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.

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 :)

Illustration by Joon Mo Kang which accompanies the article.

Why, oh why, do the very people who ought to be the most gripped by the possibilities that new things open up so often fall into a defensive wishful thinking? The latest example concerning e-texts (though already the author has blinkered his vision by focusing only on e-books)¹ was pointed to by Jonathan Robinson (on FB).

It’s a really well-written article that is on the whole simple and (when dealing with history) fairly accurate. But novelist Lev Grossman when thinking about: The Mechanic Muse: From Scroll to Screen (the title of his NY Times piece) fails to imagine a move from print to screen, but instead restricts himself to the current woeful capabilities of e-books. By limiting his imagination in this way he can conclude:

But if we stop reading on paper, we should keep in mind what we’re sacrificing: that nonlinear experience, which is unique to the codex. You don’t get it from any other medium — not movies, or TV, or music or video games.

Which is about as bananas as you can hope for. It is demonstrably factually inaccurate. To suggest that computer games sacrifice “nonlinear experience” suggests he has even less experience of such games than I have! But beyond that to suggest that e-books sacrifice the non-linear reading that codexes allow is plain daft. Admittedly current e-book devices seem woefully limited in how they exploit the possibilities of non-linear reading (and writing). But such limitations are not inherent in the electronic medium. They seem to be built into e-books to make them familiar, and so acceptable, to cautious change-phobic readers like Lev, by mimicking the difficulties the codex entails.

A true e-text not only has hyperlinks, either built in or generated on the fly, it has interactivity so that readers can communicate with each other about their reading experiences, it is searchable, bookmarkable, one can add comments and notes without defacing the medium… In fact it offers everything the paper codex offers except the limitations and sensual attractions of paper itself, and then adds huge and exciting new possibilities.

What a shame that an author’s fear of having to learn to WRITE differently should give him a platform to infect readers with his own fear of the new. Surely a good writer ought not only to have capacity for wrangling words, but also an imagination?

I wonder what Lev Grossman’s novels “The Magicians” and “The Magician King” are like? If they are as empty of imagination and daring as his article suggests, they must be sad, dull, pedestrian things. Perhaps the poor man does indeed have a merely “Mechanical Muse”?

1. An e-book is a current delivery vehicle for e-texts usually based on texts delivered also in other [print] forms thought of as the primary form.

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…

Photo "Written in Gold" by Anonymous Account

Opening sentences matter. As Charles pointed out using First Sentences from Ford and Fretheim they either draw readers in or repel them. But last sentences could be important too, they are one’s last chance to leave an impression on (at least sequential) readers minds.

With such thoughts in mind (see Why is academic writing turgid?)I looked with unusual trepidation at the first and last sentences of my Colloquium article (it is so hot off the presses that it does not yet show on the journal website).

My article starts:

Paul Ricoeur speaks of metaphor as ‘semantic impertinence,’ for it is lack of pertinence which makes metaphor work.

That’s an OK first line… but I am much less sure of the concluding marathon of a sentence:

In this subversion lies a new freedom – of the text and its readers – from the dead hand of an “author,” this permits even encourages the invention – through a collaboration of text and reader – of “Amos” the hero and “author” of the words; or as Keep, McLaughlin, and Parmar conclude their brief discussion of hypertext and the death of the author: “The Author may be dead, but his ghosts may be even more eloquent.”

I like the ideas, KM & P’s sentence is great, but the turgid mess of a paragraph-like sentence should have been edited out. I suspect many academic final sentences are worse than their corresponding firsts. I hate to think what Fretheim’s might have been ;) For when we get to the end of a piece we are tired and want rid of it. When our long-suffering proof-readers get to the end they are tired and bored. Result a misery of a final sentence :(

The article is:
Tim Bulkeley, “L’auteur est mort, but won’t lie down: inventing authors while reading Amos” Colloquium 43.1, 2011, 59-70.

I believe the copyright remains with me, except the typesetting, so I’ll post it here soon…

Now to look at the final sentence of the one I’m working on:

Thus, in this larger sense, the narrated drama of Jeremiah, his opponents and his God serves to explore theological responses to this disaster, and thus serves similar functions to the complaint psalms.

As I feared, I am running true to form. Long and turgid. I must improve that!

I have installed a new plugin, which claims to make commenting and sharing material much easier and more flexible. It enables people to highlight part of the text of a post and to comment on that. This might enable more nuanced discussion for a complex post – I’m thinking here of using this as a replacement for the rather clunky system at Digress It that I am currently using for Not Only a Father. Which has not been getting the traffic or the discussion I had hoped for.

The new system also claims to make sharing a post easier on Facebook or Twitter. We’ll see!

