely to be inferior to the academic quality of the NET Bible because of the people working on it.
I think it's important to get these perceptions right because it will help those of us working a lot with electronic resources to understand some other scholars' resistance and negative feelings. What those working with open source scholarship need to do is to persuade the as-yet unpersuaded of the real value of their projects. In this respect, the WEB may not be the best place to start. One of the reasons I'd like to see OpenText.org making a comeback on the web is that they take seriously a kind of open source model, but do not open their doors to any Tom, Dick or Harry to do work for them. Indeed in terms of necessary skills the bar is set pretty high before you can even hope to contribute to their project.
In other words, would that some scholars were more afraid of or threatened by open source scholarship. The problem is rather that some are not inclined to take it seriously enough. I suspect that this is partly due to ignorance and partly due to the fact that some projects do not think clearly enough about persuading this key element of their target audience of the value of their work. One way of doing this is to make sure that one's project gives off a decent number of "signals", some account of how quality control is maintained, of who is leading the project and why their views are worth hearing. I have suggested one obvious and straightforward way of giving off a good signal in a project like this and that is to emply an advisory committee, to name them and post their names upfront.
The discussion in the different blogs has embraced issues of open scholarship more generally and has included some sophisticated distinctions between different kinds of open scholarship, e.g. AKMA's breakdown. I'd like to add one comment here on a quiet revolution that is taking place on the "Open Access" front and it is seldom commented upon. This is the steady but striking revolution of individual scholars providing on-line reproductions of their own already-published articles on their homepages. When I began indexing this kind of thing on the NT Gateway in 1998 there were only a handful of scholars who did this. K. C. Hanson springs to mind as one of the pioneers. But now, only a few years later, there are dozens of scholars who are doing this. I am not thinking about scholarly web sites in general, or work in progress in particular, but of scholars who have already had a given article published in JBL, CBQ, NTS or the like but who want to provide wider access to it by providing a reproduction on their web page. I think that there are three reasons why this is now becoming more widespread and why it will continue to grow:
(1) The ease of PDF conversion and the free availability of Acrobat Reader makes providing accessible electronic versions of articles very straightforward. PDF is on the rise. The provision of full HTML versions of articles is on the decline.
(2) An individual scholar often owns the copyright on his/her own published article. Even if they do not, publishers have repeatedly proved to be happy to grant permission for on-line reproductions of material on a scholar's homepage. So there are not the problems here associated with making available other people's work on-line -- and that can be hard work and involve a lot of negotiation.
(3) There is growing awareness that if you want more than a handful of people to read your article, you need to get it on the web. A while ago Stephen Carlson pointed to Steve Lawrence's Online or Invisible, which persuasively sets out the case for getting your work on-line.
But this raises another important question. This quiet revolution is enabling scholars to have their cake and eat it, to get their articles into the peer-reviewed mainstream journals with all the advantages that that brings, but then to have the same articles on the web with free access to all, with all the advantages of the dissemination of their scholarship to a wider public. Under these circumstances, the appeal of bodies who publish solely on-line is diminished. It's one of the reasons that (solely) on-line journals will tend to struggle to get quality submissions unless their focus is specific enough to corner a particular market.
I think it's important to get these perceptions right because it will help those of us working a lot with electronic resources to understand some other scholars' resistance and negative feelings. What those working with open source scholarship need to do is to persuade the as-yet unpersuaded of the real value of their projects. In this respect, the WEB may not be the best place to start. One of the reasons I'd like to see OpenText.org making a comeback on the web is that they take seriously a kind of open source model, but do not open their doors to any Tom, Dick or Harry to do work for them. Indeed in terms of necessary skills the bar is set pretty high before you can even hope to contribute to their project.
In other words, would that some scholars were more afraid of or threatened by open source scholarship. The problem is rather that some are not inclined to take it seriously enough. I suspect that this is partly due to ignorance and partly due to the fact that some projects do not think clearly enough about persuading this key element of their target audience of the value of their work. One way of doing this is to make sure that one's project gives off a decent number of "signals", some account of how quality control is maintained, of who is leading the project and why their views are worth hearing. I have suggested one obvious and straightforward way of giving off a good signal in a project like this and that is to emply an advisory committee, to name them and post their names upfront.
