That was the subtitle of a talk I gave at a seminar of the Centre for Humanities Innovation (CHI) at Durham University yesterday. What I wanted to do was initiate a conversation about new and old forms of scholarly communication and offer a way of classifying them to help scholars consider taking up new forms. Along the way,… Continue Reading
Joel Marcus of Duke University recently wrote a tribute to J. Louis Martyn in which he said, But he was even better as a seminar leader, and even better than that in one-on-one conversation, because he always conveyed the sense that, however stupid you thought yourself to be, he was learning something from you. And I… Continue Reading
I recently came across a post by Roger Olson called “The Absurdity of “Higher Criticism” of the Gospels.” I think I am as bothered about his characterisation of higher criticism (hereafter HC)–indeed, even the use of the term–as he is about HC itself. Olson implies that HC is basically a kind of biblical criticism* that is “…negative or destructive… Continue Reading
Recently I gave a CODEC Research Seminar on how the paratexts of Bibles–those framing features of Bibles such as book form, covers, page layout, etc.–have changed over time. A recording of the seminar is now available here: “From Scrolls to Scrolling.” The original abstract is as follows: Biblical texts have been recorded upon (or in) various media… Continue Reading
Fortnightly CODEC staff meet to discuss a reading selected on rotation. This week was my selection, Alan Liu’s “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” PMLA 128.2 (2013). He argues that the problem of meaning in the digital humanities registers a crisis of meaning in the humanities more generally. In his words: My thesis is that an understanding of… Continue Reading
Recently someone asked me what I was up to with my work. I answered that in addition to my New Testament work (a discipline we share), I was doing front- and back-end web development for a project related to biblical studies. The response: “Oh. Well, I’m sure that will come in handy in the future.” Perhaps it was… Continue Reading
The Washington Post has a piece entitled, “When ‘Jesus’ was ‘Judas’ and other pretty stupendous Bible typos.” The most interesting thing about the article to me was that much of its material was taken from a journal article written by the foremost scholar of New Testament textual criticism at the time, Bruce Metzger. Good for the Post. How… Continue Reading
Help in thinking about how Digital Humanities relates to the humanities (and communicates its relation) can be found in Ryan Cordell’s lecture-turned-blogpost, “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities.” As the title suggests, Cordell’s main focus is on teaching DH, and he presents the failures and successes of one of his own undergraduate courses as exhibit A. Along the way he touches… Continue Reading
A few months ago, the CODEC team discussed pieces of Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader (Ashgate, 2013). One interesting chapter from that book is entitled “Selected Definitions from the Day of Digital Humanities 2009–2012.” The diversity of quoted scholars and their various definitions are instructive and reflect to some extent ongoing debates in the area. One of… Continue Reading
Proofing:Debugging::Writing:Development I spent a lot of yesterday troubleshooting some website issues related to one of my work projects. In one case, a theme developer had left three absolute urls to a development sandbox in the code (which means on a new server, those urls no longer work, resulting in long page loads and 404 errors). Reflecting on the… Continue Reading