If you would like a review copy of the print version of my new book:

Tim Bulkeley, Not Only a Father: Talk of God as Mother in the Bible & Christian Tradition (Signs) Auckland: Archer Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-1468091373

Please contact me, please say both where you expect to publish the review (blogs are quite acceptable though a full review rather than a short note would be good) and when you are expect to write it. There are no conditions and you should be as critical as you normally would.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE "The Bridge to Nowhere" by Thad Roan - Bridgepix

Around now I’d be retired, according to our schedule. Actually I’ll be working at Carey for another six months, but we’ve just taken a big step on the journey.

On Friday morning as Barbara, Thomas and I began the final clean-up inside, workmen hammered the “For Sale” notice into the grass verge and our house in Auckland went on the market. On Saturday afternoon, as Barbara and I drove exhausted back to “the farm”, they held the first open home. That evening someone made the first offer, after a couple of phone calls they offered 20k over the CV and we accepted. (Subject to lawyers and a building inspection before Friday.)

We’re surprised and delighted, and I’ve taken a big step closer to retirement. So, this morning I woke thinking about “retirement”. Ceasing full-time employment marks the beginning of what, accurately if somewhat negatively, people used to call one’s “declining years”. This period is a time of life dedicated to (hopefully slowly) running down like a clockwork toy that no one winds any more. This is a period when, barring major illness or disasters, ones capacities and world gradually shrink. In traditional societies, as ones ability to act in and on the world around shrank, ones respect grew. Not so in the “modern world”. Here “old folk” just fade away.

So, how could anyone welcome retirement (the gateway to this twilight zone) and even deliberately choose to begin it early?

As in so many other things, I think of Grandad and Granny. Mum’s dad had planned and saved for retirement all his working life, took it early and enjoyed the “fruits of his labour”. He wasn’t well off, they’d been frugal all their lives and that couldn’t suddenly change.¹ But he entered retirement planning to enjoy himself. Projects like making a dining chair set, and building a garage, as well as his garden and show rabbits kept him out of mischief.² He enjoyed his grandchildren, savoured watching his children now safely grown into people he could like and even respect.

That’s what I want, come June. Oh, not the rabbits,³ and not the building and carpentry (much, though we do have some fences and a piggery planned) but the enjoying life. And like Grandad I don’t plan that my world should shrink too fast, so I do hope that nexct year will see real progress with the development of open resources for biblical studies.

1. Carpenters in those days were not highly paid.
2. Yes, in the UK in the fifties rabbits were scarce enough that people held Rabbit Shows and won rosettes for the best in breed. Grandad and Granny were practical people, so they also bred rabbits for meat ;)
3. In NZ they are a pest. We’re hoping a friend will come to stay and bring a gun to shoot the ones our place seems to attract.

There is an interesting confluence in aspects of two significant documents that John Kutsko (SBL) pointed me towards. Today was a news item in Inside Higher Ed, it’s titled The Promise of Digital Humanities and reports on a meeting celebrating (US) NEH grants to digital humanities projects. Among the items that caught my eye was a section stressing the importance of open publication to the future of the humanities, in an era of shrinking funding when even prestigious departments are threatened with closure (like a year or two back the University of Sheffield’s renowned Biblical Studies department).

The section I’m quoting itself quotes the NEH’s Brett Bobley:

A lot of scholarly data over the last hundred years or so is locked up in expensive journals that the public could never afford to subscribe to.

“We’re quite happy about how the digital humanities is, in some sense, opening up the scholarly world to a wider audience,” he said.

That could be the key to winning back support for the humanities, suggested Doug Reside, digital curator of the performing arts at the New York Public Library.

Basically the argument goes that open publication could, by raising the public profile, also reduce the danger of the humanities being seen as irrelevant and so not worth funding.

My mind flipped back to the other document Kutsko had pointed to a week or so back. This one was a report, New-Model Scholarly Communication: Road Map for Change from the Scholarly Communication Institute. It is a careful, yet visionary, document which is full of interesting and exciting ideas.¹ They talk near the start about how:

Advancing the humanities in and for the digital age demands the active engagement of many sectors of the scholarly community working towards a shared vision. The key actors in the successful transition of humanities to a digital environment are:
• Peer communities of scholars able to assess and validate new forms of  scholarship, including genres that cross disciplinary boundaries,  reach new audiences, and use technology in innovative ways
• Publishers able to support new communities of discourse producing scholarship in multiple media and genres, and engaging the attention of diverse audiences

They also spoke of libraries, administrators and funders, but I suspect these recommendations follow from the first two and that there are few of my readers who are administrators or funders! They then provide a series of “actionable ideas”. Which offer an exciting view of humanities scholarship finally adapting to the digital communications environment. Here I’ll draw attention to one:

Reengineer the system of credit. Explore and articulate criteria for assessing scholarly merit in the online environment; experiment with venues for peer review to increase transparency, reliability, and participation; devise methods to sift through the surfeit of available information and direct scholarly attention to meritorious work; and realign reward and recognition systems to apportion credit where credit is due

The peer-review system has served us well, despite its failings² for it has promised, and on the whole provided, a more level playing field and access to all, along with a filter to remove the trash and select the good.

