As I understand it, the post Britannica’s New Site: More Participation, Collaboration from Experts and Readers basically announces that the Wikipedia model has so much going for it that Britannica has to adopt elements from its greatest rival's method of working. By that I mean that the announcement clearly hopes that something of the incredible energy and diversity of the Wikipedia community involvement will be able to be harnessed into a more controlled and even attributed and peer reviewed environment. It is a grand dream. It looks well thought out.
Among many ideas, this one stood out for me:
Britannica will help them with research and publishing tools and by allowing them to easily use text and non-text material from Encyclopaedia Britannica in their work. We will publish the final products on our site for the benefit of all readers, with all due attribution and credit to the people who created them. The authors will have the option of collaborating with others on their work, but each author will retainIs this Britannica "getting" the commercial potential of Web 2.0, and like Google and YouTube planning to profit from it, or is it more?
control of his or her own work.
You can preview the new site, which is still in beta testing, at http://www.britannica.com/bps/home. A portion of the people who visit Britannica Online today are being routed to this site and are using it now; soon it will replace our current site at www.britannica.com entirely, and the new features we have described above will be introduced in the weeks and months ahead.I can't wait to see how this attempt to marry the best of the new with the best of the old works out, in the years and decades, rather than weeks and months ahead! One thing is for sure, at last the "old" is gone, buried and dead... I still wonder what the new will look like, and wonder at what it has already given us.
In the post that preceded the announcement and anticipated it a contributor, Jorge Cauz, three important principles:
- "ownership" - by which he means attribution and responsibility - about which none need fear or quibble
- "the voices and powers of experts" which is a much less attractive phrase than the Britannica's official "community of scholars" I hope the official version wins out, I would hate to be at the mercy of the power of experts, since the "experts" of the past become in the present fools
- "objectivity" which he claims is merely "difficult to attain", my view is that it is an impossible though perhaps desirable dream!
We believe that to provide lively and intelligent coverage of complex subjects requires experts and knowledgeable editors who can make astute judgments that cut through the on a topic.This reads to me dangerously like the tyranny of "experts" that every successful totalitarian regime in the 20th century ensured.Give me the "cacophony of competing and often
confusing viewpoints" over the bland, expert unitary point of view - but then I believe truth is more important than "standing" ;-)
Labels: digital, internet, open.access.scholarship, scholarship, web2.0
¶ 3:17 PM
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So how about a session at CARG devoted to recommending citations styles for e-texts, which could then go to the proper quarters to be included in the next edition (ten years is a very long time in scholarship in the 21st century ;-) of the SBL Handbook of Style.
Labels: biblical.studies, biblical.studies.online, bibliography, digital
¶ 9:25 AM
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The chapters are podcast using PHP to read the directories and create both the RSS feeds and the corresponding web pages. So... what I need is someone who can help me create a blog using the same (sort of?) mechanism.
If you know someone who might (a) be interested in helping and (b) might have the necessary skills please let me know!
Labels: audio, bible, digital, internet
¶ 5:58 PM
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This collection of sources supplements a bibliography published by Baker under the auspices of the Institute for Biblical Research: D. Brent Sandy and Daniel M. O’Hare, Prophecy and Apocalyptic: An Annotated Bibliography (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007).
In the process of compiling sources, hundreds were entered into our data base (many of which were annotated), but in the end they could not be included in the final selection for the printed edition of the bibliography. Hence, those sources are here made available.
Which is great, a sort of bonus for those who have the print book. Well done! However, they also write:
One advantage of thisWhich is not so great... because what it means is that I can easily search the supplementary material, but the material in the print book must be inconveniently searched by hand. In other words the bibliography would have been better published online or at least electronically in the first place! BUT some criterion other than the advantage to the user caused it to be published in print, and now in order that the print book may sell the online more convenient and usable version cannot contain the full dataset.
digital version of the bibliography is that you may search for specific
words pertinent to your research.
The scholarly prejudice against e-publication strikes again!
