Tyndale Tech Goes Blog!

I am delighted to see David Instone-Brewer finally getting assimilated to the blogosphere:

Tyndale Tech
Electronic resources for Biblical Studies

Tyndale Tech tries to keep you up to date with electronic resources for Biblical Studies. I've now moved it to a blog-style site where you can add your comments on the issues. All the old posts are there, and new ones will be posted there as well as appearing in email. This means you can add your wisdom on the various topics to share with other scholars. It also means you can hear about new posts using RSS as well as or instead of emails . . .

Since David's first new post in the blog format, The Future of Communication, is full of fulfilled prophecies of his from the past, along with some new prophecies about technological changes, perhaps I may indulge myself by repeating my exhortation of 18 March 2005:

A public thought for David Instone-Brewer: you do a fantastic job with the Tyndale Techs and other contributions to Biblical scholarship and the internet, but are emailed alerts getting a little passé? Has the time now come for you to be assimilated to the biblioblogosphere? You'd do a great job and would enrich the community enormously.

In a subsequent update to that post, it looks like I repented of the "ruddy cheek" shown here but still expressed hope for his eventual assimilation, which has now arrived, I am happy to say. Since, as far as I know, David does not read the biblioblogs, it just goes to show that I can prophesy too.

Tyndale Tech Latest

David Instone-Brewer's latest Tyndale Tech, sent out as an email in June, has now gone online:

Tyndale Tech: June 2007: Backup, backup and again I say backup

I would quote a sentence or two because there are some nice turns of phrase and good suggestions which I would like to comment on directly, but David has disabled copy and paste and I am not going to type the stuff out fresh. But I would like to second David's loud and strong message here. It is so important to back up. I often say that every student and every scholar will have to have one major upset before they learn to back-up properly and regularly, whether it is a stolen laptop or a major crash. If you can get by without that major upset, that is wonderful, but few do. So do it now before it is too late; get into good habits.

I like David's suggestions of relying more on the internet as a means of more permanent back-up, and I learnt one new thing from this post -- GSpace, which is a great Firefox add-on that converts your GMail spare space into a kind of FTP back up. I've already started using that one.

The one thing I would add to David's advice would be to suggest migrating to an email service like GMail because of its amazing online storage capacity. I've known people who have lost laptops or had big crashes who say, "I've lost all my emails". Never again will that happen if you get into GMail. Another thing I would add, as something of a Googleholic, is that the new Google Documents and Spreadsheets allows you to create and edit documents online, which are stored in your Google account, and once again you have ready made back ups, accessible from everywhere.

Tyndale Tech Latest: Lexicons for Biblical Studies

The latest Tyndale Tech, originally sent out as an email in May 2007, is now available online and the topic this time is Lexicons:

Lexicons for Biblical Studies

As always, it's full of useful tips and great links. (One typo: "Sahedic" for Sahidic).

Latest Tyndale Tech: Biblical Fonts and Mac Woes

The latest Tyndale Tech email is now available online:

Biblical Fonts and Mac Woes: A Solution
April 2007
The good news for everyone is that Unicode has solved all our font problems.
The bad news for Mac users is that Hebrew doesn't work properly in Word.
The really good news is that NeoOffice now works as well as Word, with Hebrew, for free!

As usual, it's full of useful advice and great links. A couple of comments to come later.

Update (16:10): Danny Zacharias has some excellent comments on Latest Tyndale Tech: Some Clarifications.

Tyndale Tech Latest

Over at Tyndale House in Cambridge, David Instone Brewer sends out occasional Tyndale Tech emails, which feature items of interest and advice concerning computers and the study of the Bible. After a short while, David uploads the emails to the web, and the January 2007 email has recently appeared:

January 2007: Searching for Academic Research on the Web

As always, it is full of useful and interesting items. David recommends his own TynCat, a particularly helpful resource, and points to the new searchbox available for it for IE7. One thought for future development: how about a Firefox search plug-in for those of us who stopped using IE7 some time ago? (Actually, I still use it to watch the cricket on Willow TV but only because they've not made it available for Firefox yet). I took five minutes to try to create a Firefox Search Plug-in for TynCat but had no success with it and don't have the patience to try again. But I, for one, would be happy to have a successful search plug-in to add to my browser.

Update (Sunday, 23.55): In comments, Holger Szesnat notes:

I have written two quick and dirty TynCat search hacks for Firefox (author-search and title-words-search). They work for me, so presumably they'll work for others as well.

Save the following two files (tyncat-author.xml and tyncat-title.xml) to your firefox 'searchplugins' directory:

http://www.biblicalhermeneutics.net/tyncat-author.xml

and

http://www.biblicalhermeneutics.net/tyncat-title.xml

If you wish, adapt the XML code to a USA location (mine for is UK).

Thanks, Holger. They are working well for me.

Latest Tyndale Tech: Web Bible Tools

The latest Tyndale Tech (November 2006) is now available on-line. If you are unfamiliar with the Tyndale Tech phenomenon, this is an occasional email from David Instone-Brewer of Tyndale House, Cambridge, UK, which is always full of interesting helps for the those looking to expand their knowledge of and expertise in technical helps for Biblical study. After a month or two, the emails appear on the web site, as now with the latest:

Finding the Right Web Tool for the Job

I endorse what David says here, especially the enthusiasm for Zhubert.