But it is not adapted to assessing the worth of digital communications, nor at all “transparent”,³ nor does it begin to filter the huge and exponentially growing pile of trash (with the occasional nugget of gold) that Google presents to our students and the general public – though this steaming pile is all that the underprivileged (those without access to the fine academic libraries) can use as their starting point. And finally as they say current systems of reward and punishment calculated on “peer review” and “established esteemed journals or publishers” do not encourage – in fact actively discourage – experimental discourse in favour of more of the same old same old. Yet the humanities are about discourse and scholarship is about the new and innovative.

Later in the report they speak of the sweeping changes we are experiencing as an environment for scholarship. They highlight four

• changes in the nature and constitution of the audience (for humanities and all online information): readers now expect to be active users and producers of content, not passive receivers of information; the time span between creating and posting content is short, and reception and reaction equally short

Here there are two challenges, assuring quality within a quick turn around environment (for this modified forms of peer review would be helpful)⁴ and even more radical an environment where “readers now expect to be active users and producers of content, not passive receivers of information”⁵ this change, from a sequence (with considerable delays) of one way communications to a genuinely dialogical engagement, will require new forms of communication more like blogging than print journals.⁶

SBL as the largest and most active global association of biblical scholars has a huge potential to promote and develop such a shift in scholarly communications. Alongside (what I can’t resist calling) legacy journals like JBL the society should set up and sponsor alternative communications media that are more open and responsive, more dialogical and yet with robust processes of quality assurance. Such a move on it’s own would have a refreshing and renewing impact on the discipline, opening real scholarship both to producers on the fringe (the various sorts of “independent scholar” who are increasingly around but still have poor access to both resources and publication outlets) and to a new and broader body of consumers (who currently get their biblical studies from Wikipedia and any  blog Google happens to anoint today).

• rise of informal peer-to-peer networks of knowledge: the blurring of distinctions between expert and lay, academic and public scholars, and scholars and the public is potentially a sanguine development in a democracy that assumes a well-informed citizenry; but it poses challenges to professionals and the processes of professionalization

SBL is one of the prime sets of scholarly networks, with it’s massive “meetings” and the less formal networks that gather round (some of) the program units. Again technology exists (not least email, but with newer more social media offering richer affordances) and is being developed to allow far more contact and discussion to continue outside the framework of “meetings”. This would open the society further to scholars who are not Western or not employed in established educational institutions  (and who probably lack the means to spend a few days in a horrendously expensive hotel far from home as often as they would like). We could over the next ten years see SBL become a genuinely global “meeting place” for biblical scholarship.⁷

1. I hope to post about others in the coming weeks.
2. E.g. “peers” who are sometimes not peers but either old fuddy duddies, not specialists in the precise area of the study, or professional rivals; a review process that is not always as “blind” as it claims or where editors make the real decisions…
3. In fact it reeks of 19th century prejudice and pride meeting in smokey rooms in a “gentlemen’s club” ;)
4.  Paul Nikkel was already suggesting forms of review appropriate to the digital age in his paper “Through an Open Window: Exploring Openness in Biblical Scholarship” from the 2004 AIBI session I arranged.
5. My bold – to match the bold above.
6. The technologies for such media already exist, there are even (when one reads further into the report, and you should because it is fine stuff :) some environments designed for scholarly communications currently in development.
7. Initiatives like the International Meeting, the International Cooperation Initiative, and awards to enable non-Western scholars to attend meetings have already made fine steps in this direction, but digital communications could swiftly outstrip their combined effect in achieving this goal.

A search for "Christ as a man" brought up this photo by mararie

I have just posted another short section to my online discussable book on motherly talk of God Not Only a Father which addresses the question of how The Nature of Christ as a Man interacts with my ideas of the (non)gendering of God.

Not Only a Father  is an attempt at a new way of writing a book, discussing it with people as it is written. So the text currently on the site is subject to change, but I need your comments and questions or objections to help make this work. So please visit, comment/argue with me, and/or get your friends involved :)

llustration by Daniel Pudles

The traditional broadsheet media have hosted a broadside on academic publishing: Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist trumpets the Guardian. Writer George Monbiot’s argument is summed up in the subtitle and a simple cartoon:

Academic publishers charge vast fees to access research paid for by us. Down with the knowledge monopoly racketeers

The discussion is based on the sciences, where all the numbers are bigger, a single yearly subscription to a prestigious journal can cost thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars. The costs of the research that produced the article are also far higher than those in Biblical Studies (even when you take the salary of the researchers into account).

