Research

On the web: Randy Kennedy discusses how the current economic crisis in Greece is imperiling local antiquities. Matthew Kalman discusses documentary sensationalism and its impact on the status of biblical archaeology. Charles Jones highlights resources for Macedonian coinage, the Acta Sanctorum, Augustan Rome’s geography, and the Byzantine scholia on Homer’s Iliad. Jim Davila notes Google’s efforts to read unopenable Dead Sea Scrolls. Joel Willitts comments on selections from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. Robert Woods discusses wisdom from a Thomistic perspective. Tokens provides part 3 of a series of YouTube clips series from their October 24, 2011 interview with Walter Brueggemann. See here for parts 1 and 2.

Homer was also called Melesigenes (son of Mele… Charles Jones notes that Homer and the Papyri, first created by Professor Dana Sutton of the University of California, Irvine, is . . . published [online] in a second electronic edition. The new edition consists of a fully searchable relational database of Homeric papyri. ...

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“175” caption=“Image via Wikipedia”] [/caption] Tyndale House has done some wonderful work making very helpful resources available online, but today, I stumbled upon the following that I had forgotten or not noticed before: The Tyndale Bulletin is available in full-text from volume 1 forward, excepting the last three years’ issues. The Tyndale House library catalog will return search results that include works available online in full-text. The library’s periodicals section also contains a number of links to journals with full-text articles available online. ...

Zotero 2.1.7 is now available with a number of performance improvements and bug fixes over the previous stable version. The current version is available from the Zotero homepage.

On Tuesday, Brian Croxall compared Zotero and EndNote. At least until a stable release of Zotero standalone arrives, the review has the two platforms standing fairly on equal terms. Recent updates to Zotero’s SBL citation style have included some additional issues, but hopefully, those problems will soon be remedied also. ...

The Society of Biblical Literature style for Zotero has recently been updated (8:16 pm, May 11, 2011). Since I had last visited the style repository, development versions of the following styles have also been added: Currents in Biblical Research INTER. Romanian Institute for Inter-Orthodox, Inter-Confessional and Inter-Religious Studies Universidad Evangélica del Paraguay Wheaton College PhD BITH For some time Zotero, had only supported SBL style, but the addition of CurrBR as another major field journal format is certainly positive. ...

Zotero 2.1.3, 2.1.4, and 2.1.5 have rolled out with several minor updates. The Microsoft Word plugin has also been updated, but details about this update are still forthcoming from the plugin change log page. ...

A new Zotero update is now available. The update mainly contains bug fixes, but it also allows Zotero to “[r]ecognize .csl.txt files as CSL files.”

Zotero 2.1 is now available with a number of enhancements over the previous stable version. You may download the latest version from the Zotero homepage.

In the preview release of the latest Kindle software update (3.1), Amazon is beginning to allow Kindle edition readers to access the same page numbers that their print edition-reading counterparts can see: Our customers have told us they want real page numbers that match the page numbers in print books so they can easily reference and cite passages, and read alongside others in a book club or class. We’ve already added real page numbers to tens of thousands of Kindle books, including the top 100 bestselling books in the Kindle Store that have matching print editions and thousands more of the most popular books. Page numbers will also be available on our free “Buy Once, Read Everywhere” Kindle apps in the coming months. If a Kindle book includes page numbers, press the Menu key in an open Kindle book to display page numbers ( [Amazon](//www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_navbox_top_kindlelg?nodeId=200529700" target="_blank">)). ...

In the fairly short time since the initial notice, the alpha version of a browser-independent Zotero has now become available. A fully stable release is likely some time away yet, but the noticeable and rapid progress on the initiative is encouraging.

The Google eBookstore is now live and offering more than 3 million ebooks with an accompanying web-based ebook reader.

This week in the biblioblogosphere: Bob Cargill notes that, on December 11, the National Geographic Channel will re-air its special on “Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Brian LePort hypertextually ponders Derridean non-extra-textuality and deconstruction, and he notes twenty-nine doctoral theses that the University of Durham has recently made available. Michael Bird shows how to benefit most from the new SBL Greek New Testament and notes that the new Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters now has its own blog. Google Editions are poised to hit the e-book market later this month and allow fee-based full access to copyrighted titles. For some additional details and thoughts, see Blog Kindle and Google Books Help.