The discussion in the different blogs has embraced issues of open scholarship more generally and has included some sophisticated distinctions between different kinds of open scholarship, e.g. AKMA's breakdown. I'd like to add one comment here on a quiet revolution that is taking place on the "Open Access" front and it is seldom commented upon. This is the steady but striking revolution of individual scholars providing on-line reproductions of their own already-published articles on their homepages. When I began indexing this kind of thing on the NT Gateway in 1998 there were only a handful of scholars who did this. K. C. Hanson springs to mind as one of the pioneers. But now, only a few years later, there are dozens of scholars who are doing this. I am not thinking about scholarly web sites in general, or work in progress in particular, but of scholars who have already had a given article published in JBL, CBQ, NTS or the like but who want to provide wider access to it by providing a reproduction on their web page. I think that there are three reasons why this is now becoming more widespread and why it will continue to grow:
(1) The ease of PDF conversion and the free availability of Acrobat Reader makes providing accessible electronic versions of articles very straightforward. PDF is on the rise. The provision of full HTML versions of articles is on the decline.
(2) An individual scholar often owns the copyright on his/her own published article. Even if they do not, publishers have repeatedly proved to be happy to grant permission for on-line reproductions of material on a scholar's homepage. So there are not the problems here associated with making available other people's work on-line -- and that can be hard work and involve a lot of negotiation.
(3) There is growing awareness that if you want more than a handful of people to read your article, you need to get it on the web. A while ago Stephen Carlson pointed to Steve Lawrence's Online or Invisible, which persuasively sets out the case for getting your work on-line.
But this raises another important question. This quiet revolution is enabling scholars to have their cake and eat it, to get their articles into the peer-reviewed mainstream journals with all the advantages that that brings, but then to have the same articles on the web with free access to all, with all the advantages of the dissemination of their scholarship to a wider public. Under these circumstances, the appeal of bodies who publish solely on-line is diminished. It's one of the reasons that (solely) on-line journals will tend to struggle to get quality submissions unless their focus is specific enough to corner a particular market.
More on the new blogger
On Paleojudaica, Jim Davila responds to my comments about blogger. I see Jim's point about the "disimprovement" over the date adjusting / not adjusting when one re-opens a post. I don't think that I was aware of that before -- I'd thought blogger used to keep the old date there too. I also commented that:
Let me give an example of what I mean. I recall having made a post about Joe Zias and crucifixion and I want to find it. So I type into Google "crucifixion, zias, blog". My post comes up on a single page, so that I can access it straight away: February 20: Two More Passion Articles: Caron, Crossan, Zias.
The archiving is greatly improved by separating off posts into single pages with single URLs, which means that when one searches for a given post you can go straight to it rather than getting to the page on which it appears.Jim responds:
I'm confused by this: for me the individual posts always came with their own URLs in the old Blogger. I had to configure the Atomz search engine to reflect this, but that only involved an extra line or two of code.The difference is that Blogger now generates a different kind of archiving by individual post if one wants this. So, for example, have a look at the permalink to this post. It links you to a single page with just this post on it. The advantage of that is that a general search engine like Google can pinpoint the individual page and so take the searcher to the specific post, rather than to a page containing that post (and several others). Jim's Atomz search does overcome that problem nicely by taken one directly to the individual post on a given page, but Google will not.
Let me give an example of what I mean. I recall having made a post about Joe Zias and crucifixion and I want to find it. So I type into Google "crucifixion, zias, blog". My post comes up on a single page, so that I can access it straight away: February 20: Two More Passion Articles: Caron, Crossan, Zias.
Citing Electronic Resources in Research
I commented recently on Denver Journal's latest including their New Testament Exegesis Bibliography. On Bible Software Review Weblog, Rubén Gómez comments and now adds a response to an email from David Lang about the fact that many do not know how to reference electronic resources:
(1) The citing of internet resources at least is now, I would say, beginning to gather a conventional format along the following lines:
(2) It is essential that scholars lead the way on this and explain to their students how to discriminate between good and bad electronic resources, how to reference them and so on. I've seen too many examples of scholars thinking that the internet must be bad because they are not leading their students but getting led by them. Happily, one hears less of the "it's all rubbish on the internet" these days. Less happily, there are many who still do not take electronic resources seriously and are falling well behind some of their students on this.