One minor whinge about the Tyndale Tech emails -- the right click is disabled on links, so it's not as straightforward to copy links and bookmark them as it would otherwise be.

Tyndale Tech Latest

The latest Tyndale Tech from David Instone Brewer is now on-line and as usual, it is well worth consulting:

Time-Saving Tools for Writing

Of particular interest is the InsertBible tool -- details at the link above.

Tyndale Tech March 2006

One of the things mentioned in the Biblical Studies Bulletin 40 (see previous post) is the most recent Tyndale Tech from David Instone Brewer. A quick search shows that I have not blogged this previously, and it's certainly worth doing so:

Tyndale Tech: March 2006: Bibles in English and Ancient Languages on the Web

As usual, it's an excellent and informative post. I'd add just one thing: zhubert.com, which is a fantastic site for the Greek NT and tends to be the first place I go to these days.

Tyndale Tech Latest -- Unicode

The latest Tyndale Tech email arrived today from David Instone Brewer (not yet on the web) and it returns to the theme of Biblical language fonts and unicode. David has now dispensed with some of his previous qualms about the adoption of unicode, especially for those working with Macs (see April 2004: Greek and Hebrew Fonts: Unicode and Older and my blog comment Unicode: Tyndale Tech and some thoughts on Greek) and he has developed several of his own new utilities, including the following, in the tradition of his previous Tyndale Font Kits:

Tyndale Unicode Font Kit for PCs
http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Download/TyndaleUnicodePC.exe
Save this installer on your desktop, double-click on it to install the files, and follow the simple instructions to activate it. Then you can delete it.

Tyndale Unicode Font Kit for Macs
http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Download/TyndaleUnicodeMac.zip
Download this, open the folder, and open the "Instructions" file

I have not had chance to try these out for myself yet, but clearly it is likely to be another excellent and helpful tool.

One minor comment: David suggests that "Unicode fonts are loved by publishers". That has not been my own experience yet, though I think it is beginning to change. One of the biggest Theology and Religion / Biblical Studies publishers, T and T Clark International / Continuum, still go with SPIonic, something I'd like to see them change. I have found that other publishers are amenable to shifting to unicode when the aesthetics of font choice are pointed out, e.g. Palatino Linotype's Greek looks a whole league division more attractive than SPIonic.

To subscribe to the Tyndale Tech updates, if you are not already receiving them, go to Tyndale Tech and scroll to the bottom.

For more web helps on working with unicode, and especially Greek, see The Greek New Testament Gateway: Fonts.

Latest Tyndale Tech

The latest Tyndale Tech arrived this morning from David Instone-Brewer at Tyndale House in Cambridge. It's an excellent list of journals relevant to Theology and Religion divided up into free internet with no print, free internet plus print and paid internet plus print. It's a very useful and comprehensive list but, as usual, you'll have to wait for it to appear on-line, something that David does eventually at his discretion. The only thing I'd add to the list would be that there are a bunch of other freebies available for some of the journals listed here, e.g. note my own links on my Journals page to many of the available free-for-all issues of otherwise subscription-only journals (Semeia, Journal of Biblical Literature and all the new Sage journals, to mention a few).

A public thought for David Instone-Brewer: you do a fantastic job with the Tyndale Techs and other contributions to Biblical scholarship and the internet, but are emailed alerts getting a little passé? Has the time now come for you to be assimilated to the biblioblogosphere? You'd do a great job and would enrich the community enormously.

Update (Saturday, 22.37): link above fixed.

Update (Thursday, 00.31): Jim Davila comments, helpfully as ever, to this effect, "Now far be it from me to discourage anyone from starting a blog, but I think that the infrastructure for Tyndale Tech is pretty good as it is. I like to be able to click on one link to get a themed collection of websites and I think that a blog that just posted random websites as David found them would be less useful. Of course, maybe there's a middle way that would combine the benefits of blogging with the benefits of the current system to make something better. But David's system isn't broken, so I hope he'll be cautious about fixing it." I agree with Jim; my suggestion was of course a ruddy cheek in some ways. My slightly frivolous comment was certainly not intended to imply that there's anything broken about Tyndale Tech, just that I can't help thinking that someone with David's expertise and enthusiasm could make such a useful contribution to the blogosphere, and my guess is that he would enjoy the interaction that's possible here. But I may be wrong, and I've been presumptuous enough already.

Update (Good Friday, 11.03): Tim Bulkeley comments.

60 Years of Tyndale House

David Instone-Brewer's latest Tyndale Tech newsletter is all about William Tyndale in celebration of sixty years of Tyndale House. The newsletter itself is not yet copied to the web, but it does link to a nice visual tour of the 60th Birthday Celebrations. To see it, you have to go to this page:

Visual Tour of Tyndale House

And then you click on number 11 on the list, 60th Anniversary Celebrations. I found it educational. I was surprised to hear it said that in the immediate post-war period, evangelical Biblical scholars were not to be found in the UK, and that this was the catalyst for the creation of Tyndale House (". . . . the struggles to find even one senior evangelical scholar in Biblical Studies in the post-war period"). Wouldn't one class C. H. Dodd, C. F. D. Moule, F. F. Bruce and others as evangelical scholars? I have never been very good at the labels game.

