Review on Beyond Sacred Violence
With all the chaos that summer teaching brings, I failed to note (or even notice!) that my review of Kathryn McClymond’s Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice
Heap of Hittite Helps
A great Hittite resource—complete with access to Luwian Hieroglyph fonts! (Sorry for the German)
Ein Projekt der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz (Kommission für den Alten Orient) und der Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (Lehrstuhl f. Altorientalistik) in Kooperation mit zahlreichen in- und ausländischen Partnern.
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(HT: AWOL)
Day of Archaeology 2011
Today is the “Day of Archaeology 2011.” Four hundred archaeologists are blogging their research over at the blog of the same name. While the Levant and Anatolia are severely under-represented, I’d still encourage you to check it out.
A Misunderstanding of Genre…
One of my favourite adages is “A misunderstanding of genre leads to a misunderstanding of the text.” This can be seen in the following strip from Doonesbury:
A few years back I picked up the Society of Biblical Literature’s Teaching the Bible: Practical Strategies for Classroom Instruction
Obviously, the result of such an exercise is a cosmology vastly different from our own—a flat earth surrounded by water, held back by a dome upon which the sun, moon and stars are pinned. It’s only at this point that most of them are willing to entertain that what Genesis is doing is not science. I wonder if the sentiments portrayed in the comic above are part of the reason this acknowledgement is so difficult.
The Problems with Descriptive Linguistics
Comic courtesy of SMBC
The Latest Biblical Studies Carnival
Chris Brady (Targuman) has posted the latest Biblical Studies Carnival. Personally, I was off the grid for most of the month and find it more useful than ever to have this little summary of the month’s activity. The comic are a nice touch.
I hope to be updating this cite more in the upcoming month as I return to the academic and research routine. Lots of thoughts on Ugaritic to throw out there (hopefully).
iPad Research
On the heels of yesterday’s post on eBooks, I should mention Chris Brady’s excellent post on iPad use in research. I’ll quote the take away, but I encourage you to read the whole post:
I am an administrator as well as an academic, but the former takes precedence over the latter and includes a LOT of travel. This year, thanks to the iPad and Sente, I have been able to read dozens of articles, annotate them, and collaborate with my research assistant. The result is that as I move into the summer when I will finally be able to actually do some writing and real research, I have a running start. For me, that makes all the difference in the work.
eBook Querries
I’ve been doing some research on creating eBooks. My department has a grant to compile an electronic version of one of our core texts that is currently in the public domain. We want to create a dynamic interface that would allow students and faculty to annotate the texts and see each other’s glosses, as well as toying with ideas of a wikiality. Ultimately, it should be in a format available to all students and be free to use. I’ve also been informed a pony would be nice.
I had hoped that Flat World Knowledge could help. They are focussing on fully-editable, open textbooks. However, you need to start with one of their base texts and can’t start with your own manuscript (even if it’s in the public domain).
At the moment the best solution I can think of entails a custom install of WordPress with added enhancements. The actual text would occur as a series of static WordPress pages. The traditional blog component would allow, perhaps, for students or professors to note textual connections to current events. WPMU deve’sWiki plugin would cover the wiki issues, though I might go with a free or opensource alternative. But most importantly (to me, at least) would be Highlighter, a little plugin that allows folks to comment intext. People can even begin comment strings and have conversations on a particular line of text (perfect for our intended applications). I’d like to restrict intext commenting to the static pages, but I’m unsure if I can do this without making my life too complicated.
Ideally, I’d love to see a more portable dynamic format. The current technology seems to require that we use a website to correlate student work and interactivity. While this allows those with an iPad to still the view the text as a “book,” the experience won’t be much different than reading a blog for most students. I’d love to bring this kind of functionality to a truly portable format (Sony eReader, Kindle, etc.), but the technology doesn’t seem to be there.
I hope to post on this as the project comes together, but I’ve got ask: does anyone have any better suggestions on a format?
I am worried about my grade…
I’m glad to say I haven’t had this conversation this past semester, but I have had very similar negotiations over my years of teaching.