As for the comment that "even if a student or scholar properly cites an electronic resource, most of that student's professors or that scholar's peers may not KNOW the conventions for citing electronic resources, and so may regard such sources of information to be less credible or more difficult to verify than good, old-fashioned books", I think that's exactly the point I was trying to make. Many people have not made the "switch" to electronic-based research yet, and it's about time we all did. Beginnings are always difficult, and standardized citing conventions may still be in a state of flux, but we have to hang in there. I believe we have to encourage the use of digital tools, and apply to them the same critical thinking approach we should use when we work with any other sources.I agree with all of this and would add a couple of points:
(1) The citing of internet resources at least is now, I would say, beginning to gather a conventional format along the following lines:
Author, Title, URL, accessed on [date].Some add "available from" in front of the URL and there are other minor variations, but I would say that this format is now becoming fairly standard in published work. It's the convention we insist on for students here in Birmingham, though it's often an uphill battle getting them to adhere to it.
(2) It is essential that scholars lead the way on this and explain to their students how to discriminate between good and bad electronic resources, how to reference them and so on. I've seen too many examples of scholars thinking that the internet must be bad because they are not leading their students but getting led by them. Happily, one hears less of the "it's all rubbish on the internet" these days. Less happily, there are many who still do not take electronic resources seriously and are falling well behind some of their students on this.
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Short Introductions: Sample Chapters
As regular readers will know, I am a fan of publishers placing sample chapters of their books on the web to enable you to get a taster before buying. Here's another I've just come across:
The New Testament: A Short Introduction:
A Guide to Early Christianity and the Synoptic Gospels
W. R. Telford
One World, 2002:
Chapter One: The World of the New Testament: The Roman Empire
And also from One World:
Paul: A Short Introduction
Morna D. Hooker
One World, 2003:
How Important Was Paul?
The New Testament: A Short Introduction:
A Guide to Early Christianity and the Synoptic Gospels
W. R. Telford
One World, 2002:
Chapter One: The World of the New Testament: The Roman Empire
And also from One World:
Paul: A Short Introduction
Morna D. Hooker
One World, 2003:
How Important Was Paul?
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
The Passion's Passionate Despisers
Bible and Interpretation link to this article in the latest First Things:
The Passion's Passionate Despisers
Kenneth L. Woodward
First Things 144 (June/July 2004): 8-11
In the main this article is an interesting retrospective on the passionate reactions to The Passion of the Christ in the media and it touches on several of the issues I have written about in my The Passion, Pornography and Polemic and which I develop at greater length in my forthcoming piece "The Power of The Passion of the Christ: Reactions and Overreactions to Gibson's Artistic Vision". There is one particularly interesting set of remarks here on the question of the different viewers' differing reactions to the film:
The Passion's Passionate Despisers
Kenneth L. Woodward
First Things 144 (June/July 2004): 8-11
In the main this article is an interesting retrospective on the passionate reactions to The Passion of the Christ in the media and it touches on several of the issues I have written about in my The Passion, Pornography and Polemic and which I develop at greater length in my forthcoming piece "The Power of The Passion of the Christ: Reactions and Overreactions to Gibson's Artistic Vision". There is one particularly interesting set of remarks here on the question of the different viewers' differing reactions to the film:
The day the film opened, Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie was in the audience in a sold-out theater in Times Square watching The Passion of the Christ unfold. Yoffie was deeply offended by what he saw as Jewish stereotypes. “The Jews in this film are evildoers,” he later wrote to his colleagues on Reform Judaism’s website. But he also noticed the woman next to him sobbing throughout the film, and gradually came to the conclusion that such Christians are responding out of deep belief and “really do not understand the charge of anti-Semitism and what Jews are talking about.”I think that there are ways of adding to, nuancing and balancing the helpful reminder of reader-response here and these involve avoiding the temptation to view the film against the grain, to temper one's inevitable concerns about charges of anti-Semitism and excessive violence by paying careful attention to film itself, to attempt to avoid the lapse into polemic and overreaction. This is developed in more detail in my forthcoming article, but let me give one example that is fresh on my mind after having watched the Emma Awards on BBC2 on Sunday night. Maia Morgenstern, the actress who plays Mary in the film, collected The Passion of the Christ's award for best picture, and gave a delightful speech, explaining that it was her son's twentieth birthday that day and that her family had only allowed her to go to the awards on the condition that she came back with something. She was then quite overcome also to win best actress. But I was reminded again that Morgenstern is a Jew whose grandfather died in the holocaust and whose father was a holocaust surviver. This casting choice for the most sympathetic character in the film deserves serious attention and cannot be lightly brushed aside (some reviewers) or ignored (the majority).
