Technology

In the preview release of the latest Kindle software update (3.1), Amazon is beginning to allow Kindle edition readers to access the same page numbers that their print edition-reading counterparts can see: Our customers have told us they want real page numbers that match the page numbers in print books so they can easily reference and cite passages, and read alongside others in a book club or class. We’ve already added real page numbers to tens of thousands of Kindle books, including the top 100 bestselling books in the Kindle Store that have matching print editions and thousands more of the most popular books. Page numbers will also be available on our free “Buy Once, Read Everywhere” Kindle apps in the coming months. If a Kindle book includes page numbers, press the Menu key in an open Kindle book to display page numbers ( [Amazon](//www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_navbox_top_kindlelg?nodeId=200529700" target="_blank">)). ...

In the fairly short time since the initial notice, the alpha version of a browser-independent Zotero has now become available. A fully stable release is likely some time away yet, but the noticeable and rapid progress on the initiative is encouraging.

What wonderful news just came through from Logos: We are about to begin processing Pre-Pub orders for Qumran Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls Database. For a description of the resource, see here. Oh, happy day. :)

As an incentive to download and install NookStudy, Barnes and Noble is offering registered users the opportunity to download up to twelve NookBook classics for free. Among these texts are Dante’s Inferno and Plato’s Republic.

Through its pre-publication program, Logos Bible Software is now offering the fourteen-volume Eerdmans Biblical Resources Series. Series titles include: Adele Berlin, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism Richard Burridge, What Are the Gospels John Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination John Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem Frank Moore Cross, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry Joseph Fitzmyer, To Advance the Gospel Hermann Gunkel, Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton Richard Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ Colin Hemer, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia Anthony Saldarini, Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees in Palestinian Society Anthony Saldarini, The Semitic Background of the New Testament (vols. 1–2) Mark Smith, The Early History of God Samuel Terrien, Till the Heart Sings

The Google eBookstore is now live and offering more than 3 million ebooks with an accompanying web-based ebook reader.

This week in the biblioblogosphere: Bob Cargill notes that, on December 11, the National Geographic Channel will re-air its special on “Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Brian LePort hypertextually ponders Derridean non-extra-textuality and deconstruction, and he notes twenty-nine doctoral theses that the University of Durham has recently made available. Michael Bird shows how to benefit most from the new SBL Greek New Testament and notes that the new Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters now has its own blog. Google Editions are poised to hit the e-book market later this month and allow fee-based full access to copyrighted titles. For some additional details and thoughts, see Blog Kindle and Google Books Help.

Thanks to Chris Brady for making available a series of podcasts with the papers from this year’s SBL Blogger and Online Publication Section: James Davila, University of St. Andrews, “What Just Happened: The Rise of ‘Biblioblogging’ in the First Decade of the Twenty-first Century” Christian Brady, Pennsylvania State University, “Online Biblical Studies: Past, Present, Promise, and Peril” Michael Barber, John Paul the Great Catholic University, “Weblogs and the Academy: The Benefits and Challenges of Biblioblogging” James McGrath, Butler University, “The Blogging Revolution: New Technologies and Their Impact on How We Do Scholarship” Robert Cargill, University of California-Los Angeles, “Instruction, Research, and the Future of Online Educational Technologies” Having unfortunately been unable to attend this particular session, I am very much looking forward to catching up on the presentations there through these podcasts. Thanks, again, Chris! ...

Yesterday, Tyndale Tech released the following series of helpful posts: Writing a Book or Thesis Research You Can Re-search Surviving the Death of Your Hard Drive Writing Greek and Hebrew on a Computer Translating Online Finding and Reading Online Books and Periodicals

Just a bit ago, on the Document Foundation’s listserv, the following press release came out: “The Document Foundation is about documents and the associated software is pivotal to create, exchange, modify, share and print documents”, says Thorsten Behrens, a software developer and a member of TDF Steering Committee. “LibreOffice 3.3 is the first flavour of this long term strategy, but the journey has just begun, and the enormous advantages of our developer-embracing environment are not yet fully reflected in the upcoming software release”. ...

Emanuel Tov has posted a number of his publications online in openly-accessible, PDF format. Hearty thanks to Dr. Tov for this contribution to digital scholarship in biblical studies. HT: Tommy Wasserman.