But is the problem the same?

Jim West clearly thought so. He swiftly (does the man do anything slowly?) posted Yes, We’re Looking at You, Brill cutting highlights from the Guardian piece and agreeing.  Duane basically also agrees, adding value linking to the referenced version on Monbiot’s website and by reporting also (though with a link that merely leads back to the original essay) John Hawks’ response Make journals work better recognising that the current system does not work (at all well) for us users, and suggesting that Amazon would make a more caring and convenient publisher.¹

But still, are things the same in Biblical Studies? We have only begun to move to the commercial publishers, most of our journals, even many of the most prestigious ones, are still published by learned societies (even the name sounds old-fashioned in a good solid dependable way), or by institutions. There are however, a growing number “captured” by Brill and their like. They may well make a decent, or even indecent profit, but the learned societies and institutions don’t.

I think the discipline faces two alternative futures, Capitalist and Socialist, with a mixed economy also being possible.

On the Capitalist model gradually all the “best” journals move to commercial publishers, who strive to (between them) carve out a near monopoly and charge growing prices.² Individual scholars will be priced out of the market and Biblical Studies will become even more closely part of the academic-industrial complex.

On the Socialist model scholars will altruisticaly decide to offer their best articles to the JBLs and CBQs (to an even greater extent than they already do) these will move (as several have been) further towards an “open” model and the bulk of “important” scholarship will remain accessible to all.

On the mixed model we will get both sorts of publisher continuing to control a significant share of the BS journal market. So things will continue much as now, but in more extreme ways, the learned societies will move slower toward openness, and the Brills will raise their prices more slowly… and individual scholars will continue to get uneven access.

Two (at the very least) colossal forces are operating. On the one side “publish or perish” will ensure Brill won’t die easily. On the other the whole tendency of our culture is towards openness and the learned societies have prestige and clout.

1. Having read some of the small publisher’s comments on Amazon’s cut throat tactics and inflexibility, I have some doubts whether we should trust their renowned altruism so far ;)
2. Jim if you think Brill is steep now just wait till they publish JBL, CBQ and a few others as well as their current stable…

A while back a number of us talked about producing a free open-source textbook to the Hebrew Bible/OldTestament/TaNaK/whatever you call it today. Since that first flurry the idea has quietly dropped. However, also since then I find I have one day a week next semester to do with as I please, and even more time next year :)

So, I would like to put some of that time into this project. In order to start this rolling I want to do two things:

1. Gather a small group to be the editorial team: this group would correspond by email in private and take the final decisions, its members should be established teachers willing to spend at least a little time thinking and planning, and perhaps some more in bursts on editing tasks (though if we could get funding this might largely be outsourced). To nominate yourself or someone else please either comment here or write to me: tim at carey.ac.nz
2. Begin and sustain a wider discussion of the parameters of the project: that is I hope the blogging community will contribute criticism and ideas that will inform the editors decisions. I’ll begin this here.

Some items for early decision.

Scope:

We need to decide the scope of the project, in at least two ways:

• Do we deal with the Hebrew or Greek canon? (I think this one is easy, put the first priority with the shorter Hebrew canon, and extend to enable a version that includes the rest when contributors permit.)
• Is the textbook to be sectarian? By “sectarian” I am thinking of sects both religious: Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant…, and scholarly: minimalist, maximalist, etc…   (I think a similar approach might be possible. In the first instance the core chapters would try to take a non-sectarian line, and we might deliberately ask  for a reviewer from different “sects” from the author to ensure at least fairness, if not the mythical “balance”. While, once the basic chapter is written, anyone might add to it a section that suggested how this information becomes a INSERT SECT ADJECTIVE reading.)

There will be issues of size etc. but they can be discussed later.

Name:

Since the first suggestion, by Brooke on Facebook and AKMA in his blog, we have been calling this FOSOTT (Free Open-source Old Testament Textbook). While I like the acronym, and the meaning, I am less sure about designating the object of study as “Old Testament”. This is a sectarian description. I am sure different instructors can use different terms for their classes, a simple search and replace would enable one to use different terms throughout. But what name, for this rose we study, should we use in the project title?

Peer review:

Above I have mentioned reviewers, I think this work, in its “canonical” form should be peer-reviewed. As I suggested above I think for a textbook chapter such a review process might help ensure less bias and better balance, while hopefully not stiffling individuality… but I imagine others may think differently.

License:

Like AKMA I think a CC license is the obvious choice, for me too attribution is a minimum. But he preferred non-commercial, and I would go for even greater openness…

Format:

Are we thinking text plus pictures, like a conventional print work, or will we build in the possibility of a richer electronic edition with internal and external links, video and sound… (My take is that we ask for a basic text-plus-pictures, but also seek to produce in parallel a richer electronic edition, the “print format” version could include the links to media on the project site in print format.)