Yoffie’s modest exercise in what literary types call “reader-response theory” is a useful way to survey the reactions of the nation’s celebrity pundits. In Vanity Fair, everybody’s favorite urban atheist, Christopher Hitchens, called Gibson a fascist and the movie an “exercise in lurid masochism.” In the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier let loose with another of his contemptuous screeds against Christianity in general, medieval Catholicism more generically, and Gibson’s “wretched hero” in particular. “A sacred snuff film” was his most inelegant shot. From the other side of the political aisle, columnists William Safire (New York Times) and Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post) found the movie sadistic as well as anti-Semitic. Indeed, “sadist,” “masochistic,” “pornographic,” and their variants were the most common adjectives in the lava-laden commentaries published in the Boston Globe, USAToday, and Slate.
Denver Journal latest
Some new items on the Denver Journal:
Denver Journal Volume 7 (2004)
Note in particular:
New Testament Exegesis Bibliography (Craig L. Blomberg & William W. Klein)
This is an annually updated feature of the Denver Journal and focuses on useful material for students of the New Testament, largely but not entirely from an evangelical perspective, and focuses especially on commentaries. Well worth checking up.
The following book reviews have been published so far:
Brown, Dan, The Da Vinci Code: A Novel
Reviewed by Craig L. Blomberg
Dunn, James D. G., ed. The Cambridge Companion to St Paul
Reviewed by Craig L. Blomberg
Schreiner, Thomas R. 1, 2 Peter, Jude. New American Commentary, vol. 37
Reviewed by Craig L. Blomberg
Johns, Loren L. The Lamb Christology of the Apocalypse of John
Reviewed by David Mathewson
Witherington III, Ben, with Darlene Hyatt Paul's Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary
Reviewed by Craig L. Blomberg
Update (Wednesday, 12:13): On Bible Software Review Weblog, Rubén Gómez writes on the New Testament Exegesis Bibliography:
Denver Journal Volume 7 (2004)
Note in particular:
New Testament Exegesis Bibliography (Craig L. Blomberg & William W. Klein)
This is an annually updated feature of the Denver Journal and focuses on useful material for students of the New Testament, largely but not entirely from an evangelical perspective, and focuses especially on commentaries. Well worth checking up.
The following book reviews have been published so far:
Brown, Dan, The Da Vinci Code: A Novel
Reviewed by Craig L. Blomberg
Dunn, James D. G., ed. The Cambridge Companion to St Paul
Reviewed by Craig L. Blomberg
Schreiner, Thomas R. 1, 2 Peter, Jude. New American Commentary, vol. 37
Reviewed by Craig L. Blomberg
Johns, Loren L. The Lamb Christology of the Apocalypse of John
Reviewed by David Mathewson
Witherington III, Ben, with Darlene Hyatt Paul's Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary
Reviewed by Craig L. Blomberg
Update (Wednesday, 12:13): On Bible Software Review Weblog, Rubén Gómez writes on the New Testament Exegesis Bibliography:
Fairly standard list, with lots of good books. But my question is: why isn't there a single reference to any Bible software, multimedia software, courseware or such like? Does this mean that there is no single software tool that deserves to be recommended? It baffles me that this should still happen in 2004. Come on, ladies and gentlemen! there are currently some excellent applications that scholars and students should not only know about, but use extensively.This is a good point. There are no internet resources either, which potentially reinforces the impression that "proper" research only takes place with books on a desk. What I think we need to be doing is pointing students to the best electronic resources so that they can learn to be as discriminating with those as they are with print resources.
New Blogger Grumbles
On Paleojudaica, Jim Davila grumbles about the upgrade to Blogger, which I use too. I've actually quite enjoyed the new format myself, but perhaps partly because I don't have the paragraph-break problem Jim mentions, perhaps because I don't work with a Mac. On one of Jim's points, the date and time one, you can make an adjustment manually by clicking "More Post Options . . ." at the bottom of any given entry and then adjusting the time. I find this useful because I often write half a post, get disturbed and can't get back to it for some time, sometimes after I've published others in the mean time (e.g. now I have one pending on the Open Scholarship issue). In fact I tend to think of there being broadly two types of blog entry, the one notebook style entry which goes up quickly in five minutes or so and the other the mini-essay post, which takes a little longer and has more of one's own prose in it.