In working on the phrase εἰς ἐπίγνωσιν τοῦ μυστηρίου τοῦ θεοῦ, Χριστοῦ in Col 2:2 ( NA27 punctuation), I stumbled upon J. B. Lightfoot’s commentary on Colossians in full view, PDF format on Google Books. According to Lightfoot ( 239), ...

Over at Academia.edu, Charles Jones, Head Librarian at New York University, has requested suggestions for additions to a new list of “Ancient World Open Bibliographies.” Of course, as it develops, the bibliography should certainly list New Testament Gateway. Maintainers of ancient world bibliographic resources can note additions on Academia.edu or the bibliography page itself. ...

Among the growing body of scholarly resources available on Kindle ( sans page numbers, unfortunately), is Bruce Metzger’s Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Palaeography. Sounds like a good thing to read electronically in bright sunlight to me. :-) ...

Along with Logos 4 users, Libronix users may now download and install the SBL Greek New Testament and its apparatus. HT: Logos.

Earlier today, the Zotero Project announced concrete plans to release a stand-alone, browser-independent version of their open-source, bibliographic management system. Since its inception, Zotero has been tied to Mozilla Firefox as a support for its underlying architecture. Yet, as the members of the Zotero Project recognize, “not all researchers can or want to use” Firefox. In addition to maintaining Zotero’s compatibility with Firefox, this “major new initiative” for a stand-alone version of Zotero will “soon” allow users of “Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Internet Explorer” to use Zotero with whichever of these browsers they choose. This move will extend Zotero’s availability to approximately 98% of internet users. ...

Another set of Zotero updates is available that remedies some stability issues and brings us up through 2.0.7 to 2.0.8.

This past week, along with several bug fixes, Zotero got some substantive updates to its syncing and word-processor integration features. As usual, the Zotero website has change logs for the main new release, 2.0.4, as well as what are, thus far, the two additional, supplementary ones ( 2.0.5, 2.0.6). ...

A while back, when I finally decided to preorder the Göttingen Septuagint from Logos before the initial, pre-publication special ended, and when I did so, I was quite prepared to wait several years before this resource actually went through and came out of development. Yet, earlier today, I happened to stumble across this on the Logos website: So, rather than a couple years, the Logos edition of the Göttingen Septuagint is apparently just over a couple months away (!). ...

Earlier this morning, Logos Bible Software announced the release of the beta version of Biblia.com. To all visitors, Biblia.com offers access to slightly more than forty resources, including various Bible translations and a few more dated Greek New Testament texts. Free registration at Biblia.com allows users to access still other resources. ...

This week in the biblioblogosphere: Mark Goodacre finds and makes available a PDF version of Wilhelm Wrede’s Paul. Daniel and Tonya draw attention to Alex Andrason’s recent article on the use of yiqtol in Biblical Hebrew (via Uri Hurwitz) and Randall Buth’s response to the article. Via Ekaterini Tsalampouni, Holger Szesnat mentions the availability of the new Journal of Ancient Judaism. Christian Askeland notes the availability of a stable, Unicode-compliant Coptic font. At BioLogos, Peter Enns interviews N. T. Wright about Jesus’ humanity. Kirk Lowery ponders current developments in the peer review process for scholarly publications. Scot McKnight prepares his readers for a change of blogging address. Larry Hurtado uploads an essay on Martin Hengel’s impact on English-speaking, New Testament scholarship. Charles Halton considers cartographic hermeneutics and some of their implications for readers of biblical texts.

This week in the blogosphere: James McGrath helpfully notes that John Byron, Associate Professor of New Testament at Ashland Theological Seminary, is now blogging at The Biblical World. Sadly, Gerald Hawthorne passes away (HT: John Byron). Helen Bond discusses the composition of the Sanhedrin in first-century Palestine. Trevor provides a good summary of a variety of different ways to add records to Zotero. Happy Dissertating suggests priming the writing pump as necessary via 750 Words. Based on what the site provides, it looks like a fully private blog could also be used in much the same way, but particularly for those who would prefer not to need to ensure for themselves that all their privacy settings are correct or who might enjoy some of the other features that 750 Words offers, the site may be worth a look. Pat McCullough begins a bibliography of resources about the application of Social Identity Theory to biblical studies and invites suggestions for additions.