Labels: digital, internet, open.access.scholarship, open.biblical.studies
¶ 5:54 PM
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Thus:
print journalism is going through a wrenching transformation, and its future is in doubt. Over the past two decades, newspaper readership in the United States has plummeted. After peaking in 1984, at 63 million copies, the daily circulation of American papers fell steadily at a rate of about 1 percent a year until 2004 when it hit 55 million. Since then, the pace of the decline has accelerated. Circulation fell by more than 2 percent in 2005 and by about 3 percent in 2006.A print newspaper is a "bundle" of services but:
When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else.This, it is sometimes argued, is promoting an "unbundling" of traditional newspaper services, with some becoming free on the Internet, and other more specialised services being paid for, yet users do not want to pay online, and:
few newspapers, other than specialized ones like the Wall Street Journal, are able to charge anything for their content online, the success of a story as a product is judged by the advertising revenues it generates. Advertisers no longer have to pay to appear in a bundle.Neither the first article, nor Clay Shirky's followup, which argues that What Newspapers and Journalism Need Now: Experimentation, Not Nostalgia, really offers a clear prediction of the future of investigative journalism, though Clay seems to see blogging filling this role [?] ;).
Sean asks some sensible questions:
If you take as a given that academic publishing must change to meet the new realities of the Internet economy (i do), which parts will become essentially free goods, and which parts will continue to require a high level of professional competence. Even more importantly, assuming some of these services can’t be easily replaced, what are the new economic models that will provide the required compensation for them?My answers really haven't changed much over recent years. I still see the "content" of tertiary education (textbooks and lectures typically in the current system) becoming free, or at least dirt cheap. See "Gatekeepers, Open Courseware and the future of the University". That others have joined MIT since 2004 just reinforces this view. Nichthus will ask: How will such content be financed? Basically I suspect long term through either advertising or cheap prices and high volume (a sort of iTunes University ;-)
So, what will teachers, like me, offer to justify our excessive salaries: guidance, tuition, the things we have traditionally provided, since time immemorial. See: Tim Bulkeley "Back
to the Future: virtual theologising as recapitulation" Colloquium,
2005, 37,2, 115-130.
Labels: digital, education, internet
¶ 10:22 AM
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It's nearly the end of the year, just the marking tide to survive... I'm looking forward to my sabbatical! So, I'm buying "books"...
The first is delivered in print, I expect/hope to be surprised and delighted with a different perspective, even if the editors are all people whose works already fill my shelves ;-)
The second is actually 58 books the Word Biblical Commentary series. Paper copies of many of these are already on my shelves, but the convenience of adding them to my portable office (alias HP laptop) and to search and jump is just too good to resist... though, I have resisted the new, improved and updated edition with 59 volumes and the updated Isaiah volumes, a few hundred dollars (US!) more for three volumes is too much! ¶ 12:44 PM
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AKMA has a post noticing Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows and its business model, for forty pounds sterling you can get a package with EVERYTHING: But if all you want is the music, of the basic album, why download it and pay whatever you think is right. That's right, you fix the price.…the new album, in
rainbows, on CD and on 2 x 12 inch heavyweight vinyl records.
A second, enhanced CD contains more new songs, along with digital photographs
and artwork.
The discbox also includes artwork and lyric booklets.
All are encased in a hardback book and slipcase.
Business Week had this to say:
Amy Phillips on Pitchfork wrote:
AKMA expressed similar sentiments more verbosely but decorously:
I am convinced they are right... But how do people (say biblical scholars) who do not get paid mega-bucks for personal appearances and the like pay for the other people's work needed for a successful publication. Our own work is either a hobby or we are paid for it as part of our job, but whatever format we choose except the casual blog, we need proofreaders, designers, film editors etc... to help make the "product"... how do we pay them?
makes easy and by charging for what the internet doesn’t
facilitate (personal appearances, physical artifacts like packaging,
clothing, books, and so on). It’s that simple, but some
people and some corporate entities want to force the internet to
conform to the properties and characteristics of a pre-digital
environment. In the long run, they’ll be as successful as the
dinosaurs who commanded mammals to respond the the ice age by voluntary
mass extinction.
Labels: digital, media, open.biblical.studies
¶ 6:38 AM
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In a frictionless environment, I'd suggest a radical reconfiguration of the idea of teaching and scholarship -- but the constraints from the institutionalization of education constitute a barrier that only a fabulously wealthy patron could overcome. And I don't have the free time to dedicate to imagining that reconfiguration in detail, especially since the more vividly I imagine it, the more frustrating it is that it won't happen.
