Sansblogue

The Bodleian library is for many a symbol of Universitas (photo Wikimedia)

Inside Higher Education writes that Rice University is closing its all-digital university press (for a brief summary and reflection on the article see AKMA’a post):

Rice University Press is being shut down next month, ending an experiment in an all-digital model of scholarly publishing. While university officials said that they needed to make a difficult economic decision to end the operation, they acted against the recommendations of an outside review team that had urged Rice to bolster its support for the publishing operations

What this means is not that we can all smile wisely and pontificate that the codex has been given a new lease of life, but that the Academy is apparently not a place where experiment and trial of new things can flourish, a project needs to be economically sound to live in the 21st century University.

Universitas in the 21st century? (Photo Wikimedia)

Yet the idea of Universitas is fundamentally concerned with the creation, preservation and transmition of knowledge. This description (from John Etchemendy, Provost of Stanford University on Philosophy Talk) is unimaginative, ancient, and leaves out the possibility that Universitas may aspire to something more than “knowledge”, but it does describe some sort of highest common factor (or for the non-mathematically literate “lowest common denominator” ;) aspiration of Universitas.

Meanwhile, print academic presses are struggling. Digital dissemination is apparently seen as not economically viable. But how sad that a University (and especially the one that had had the courage to try something new)  has to abandon its role as crucible of innovation.  It makes the publishing innovations of SBL all the more important, if the Education Industry is failling in its calling to assist the dissemination of complex ideas maybe associations of scholars can help to fulfil the mission of Universitas?

TaDa a codex! (Photo by Friar's Balsam)

The Center for History and New Media, George Mason University the people who brought us Zotero, the neat simple free “just does what it should” bibliography manager have held a One Week | One Tool project funded by the (US) National Endowment for the Humanities. The tool they produced (only 0.3 alpha as yet to be fair) they call Anthologize.

Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

I wonder if we could use it with some other WordPress plugins to make making FOSOTT easier? And what about collaborating on and publishing the output of a colloquium? Like the Isaiah and Empire one?

The only trouble is, to get full brownie points in the academic system we may need to use a conventional respected print publisher, and I doubt any of them will be happy with opting into such a system :( How come systems (like the NZ “Performance Based Research Funding” exercise or US tenure committees) end up stifling innovative ways of undertaking basic scholarly tasks like publishing the results of research? Still FOSOTT wouldn’t count for such purposes anyway – it is merely teaching!

HT: Digital Campus

James has added a strong plea (to the mix of posts on the idea of a Free Open Source Old Testament Textbook) that any project not be limited to mere textyness. While, naturally, I agree (after all the Amos: Hypertext Bible Commentary was at least in part a partial intro textbook in (early) hypertext form, I would also like to see a core to the project that can produce a texty text book, for such a limited text is convenient for both teachers and students in a class setting.

So I’d see James’ plea as adding weight, and perhaps the possibility of dedicated new material, to Marks addendum to the Textbook idea.¹Mark explains this well with an example in another fine post The “Textyness” of the Textbook in a Digital Age:

Let’s say you are talking about the topic of form-criticism and introducing Richard Bauckham’s recent contributions about the involvement of alleged eye-witnesses.  You could record your own audio or video about this, in which you attempt to summarize his position, or you could watch and listen to the man himself doing it for you.  Examples of this kind could be multiplied.  My point is not that we should stop producing new resources — of course not.  But rather that we should start thinking seriously about the integration of good existing resources into our new model.

On the other hand, Mark’s latest post The Shortcomings of Traditional Textbooks in the Digital Age, and Our Invitation gives a clear vision of how such an Open Textbook with its associated richer collection might be significantly different from and better then merely another (but free) textbook:

The traditional textbook’s difficulty is that however strong its author, it is still that author’s views that are presented, in all their particularity.  What the textbook of the digital age can produce is something that is genuinely multi-authored as well as multi-media, a resource that encourages the university student to think critically from the earliest point by listening to different voices speaking on the same subjects.