According to Google, the world contains about 129,864,880 books. Google calculated this number by combining duplicate entries from a data base of nearly one billion raw, bibliographic records and by eliminating about an additional 16.5 million non-books that had records in Google’s raw data base.

This week in the blogosphere: Baker acquires Hendrickson’s academic arm (HT: Nijay Gupta and Rod Decker). Larry Hurtado rightfully lauds and recommends careful attention to Harry Gable’s Books and Readers in the Early Church. Cynthia Nielsen continues her discussion of interconnections between Joerg Rieger and Frederick Douglass with a post about duality in identity construction. Michael Halcomb has a new website specifically dedicated to Getting (Theological) Languages. Kirk Lowery returns to the biblioblogosphere after a hiatus for the development of the Groves Center as an independent research unit. I had the privilege of doing an Aramaic and a Hebrew Bible text-linguistics seminar under Kirk and am again looking forward to seeing what shows up on his “scratchpad.” Happy Dissertating suggests PhD2Published as a potentially valuable resource for new PhD graduates in humanities disciplines. James McGrath spots several video recordings of presentations at this past year’s annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Michael Bird starts reading a recent biography of Ernst Käsemann and reproduces several, brief quotations from Käsemann that are, as one might expect, particularly insightful. Todd Bolen reports a recent spectrometric analysis that suggests a Jerusalem origin for a newly discovered cuneiform tablet. Ken Schenck discusses the reading of biblical literature as Christian scripture. Brian LePort discusses the relationship between scripture and tradition in view of the Trinitarian-Oneness debate. On this relationship, our Writing Center director at Southeastern recently brought to my attention F. F. Bruce’s edited volume, Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. I have yet really to peruse it, and the book is scarcely findable in print at this point. Still, it does look like a very interesting volume, and much of it is available through Google Books. Google and Verizon propose, regarding Net Neutrality,“that ‘wireline broadband providers [sh]ould not be able to discriminate against or prioritize lawful Internet content, applications or services in a way that causes harm to users or competition’, but broadband providers [sh]ould be able to offer ‘additional, differentiated online services’.” Chris Brady shares some of his conclusions from his recent International Organization for Targumic Studies presentation about Boaz in Targum Ruth.

In the past few weeks, I had thought of what might be a pedagogically helpful application for Google Wave. I had all but decided to experiment with it in a course assignment, but on Wednesday, Google announced that it would not “continue developing Wave as a standalone product” but would, over time, “extend the technology for use in other Google projects.” So, apparently, it is time to “wave” goodbye and wait to see what the next iteration of the technology holds. ...

The equivalent of 15 print volumes of over 1,800 Oxyrhynchus Papyri fragments are now available to order from Logos via their pre-publication discount program. Details about the module and a list of the papyri it will include are available here. ...

According to Google’s blog, the National Library of the Netherlands will soon start making over 160,000 public-domain volumes available through Google Books. Works targeted for digitization “constitute nearly the library’s entire collection of out-of-copyright books, written during the 18th and 19th centuries.” Among the authors whose works this post explicitly notes as being included within this group is Abraham Kuyper (at least via a direct link to his Wikipedia page), the Dutch Reformed theologian, philosopher, and politician. ...

The Evernote blog has a helpful new video for Google Chrome users, showing them how to get Chrome to search their Evernote accounts directly. Firefox users can achieve the same results with Ubiquity (0.1.9.1) by copying this code into the Ubiquity command editor or by subscribing to this command feed. ...

This morning, Tommy Wasserman introduces the new “Digitised Manuscripts Blog,” which will “report on various issues related to the current digitisation projects at the British Library, in particularly the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.” Wasserman especially draws attention to Juan Garcés’s post from yesterday. There, Garcés notes that “[t]he first phase of the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project, funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, will include no less than one majuscule from the 7th century, 33 minuscules from the 10th–14th centuries, and 16 lectionaries from the 11th–14th centuries,” and he mentions plans to “post on a selection of these over the following weeks,” a series that will surely prove interesting. ...

The final release of Zotero 2.0 is now available. For a list of changes since 2.0rc5, see here, or check this page for upgrade instructions and a list of new features in Zotero 2.0.