So if you want to try it, you could start by playing on this post, just highlight a word or phrase and away we go :)

My colleague Laurie Guy’s “big book” and it is in every sense, 900 or so pages they say, and chapters on everything from sex to rugby ;) Here are the details:

Shaping Godzone: Public Issues and Church Voices in NZ 1840-2000

Guy, Laurie

Published 2011

ISBN 9780864736413

Format paperback

Category Religion, New Zealand, History
Among other things VUP say this about the new book:

This ground-breaking book highlights the influence of the church in the shaping of ‘Godzone’ – Aotearoa New Zealand. It audaciously claims that the church has been midwife to the nation. Without missionary influence there would have been no Treaty of Waitangi and no New Zealand as we know it today.
In the nineteenth century church voices were nation-shaping on issues as wide-ranging as alcohol restraint, voting rights for women, the use of Sunday and the exploitation of workers.

He’s having the launch party at Carey on 1st July. When the book will be available at a fine discount :)

TED often has inspiring and intriguing short talks. Though, as a long-time visitor to the site I’m less easily wowed than I used to be. One from the latest crop is a commercial demo. It’s what Push Pop Press (or possibly TED) think is “the next-generation digital book”. Take a look, it is impressive:

I suspect the technologically clever windmill that turns when you blow will lose its wow in a few weeks, but the possibilities of the visuals is stunning. Though in the demo the data “visualizations” were on the whole less than impressive. Not a patch on for example the more static data visuals TED demonstrated a while back.

And that’s my frustration with Push Pop Press’ Al Gore book, it looks good, it may be fun, but it is static. Umberto Eco classified literature on a scale from closed to open texts. Closed texts tell you what to think, open texts encourage exploration and readers to form their own understandings. (Although his distinction was intended to describe a significant feature of fiction, I think it applies at least as powerfully to educational and “factual” books.) Looked at with Eco’s eyes, Al Gore’s sequel to An Inconvenient Truth is a closed text, it fails to encourage exploration or imagination, but tells us what to think. Despite its title Our Choice is not about us learning and growing, it’s about us watching and enjoying a masterful performance by the programmers and designers.

This iBook is a digital equivalent of the bread and circuses TV or the mega-Church “worship” that are the opium of the people in the wealthy and comfortable bubble that is Western Culture. It is indeed a next-generation digital book as the corporates would like it to be, saleable and static, a disposable commodity. A true next-generation digital book would by contrast be open, it would encourage exploration and conversation far from being disposable it would open new possibilities and thoughts on return readings.

The technology for such a book does not need teams of expensive programmers. With minimal coding skills we could do it with a combination of HTML and WordPress. The linkages and connections made possible by <a href=http://… together with the ongoing conversation and community that blogging tools allow are all that is needed for a true Next-generation Digital Book. I love to see us produce a FOSOTT (free, open source Old Testament textbook) that as well as a paper edition offered an e-book version that included such interactivity.

Podcast bear by blogefl

Promoting a blog is easy, no need to list it in directories, just post a few interesting posts, and as with the most publishable academic articles make sure they “engage” with others (in blogging this may mean being rude, in academia proper fawning admiration is often better) and presto in a few weeks or months you are on your way with a growing readership.

Not so with Podcasts :(

Take Mark Goodacre’s excellent NT Pod. Mark is a fine scholar, teaching at a prestigious University, he’s an all-time nice guy, and famous in Biblical Studies online as the pioneer gateway keeper of the NT Gateway. His podcast is liked by 405 people on Facebook, and Twitted by many, yet it is sitting down in doldrums on Alexa, miles from the top 50. Podcasts are hard to promote…

First Google cannot, yet, index audio, so the “content” that draws the spiders is only that “teaser” you knock off at the last minute as you post the carefully crafted audio. Actually in terms of search engines it would be better to craft the few sentences of the teaser, and let the audio suck, it’s not “content” but text that is king of the search world.

Links, bloggers simply do NOT link to podcasts (unless you prod them really hard, I have not tried bribery, it might work… but is probably unethical) bloggers live in a world of blogs. Therefore they will link to your blog post that itself links to your podcast, but usually will fail to link to the real thing :( The only answer here is shameless self-promotion. So when the entertaining and much-commented How Jim West Really Knows So Much About Hell appeared it at first had a link to an earlier post here, but no link to the real content on 5 Minute Bible: Universalism, or Not? Part One: Jonah but I am determined¹ so I posted a comment complaining, and presto a precious link :)

Yes, to promote a podcast you MUST trawl the web for podcast directories and submit your site to them, without that no one will find you except your children and cousins, or if you are a teacher your students ;)

So, this is an appeal to YOU, if you have a blog or other web presence please link to AT LEAST one podcast this week :)

PS: Having mentioned the problems of promoting podcasts, I should do my bit by mentionning other related podcasts here. In particular one I have not linked to before: The [ad hoc] Christianity Podcast a weekly show on theological and ethical issues facing the Christian community “non-obnoxious” and laid back. With Travis Jacobs, Steve Douglas, and Matthew Raymer.

1. You do know that this is an irregular verb don’t you: I am determined, you are stubborn, s/he is pig-headed!