1. See Neopublishing, FOSOTT and gateway sites formy take on why these are different but hopefully related projects. [↩]

Isn’t it exciting that at last there might be movement in the direction of a really simple and significant piece of what AKMA neatly neologises as “neopublishing“! By now you know that it all started with a twit that was published on Brooke’s Facebook page (see his blog Anumma for the belated expression of this in public “Open Access Intro to OT“) that happily was seen by AKMA. And that Mark offered (in The Future for Textbooks Online) his own slant on AKMA’s take on Brooke’s ideas. Doesn’t this sound like the resume of an episode of one of those teenage soaps one’s daughters watch?

In the latest round of posts, AKMA (Funding Neopublishing) highlights some really interesting ideas for funding such a project, and since this is a high demand, low(ish) cost project the idea of (almost) crowdsourcing the funding ought to be possible :) While Mark, always the gentleman and peacemaker, seeks to convince (himself and?) us that AKMA’s multiauthor multiple possibility neotextbook is really much the same sort of teaching tool as his own proposal for a gateway site focused on the needs of beginning students and intro classes. They aren’t, but both would serve really useful purposes. FOSOTT as a textbook would allow consistency of design, format and presentation making the assimilation of the basics of the discipline easier for beginners. An Intro Gateway as a collection of links to quality (somewhat?) assured resources selected for usefulness to beginners would be great for the further reading that we hope all students will do, and that the smart ones actually do do.

Incidentally, to display my own peacemaker tendencies, I think both Mark and Bob (in his comments to Mark’s most recent post) have it right: Mark point that there are now (on at least most topics) far more quality resources and enough to make a workable “further reading” list for an intro class is correct. Bob is also right though that Google works better as a search engine, and so can offer more complete coverage than even the NT Gateway or iTanakh can manage (just note the cost though for an intro class, teachers must spend more time educating students to be critical).¹

1. Yes, we say that this is what we do, but really we sometimes resent the time spent explaining how they should have known that the latest Indiana Jones stunt is not worth the price of the salesman/archaeologist?’s hat, since that time would have been much better spent downloading more of our precious learning into their poor feeble brains. [↩]

Brooke has now posted his own take on the project Open Access Intro to OT so perhaps I’ll have to start using OAIOT ;)

From AKMA and Mark I learned that Brooke Lester had asked his Facebook friends, “I know the answer before I ask, but: Do we have no good, critical, open-access Intro to Old Testament textbooks?”

I have no idea what Brooke said, because this conversation is not on Anuma, and I’m not in the favoured few friended on Facebook. But both Mark and AKMA’s replies are brilliant, and brilliantly different. I read AKMA’s first, and he outlines exactly how such a project, that he calls FOSOTT Free Open Source Old Testament Textbook project would work. Basically with different people contributing chapters, and eventually a collection of variant chapters offering different perspectives and approaches to choose from and build your own textbook. As AKMA points out most of the infrastructure is ready and print on demand would make paper copies easily obtainable. I also love AKMA’s suggestion of podcast editions, short video intros and other optional extras. I’d add three details that I did not notice in AKMA’s presentation (which you must read!) some form of peer review or selection of authors¹ so that the quality is not compromised and an archive of earlier editions so that versions are stable and therefore citable² Thirdly I’d like to see strong guidelines for authors so that there is a measure of consistency in the topics treated and headings used, because such a straitjacket though a crimp on authors’ creativity would make life easier for poor beginning students ;)

Mark’s suggestion is a beefed up and focused version of his NT Gateway (or perhaps more precisely of Chris Heard’s iTanakh) such a site, collaboratively curated, that pointed students to suitable selected material already available on the web would also be brilliant.It has the advantage of avoiding the need for yet more spiffy wheel designs, but the disadvantages of lack of consistency and difficult printability.

I can envisage using both in different ways. FOSOTT as a textbook, that students are required to read selected chapters from week by week, they can choose whether to read online or buy a print copy, and the beginner focused Gateway site as a suggested further reading resource.

I therefore volunteer to write a chapter for FOSOTT, I can start writing at the end of next year (2011) when my current writing projects end, and if FOSOTT gets underway would prioritise it over another “volume” of HBC or other projects.