By 
AKMA, at
October 4, 2007 3:25 AM
This freedom of information must terrify the Junta! Chris added a fascinating comment by Soe Myint of Mizzima News saying:
Citizen Journalists in Burma have demonstrated that the exclusion of professional reporters no longer cuts of the flow of news, (though it does guarantee that much of it is produced by people unsympathetic to the administration.)
In a similar vein, a student in the prophets class talking about a recent project on culturally approved slavery in Ghana (he prepared the project for our Integrative Seminar on Slavery Today) went on to describe how he was exploring setting up a partnership with a local congregation in Ghana, like the one his church has with a church in the USA. Such intercontinental partnerships were much more costly and inconvenient two decades ago. Maybe it is time more congregations started to realise that "It's a small world after all!"
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Text criticism is not everyone's cup of tea (odd expression! but one I grew up with...) indeed, the discussions that get specialists in the field excited often leave others yawning. And yet, it is vital to any and all biblical interpretation. A bit like a visit to the dentist, no fun (sometimes far from it) but important and not to be avoided!However, John's substantial and argumentative review of the new fascicles of Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ): Taking Stock of Biblia Hebraica Quinta (and perhaps inevitably also of the whole field of textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible) makes interesting and even entertaining reading.
Not long ago the Targuman had a post Ehrman @ PSU that included the subtitle "Making Text Criticism Sexy". This is what John achieves, though perhaps for a different audience ;-) Writing like this:
According to James Sanders in his review of BHQ 18, a review more rambling, believe it or not, than this one, “Another highly commendable trait of BHQ is that of presenting the text honoring the te’amim or masoretic accent marks.”Will hold my interest, even when the topic is text criticism!Would that this were true. [9]
Once again, I am left wondering, bewildered at the attachment of biblical scholars to the codex as tribal totem. As John points out, thanks to the explosion of information about earlier (than Medieval) forms of the text in the last century or so, printing such works has become a massive task:
Upon completion, BHQ is slated to be issued as a single volume containing text, masorah, and apparatus. An accompanying volume is expected to contain the other components of the fascicles that are now coming out: an introduction to each textual unit, notes on the masorah parva, notes on the masorah magna, notes on the critical apparatus, and an index of cited works.Oh, goody! A three volume Bible to carry into class... Not only this, but John also points out the need for "Updateability" (in a section of that title). Any reference work of this sort needs to be updateable, information available changes... So, you ask - well I do even if you didn't! - is this magnificent opus being produced and disseminated electronically, thus allowing me to subscribe to the latest edition. Well, no. We scholars produce "books", so we'll be stuck with the out of date, three volume (how practical!) but beautifully bound codex edition. Or, after a decent delay, in case the electronic edition diminishes sales of the (horrendously expensive to produce) print edition, we can buy at an inflated price (though happily now a little lower than the
That may not be realistic. Text, masorah, and apparatus of the two BHQ fascicles published so far exceed by 20 and 60 per cent in cumulative girth their equivalents in BHS. A single-volume edition is still imaginable, but will be bulky. Based on the fascicles published to date, it seems likely that the commentary to the single volume edition will require three volumes, not one.
Oh, boy, how the primitive culture (Late Mechanical Age III) of these biblical scholars causes them to suffer in order to maintain their signs of tribal allegiance!
Labels: bible, digital, text criticism
¶ 6:40 AM
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One thing print editions don't need is a power cord or battery. They are 100% energy independent. They are totally portable, and their batteries never die. I'll take that over the unreliable and unstable electronic versions any day.
By 
Jim, at
March 21, 2007 7:39 AM
Hmm... my phone (includes a 640x480 screen and PocketPC so could "run" a complex text like this) runs for days on a charge, the XO (One Laptop Per Child $100 laptop) runs for 10 mins for each minute someone spends pulling its string. Either is FAR more portable than a three volume (plus another if you want the extra information) set print edition... I'll take cheap, portable, more up to date and accurate etc. etc. over the luggable codices!
(BTW my laptop ran this morning while I was [among many other things] composing the post for 4 hours on battery alone. Admittedly the meter only claimed it had under two more hours left, so if I planned to be more than 6 hours or so without access to any power point I might need the codex as a backup - if it will fit in my backpack with the tent etc... ;-)
By Tim, at
March 21, 2007 8:15 AM
That day was foreseen back in 1993 (the year I started at Carey) by a cyperpunk called "Stranger", and recognised as a significant insight by Nathan Cobb, "Cyberpunk -- Terminal Chic?," Boston Globe (24 November 1992, pp. 29, 32), now online in various places. [Hat tip to Alex Soojung-Kim Pang of The End of Cyberspace and his "former student Josh Buhs".]