Yesterday, Tyndale Tech released the following series of helpful posts: Writing a Book or Thesis Research You Can Re-search Surviving the Death of Your Hard Drive Writing Greek and Hebrew on a Computer Translating Online Finding and Reading Online Books and Periodicals

Over at Academia.edu, Charles Jones, Head Librarian at New York University, has requested suggestions for additions to a new list of “Ancient World Open Bibliographies.” Of course, as it develops, the bibliography should certainly list New Testament Gateway. Maintainers of ancient world bibliographic resources can note additions on Academia.edu or the bibliography page itself. ...

Earlier today, the Zotero Project announced concrete plans to release a stand-alone, browser-independent version of their open-source, bibliographic management system. Since its inception, Zotero has been tied to Mozilla Firefox as a support for its underlying architecture. Yet, as the members of the Zotero Project recognize, “not all researchers can or want to use” Firefox. In addition to maintaining Zotero’s compatibility with Firefox, this “major new initiative” for a stand-alone version of Zotero will “soon” allow users of “Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Internet Explorer” to use Zotero with whichever of these browsers they choose. This move will extend Zotero’s availability to approximately 98% of internet users. ...

Another set of Zotero updates is available that remedies some stability issues and brings us up through 2.0.7 to 2.0.8.

This past week, along with several bug fixes, Zotero got some substantive updates to its syncing and word-processor integration features. As usual, the Zotero website has change logs for the main new release, 2.0.4, as well as what are, thus far, the two additional, supplementary ones ( 2.0.5, 2.0.6). ...

This week in the biblioblogosphere: Mark Goodacre finds and makes available a PDF version of Wilhelm Wrede’s Paul. Daniel and Tonya draw attention to Alex Andrason’s recent article on the use of yiqtol in Biblical Hebrew (via Uri Hurwitz) and Randall Buth’s response to the article. Via Ekaterini Tsalampouni, Holger Szesnat mentions the availability of the new Journal of Ancient Judaism. Christian Askeland notes the availability of a stable, Unicode-compliant Coptic font. At BioLogos, Peter Enns interviews N. T. Wright about Jesus’ humanity. Kirk Lowery ponders current developments in the peer review process for scholarly publications. Scot McKnight prepares his readers for a change of blogging address. Larry Hurtado uploads an essay on Martin Hengel’s impact on English-speaking, New Testament scholarship. Charles Halton considers cartographic hermeneutics and some of their implications for readers of biblical texts.

This week in the blogosphere: James McGrath helpfully notes that John Byron, Associate Professor of New Testament at Ashland Theological Seminary, is now blogging at The Biblical World. Sadly, Gerald Hawthorne passes away (HT: John Byron). Helen Bond discusses the composition of the Sanhedrin in first-century Palestine. Trevor provides a good summary of a variety of different ways to add records to Zotero. Happy Dissertating suggests priming the writing pump as necessary via 750 Words. Based on what the site provides, it looks like a fully private blog could also be used in much the same way, but particularly for those who would prefer not to need to ensure for themselves that all their privacy settings are correct or who might enjoy some of the other features that 750 Words offers, the site may be worth a look. Pat McCullough begins a bibliography of resources about the application of Social Identity Theory to biblical studies and invites suggestions for additions.

This week in the blogosphere: Baker acquires Hendrickson’s academic arm (HT: Nijay Gupta and Rod Decker). Larry Hurtado rightfully lauds and recommends careful attention to Harry Gable’s Books and Readers in the Early Church. Cynthia Nielsen continues her discussion of interconnections between Joerg Rieger and Frederick Douglass with a post about duality in identity construction. Michael Halcomb has a new website specifically dedicated to Getting (Theological) Languages. Kirk Lowery returns to the biblioblogosphere after a hiatus for the development of the Groves Center as an independent research unit. I had the privilege of doing an Aramaic and a Hebrew Bible text-linguistics seminar under Kirk and am again looking forward to seeing what shows up on his “scratchpad.” Happy Dissertating suggests PhD2Published as a potentially valuable resource for new PhD graduates in humanities disciplines. James McGrath spots several video recordings of presentations at this past year’s annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Michael Bird starts reading a recent biography of Ernst Käsemann and reproduces several, brief quotations from Käsemann that are, as one might expect, particularly insightful. Todd Bolen reports a recent spectrometric analysis that suggests a Jerusalem origin for a newly discovered cuneiform tablet. Ken Schenck discusses the reading of biblical literature as Christian scripture. Brian LePort discusses the relationship between scripture and tradition in view of the Trinitarian-Oneness debate. On this relationship, our Writing Center director at Southeastern recently brought to my attention F. F. Bruce’s edited volume, Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. I have yet really to peruse it, and the book is scarcely findable in print at this point. Still, it does look like a very interesting volume, and much of it is available through Google Books. Google and Verizon propose, regarding Net Neutrality,“that ‘wireline broadband providers [sh]ould not be able to discriminate against or prioritize lawful Internet content, applications or services in a way that causes harm to users or competition’, but broadband providers [sh]ould be able to offer ‘additional, differentiated online services’.” Chris Brady shares some of his conclusions from his recent International Organization for Targumic Studies presentation about Boaz in Targum Ruth.