1. Notice that here I strongly disagree with a commenter who suggested starting the textbook as a Wiki – not because I don’t like Wikipedia, I love it, but because there is so much crud “biblical” material around and I want a resource I can use to help my students see what “good” looks like! [↩]
2. As a teacher I need this so that I can check students bizarre quotations in their essays. [↩]

They say that “old media” like Newspapers and TV are more reliable, because they employ professional journalists who have high standards to check the truth of what they present, while there are no standards on the web. Errors (often it must be admitted short-lived errors) on Wikipedia are often cited in support of this argument. The discussion seldom mentions the enormous salaries TV journalists are paid. But here’s a fine example of these standards at work:

From the TVNZ Breakfast show, the group does not exist. Duh! The NZ Herald a newspaper owned by a different media group quoted a TVNZ spoke as saying:

It appears that the person who has duped us orchestrated a tissue of lies and duped us because that’s what they set out to do.

What do you do when somebody deliberately sets out to deceive you?

Check up on them? Apparently the TV journos are not paid enough for that! They just saw the guy had a website, so he must be kosher ;)

Photo by iandeth

Link now working, sorry :(

I am still gradually expanding the open book Not Only a Father. I have added a section concerning “The Gender of Yahweh” to chapter five which (as a whole) is about “Theology of God as both Father and Mother“.

This growing book is an experiment in publishing as discussion, not merely a blog, but a coherent book-length exploration of a topic, but not merely a book online, since each thought and idea can be questioned, commented, challenged or expanded by the readers. The trouble is that unless it gets people visiting the material it does not get discussed, and unless YOU, or others like you who find the topic of using motherly language and pictures interesting, link to the material no one will find it, and the experiment will fail :(

Aoraki Mt Cook across Lake Pukaki, NZ

My colleague Dr Tim Meadowcroft and I are teaching a MTheol/DMin course on “Isaiah and Empire” this semester. The more we have prepared for the course the more aware we have become that, despite the fact that most readings of the book of Isaiah see it as set against several (traditionally three) distinctly different Impreial contexts, there is no book addressing the topic of the interaction of this work and “empire”.

The first section of the book is (mainly) set against the backcloth of Judah as a client state of the Neo-Assyrian empire, chapters 40-54 are widely seen as speaking first to Judean exiles in Babylon (the heart of the empire then),¹ while the last chapters seem to address inhabitants of the province of Yehud in the Persian Empire. Add to that the recent popularity of empire (and of Post-colonial approaches) in Biblical Stidies, and you see why we are surprised by the lack of a book or journal with a topical issue. Hence the colloquium, leading to a book, that we are planning.

The idea is to get participants reading each other’s work before the meeting, so interacting at more depth at the meeting, then editing their own papers afterwards to make a more coherent book, yet one which reflects differing approaches and methods.Here is the call for paper (as a Download PDF):

Isaiah and Empire

Colloquium and Book

Call for papers:

This colloquium (sponsored by Laidlaw-Carey Graduate School in Auckland, New Zealand) will explore cultural and theological implications of aspects of the book of Isaiah in the context of empire. Potential papers might include, but are by no means limited to:

• readings of particular texts in the light of ancient imperial contexts
• studies of the redaction history of Isaiah
• Isaiah (or a particular text) in contemporary “imperial” or post-colonial contexts
• theological reflections
• cross cultural perspectives on Isaiah in imperial contexts
• contemporary political reflections

The colloquium will take place in Auckland, NZ, on 14^th-15^th February 2011 (this is summertime in NZ but after schools have begun for the year). Since we intend to publish a book with the same title in 2011, draft papers will be circulated among participants in 2010 and final form submitted by April 15^th 2011.

Please send enquiries and abstracts before 31^st August 2010 to:

Dr Tim Bulkeley tim@carey.ac.nz or
Dr Tim Meadowcroft TMeadowcroft@laidlaw.ac.nz

PS don’t forget the other colloquium call for papers on has still not closed:
spiritual│complaint : theology and practice of lament

1. one minority view would see this section addressed to people in Judah but still under the Babylonian empire [↩]

Yahoo have produced a Styleguide for the web. In the absence of any different requirements from your webmaster, and for most blogs we are our own webmasters, I do not know of another succinct styleguide that aims to cover issues of publishing on the web. There is even a page of very sensible advice about writing for search engines as well as humans.

Does anyone know of another, perhaps better Internet styleguide to recommend?