It was nearly midnight deep inside Venus de Milo, a dark and sweaty Boston dance emporium. The Shamen, a British musical duo augmented by an assortment of digital gewgaws, was unleashing a storm of high-energy technopop that was cyberpunk through and through. "We can see tomorrow in each other's eyes," they sang at one point as the bouncing crowd raised its collective fist, presumably in the direction of cyberspace.Meanwhile back on planet Carey... it's the start of the year, and students are facing the challenging world of networked electronic communication. Some arrive already literate, but others - mainly the over-forties - are illiterate by 21st century standards. Like 19th century factory workers or farmers who could not read or write a letter, they have difficulty reading and writing online. "Discussion forums" are frightening, online multi-choice tests terrify... today they are illiterate, even if their spelling and punctuation are hugely better than that of their, usually younger, literate peers.
...
A handful of computer jockeys have spawned a style and an attitude. It's no coincidence that Mondo 2000, a glossy quarterly magazine that trumpets the pop version of cyberpunk, likes to talk about "surfin' the new edge." Way cool.
And consider: Cyberpunk is only a corner of a much broader cyberculture- at-large, which includes an online worldwide population of middle-aged couch potatoes, wheezy academics, corporate pooh-bahs, govermnet drones, and on and one. "In the future it will be everywhere, but it won't be called cyberculture," says Stranger, a 17-year-old Miami high school senior who, like most hackers, prefers his computer handle to his real name. "It will just be called culture. A few years ago, people used to talk about 'the emerging TV cuture.' We no longer talk about a 'TV culture' today. It's a given. Somdeay soon, no one will talk about 'emerging cyberculture.' Because it will be a given, too."
Oh, for the day when networked communication technology is ubiquitous, and as invisible to us as the complex and esoteric technologies of alphabets, pens and paper have become. In the meanwhile, we'll muddle through, and try along with Job and Genesis to help you gain the basic skills for educated survival in the current century!
(Shame most of you cannot yet read this blog post, and God forbid I should podcast the ideas ;-)
Labels: culture, digital, literacy, network
¶ 10:58 AM
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And yet, when a technology becomes ubiquitous (and part of the environment) it ceases to be seen as a machine, or something that can be understood as a system; it becomes opaque. And that then opens the door to 'magic'. No longer do you have to understand a technology to use it, rather all you need to do is remember the incantations, rituals and actions required to make it work.
And, at that point, those actions become divorced from the actual technological understanding of the task at hand, and become instead part of a new narrative world and mythology about why things work the way they do.
By Stephen G, at
March 9, 2007 9:54 PM
There is a LOT of magical thinking around already about computers ;-) With many users learning the sort of rituals you describe. So, I suspect it is the opposite, few people treat driving a car as magic, we just do it, semi-unconsciously even. But stick the same person in front of a screen even a diddy telephone screen and they start to require incantations and rituals...
So, I think ubiquitous technologies (like paper) become transparent rather than opaque, we see through them and focus on the tasks...
By Tim, at
March 10, 2007 6:29 AM
And yet, the car is an opaque technology. It's a blackbox. You learn to fill it with petrol, have the 'priestly' mechanics service it, and the actions of driving are disconnected from how the machine actually works. More so in an age where the engine etc. is electronically monitored and controlled.
Perhaps, the problems you describe are more to do with some people being unwilling to learn the incantations to make something work without the other knowledge, while others are quite happy to do so.
By Stephen G, at
March 10, 2007 12:42 PM
Perhaps it's more that, as a technologist, you'd like people to understand how things work; while as a teacher I want people to use them - and if they can do that effectively then I'm happy whether they understand or not. In the age before the model T people needed to understand cars, and many (of the few who actually had access to cars) also had professional help to maintain and drive them. Now people drive them from A to B and back via C, and if (rarely even compared to the 70s, let alone the 30s) something goes wrong then mechanics are nearly ubiquitous.
I'll be delighted when networked communications become as black boxy as cars, and all most people need to know is how to put the petrol in, or as paper and once they leave primary school all they need to know is where to buy refills...
By Tim, at
March 10, 2007 3:58 PM