[caption id=“attachment_1618” align=“alignleft” width=“80” caption=“Paul Silvia”] [/caption] Over at To Do: Dissertation, one of the authors provides a list of aids that dissertation writers may find helpful. Second on this list is Paul Silvia’s book How to Write a Lot, which has proven particularly helpful to me as well. The book really is worth its purchase price for the number of practical thoughts that it includes that may help the writing process go more smoothly. ...

According to Google’s blog, the National Library of the Netherlands will soon start making over 160,000 public-domain volumes available through Google Books. Works targeted for digitization “constitute nearly the library’s entire collection of out-of-copyright books, written during the 18th and 19th centuries.” Among the authors whose works this post explicitly notes as being included within this group is Abraham Kuyper (at least via a direct link to his Wikipedia page), the Dutch Reformed theologian, philosopher, and politician. ...

The Evernote blog has a helpful new video for Google Chrome users, showing them how to get Chrome to search their Evernote accounts directly. Firefox users can achieve the same results with Ubiquity (0.1.9.1) by copying this code into the Ubiquity command editor or by subscribing to this command feed. ...

The final release of Zotero 2.0 is now available. For a list of changes since 2.0rc5, see here, or check this page for upgrade instructions and a list of new features in Zotero 2.0.

I have been asked to produce a resource for distance education students who may have more difficulty than on-campus students with accessing traditional research venues like the brick-and-mortar library. To that end, this blog now has an Online Research page, part of which subsumes and expands the old, Other Websites page. I have tried to highlight and link to many of the wonderful resources already available for distance education students who are doing biblical studies work, but if anyone has suggestions about other free-access resources that these students might find particularly useful, please do post them in the comments section here. The students who will use this page and I would be very grateful for these additions. ...

Zotero 2.0 release candidates three and four have been released with several improvements, including upgrades and fixes for the synchronization and indexing functionality. As always, new Zotero users can download the latest version from the Zotero homepage. For those who may be interested, although composed for Zotero 1.5, the screencast below still highlights the main features of Zotero 2.0. ...

Yesterday, Zotero 2.0 moved from beta into its first and second release candidate versions. If you have yet to try Zotero, you may download it or view the video introduction from their homepage. At this point, Society of Biblical Literature Handbook of Style support is still under development, but even so, Zotero does provide a fairly good approximation that can be tweaked here and there with reasonable ease. ...

Evernote is a program that manages assorted notes and images while attempting to render searchable any text—even handwritten text—that is in its database. While the program already provides some very useful features for biblical studies research, a beta version of a major overhaul for Evernote’s Windows client is now available. The new version mostly aims to enhance performance and to make future improvements easier. ...

Steve Runge has posted a fantastic essay on “The Bane of Dismissive Scholarship.” Among his most poignant statements are the following: [T]he literature review and preparation for writing the paper. . . . is where I should be adding to my already profound arsenal of Knowledge, filling my cup til it runneth over. Realistically, I feel like many use this stage to fill their quiver with barbs that they will launch at other scholars. Why? Because some folks seem more interested in being right than in getting it right. . . . The specific issue that has got me in a tizzy is folks getting it mostly right, but being dismissed because of the portion that is lacking. To put it another way, instead of remodeling the missing element of the structure, they demo the whole thing so that THEY can be the builder, THEY can save the day. . . . It behooves me in writing my paper to stop and ask what my objective is: to be right or to get it right? If I am claiming something that no one else has ever claimed before, I have good reason to fear. If I am claiming something that represents the core idea the grammarians have expressed for over a century and I can build on or clarify that argument, there is a far greater chance of getting things right. It is a win-win: in getting it right, I get to be right (Runge, “Dismissive Scholarship”; italics and capitalization original). ...