Earlier discussion of this idea:

FOSOTT (Free and Open Source Old Testament Textbook)

Open Access Intro to OT

The Shortcomings of Traditional Textbooks in the Digital Age, and Our Invitation

Funding Neopublishing

multiauthor multiple possibility neotextbook

Several posts on this blog (posts in reverse chronological order :(

Open Access, Open Source, and Open Ended Textbooks

I know I have missed bookmarking quite a few contributions, so please let me know and I will add a link to yours :)

By Paul Downey

A growing institution that despite growth is somewhat strapped for cash has most of its staff on OfficeProduct 2006, it less than the latest thing, but does everything the staff need. New staff are employed (it is a growing institution) new laptops are bought, they come with OfficeProduct X an easily “upgradeable trial version”. So, of course, to keep things simple they run OfficeProduct X.

Now disaster strikes, OfficeProduct 2006 cannot read OfficeProduct X files and the whole institution must be upgraded to OfficeProduct X. Strangely the same institution runs OpenOffice (a standards compliant open source Office package) on the public access terminals in the library. They do not need to upgrade, for OpenOffice CAN read the OfficeProduct X files…

As a further bonus advantage OfficeProduct X uses strikingly different menu structures from its predecessors, that means staff will need training, or possibly will just suffer the frustration of wasting hours learning the new “improved” product by trial and error, and then more hours helping their colleagues who are slower at learning such arcane 21st century skills.

A further disaster, but one that in the past could not have been avoided, many staff still have files from OtherOffice 2.0, those files are now unreadable by almost every modern Office suite. Lost data :( Now in the past such disasters were unavoidable, now however, suppose the files were saved in Open Document Format (an open standard that non-proprietary office suites use). Guess what in 10 or 15 years if ODF 2.0 has come out there will be plugins available to read the old files.

Now remind me, just how does paying for Microsoft Office make economic sense?

What a great resource, and free online instead of expensive dead trees from Brill :)

The כלי Database: Utensils in the Hebrew Bible from Het Oudtestamentisch Werkgezelschap (the Dutch and Flemish society of Old Testament scholars) looks really excellent a great source of information on all those awkward terms that refer to various sorts of tool or implement. Unfortunately the first term I looked up מִזְרָק from Am 6:6 does not appear to have been entered yet :( but the list is already impressively long.

The format is a series of PDF files, which allows the appearance to be controlled, but makes usage somewhat less easy and reuse much less easy compared to XML and CSS, but it will have made production easier :) It is sad that there are few or no illustrations. At a time when images are getting easier to find and permission to use more likely to be freely given. However, entries have a section pointing readers to illustrations in reference works in their library.

In short this seems a really useful tool, and one we can be grateful they are publishing in such an open fashion. It also offers an interesting set of compromises between traditional forms and the new medium. It will be fascinating to see over coming decades how many and which such compromises continue to be made, representing what is culturally important about print. For example in this case the physical layout of print with page and line breaks was deemed significant.

HT: Jim West

One video in particular from Michael Wesch’s Visions Of Students Today 2011 project caught my eye. He asked students to make short videos of education from their perspective, and offer them as an open source resource.

This video caught my attention because it highlights the dangers of leaving students passive and the power of active learning:

||

For more on Michael see these previous posts:

• Participatory pedagogy and cultural literacy
• It’s not what we’re teaching, it’s HOW we are teaching!

Image by jonathan.d.becker

Brooke at Anuma in VOST2011: The Visions of Students Today asks:

What do students in Higher Education see today? What do they “see” in the sense of, “What are their visions?” And, what do they literally see from the place in which they are expected to learn?

He’s pointing to a new project by Michael Wesch, professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. The call for submissions asked students to make short (preferably < 2 minutes) videos of education from their perspective, and offer them as an open source resource. The videos are often fascinating (at least for a teacher ;) and sometimes compelling, just think of the talent and effort being expressed here!

Brooke also wrote:

In the professorial circles in which I run, I am probably among those more likely to identify with the students of VOST2011: besides being a “distance pedagogies guy” (in progress), I am after all a Gen-Xer, and until a subject matter grabbed me in my Masters work, felt continually disenchanted with and alienated from the structures of education, while still identifying strongly with other students as a peer group.

Well, it may not surprise you to know that although well past being Gen-X those experiences rign true for me, as do many of the students’ visions. Perhaps they do for others… so, in this over-mediated world where information tends to be free, why do we still teach, instead of facilitating learning?

See these earlier posts among many others for my thoughts:

• 2004: Internet and Missions yes, despite the title it IS on this topic, and despite the age IS still relevant ;)
• 2007: (What) does the Web change (in) education?
• 2009: David Clines’ SBL Presidential Address