A couple of things I like about the new blogger: the archiving is greatly improved by separating off posts into single pages with single URLs, which means that when one searches for a given post you can go straight to it rather than getting to the page on which it appears. I've also noticed that other users of Blogger are now using its Comments function. I still have comments from Haloscan which date back to the time before Blogger provided their Comments system. Ideally I'd like to move to that too, but it will mean losing all the Haloscan comments.
A couple of things I like about the new blogger: the archiving is greatly improved by separating off posts into single pages with single URLs, which means that when one searches for a given post you can go straight to it rather than getting to the page on which it appears. I've also noticed that other users of Blogger are now using its Comments function. I still have comments from Haloscan which date back to the time before Blogger provided their Comments system. Ideally I'd like to move to that too, but it will mean losing all the Haloscan comments.
Dr J. I. H. McDonald (1933-2004)
This sad news from Larry Hurtado:
With sadness, I report that my beloved colleague, Dr. J. I. H. McDonald (1933-2004), died peacefully early on 24th May, after a difficult battle with cancer over the last year or so. His funeral service was held in Edinburgh 28 May. He retired several years ago as Reader in New Testament Studies and Christian Ethics, and continued actively in scholarly work, having been appointed as an Honourary Fellow of the School of Divinity. In more recent years until his illness was diagnosed last year, he served as Editor of Expository Times, leading it through a major re-design, and steering this well-known publication through the changeover from the Edinburgh-based T&T Clark to the London-based Continuum Group.
Ian's book-length contributions in New Testament studies and Christian ethics are widely known and cited:
Jesus and the Ethics of the Kingdom, co-authored with Bruce Chilton (SPCK, 1987)
The Resurrection: Narrative and Belief (SPCK, 1989)
Biblical Interpretation and Christian Ethics (CUP, 1993)
Christian Values: Theory and Practice in Christian Ethics (T&T Clark, 1995)
The Crucible of Christian Morality (Routledge, 1998)
He was a regular attender at meetings of the SNTS, and will be known and missed by many colleagues internationally. Those of us privileged to have worked with him will particularly miss this genial, informed, thoughtful, and dependable colleague. He leaves his wife, Jenny.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Invigilation Blues
It's examinations time in the U.K. and no doubt some readers will be wondering how they are going to cope with the three-hour stint of invigilation. I had missed this earlier this week, but I caught a mention of this news item on Have I Got News for You? on BBC1 and so looked it up. Here it is in BBC News On-line:
Teachers reveal exam hall games
Teachers have revealed some of the tricks they use to avoid boredom during exams - including pencil-sharpener races and spotting the ugliest pupil in the hall.
I am lucky this year and haven't had to do any invigilation. (The usual arrangement here is that most members of academic staff will do at least one stint of invigilation each summer). I usually cope with it by making sure I have an idea to work on during the three hours, something that actually requires some sustained, uninterrupted thinking. I remember once planning a book while invigilating; another time I chewed over an element in the Synoptic Problem until I'd cracked it to my satisfaction. It serves as a useful reminder to me that sometimes too much reading and writing can obscure some free thinking.
Teachers reveal exam hall games
Teachers have revealed some of the tricks they use to avoid boredom during exams - including pencil-sharpener races and spotting the ugliest pupil in the hall.
I am lucky this year and haven't had to do any invigilation. (The usual arrangement here is that most members of academic staff will do at least one stint of invigilation each summer). I usually cope with it by making sure I have an idea to work on during the three hours, something that actually requires some sustained, uninterrupted thinking. I remember once planning a book while invigilating; another time I chewed over an element in the Synoptic Problem until I'd cracked it to my satisfaction. It serves as a useful reminder to me that sometimes too much reading and writing can obscure some free thinking.
Tom Wright does Face to Faith
In today's (now yesterday's) Guardian, Tom Wright does a Face to Faith for Pentecost:
The spirit of the age
Tom Wright
The spirit of the age
Tom Wright
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