Unicode: Tyndale Tech and some thoughts on Greek

David Instone-Brewer has uploaded to the web the latest of his Tyndale Tech newsletters (with thanks to Jim Davila on Paleojudaica for the alert). The topic is unicode, and especially unicode for Hebrew. As ever, it is full of useful bits and bobs:

Greek and Hebrew Fonts: Unicode and Older

I think my own experience of working with unicode is more positive than David's and for two reasons, first that I work with Greek a lot but Hebrew only a little and second that I work with PCs and not Macs. There are a few things I would add from my own experience and which may prove helpful to others:

(1) Palatino Linotype: if you are running Windows 2000 or XP you arleady have a unicode font installed called Palatino Linotype. This includes a Greek character set (not all unicode fonts do) and it looks excellent on both screen and paper. The reason that this is worth mentioning is that if you are running Windows 2000 or XP and require a really good Greek font, then you don't have to do anything.

(2) Inputting the text. This is the big issue. I have been using this excellent facility for some time now:

Unicode Classical Greek Inputter

This is designed by James Naughton and provides a very straightforward facility for you to type in unicode and then to copy and paste into your document. You can choose your preferred font (Arial Unicode MS, Cardo, Gentium, Palatino Linotype etc.). If you prefer mouse-clicking to typing, you can do that too. An additional advantage of this web page is that you can save it onto your hard drive and access it whenever or wherever you want, without being connected to the internet. So it's worth saving now while one has the chance -- it might not be there in a year's time!

(3) Quotations from the Greek New Testament: If in a given document you are simply writing out quotations from the Greek New Testament, there is no need to type this afresh. Here there are several options:

(a) Search or browse on The Unbound Bible, choosing "NA26, Accents (Unicode)" and copy and paste the results into your document.

(b) Do the same at the Online Greek Bible, choosing either "Athena" or "Palatino Linotype".

(c) Go to James Naughton's Unicode Classical Greek page and download the complete text of the Greek New Testament in an HTML help file or PDF. The advantage of this is that you can store it locally and use off-line.

Update (19.23): Paul Nikkel comments in Deinde on the Tyndale Tech email and the comments in Paleojudaica. He comments that "Actually the current Mac OS has Unicode support and as far as I know has had it since OS 8.5 or so. Also, contrary to the Tyndale article OpenType fonts are supported on the Mac OS X as far as I know, Mac Developers Article." Read more . . . . .

Update (Saturday, 22.24): Rubén Gómez comments in Biblical Software Review Weblog.

Update (Saturday, 22.32): Jim Davila comments in Paleojudaica. Minor note: Jim comments on Deinde, "If there's a way to link to individual posts on his site, I couldn't find it". You click on the "View comments" link and that gives you an URL for that post plus any subsequent comments on it.

Latest Tyndale Tech emails on-line

The two most recent Tyndale Tech emails from David Instone Brewer are now also on-line at:

Tyndale Tech (November 2003): Full text bibliography and journals on the web

Tyndale Tech (December 2003): Full text books on the web, free and subscription

What he has done is to combine details from the two separate emails originally sent to create the themes above. As I've often commented before, they are full of useful materials. If you don't already subscribe to these emails, I'd encourage you to do so -- they are always full of interesting and useful material. If I were to pick out one thing that I have found particularly new and helpful, I'd note the Tyndale Catalogue's facility to link to on-line versions of books at Amazon. David points out that books with this facility at Amazon actually outsell those without it, something that might give a second thought to those nervous about placing full texts of books on-line. I wonder, though, whether this may be due in large part to the fact that the books Amazon has full-text searches for are already the more popular books on their site, those marketed in a bigger way by their publishers, so the fact mentioned may not be particularly telling.

In the second of the two emails, David also lists with links a good number of books that are available for full-text searching at Amazon -- also very useful.

One thing now to add to the bibliographical resources listed (see also WWW links for finding books and articles) is BiBIL, on which I've been blogging recently. If I might be so bold, I would also be inclined to draw attention to the NT Gateway as a good resource of links to on-line books and articles and it has the added advantage of being categorised by topic. Further, the NT Gateway's page on Journals provides a fuller and better and more fully annotated list than those listed by David, especially the bsw one which is now very out of date.

Tyndale Tech and Theology Portal

David Instone-Brewer yesterday issued a follow-up to his latest Tyndale Tech email, this one drawing attention to more full-text availability on the internet. I'll pick out a few highlights over the coming days, as usual (and may also comment that Tyndale Techs remain NT Gateway - free zones). David is also singing the praises of the new Theology Portal (cf. my blog entry on) and this reminded me to add a proper entry on the NT Gateway Resources page which I've now done:

General Resources: Religion and Theology

Tyndale Tech and Red Light Green

The latest Tyndale Tech email from David Instone Brewer arrived last week. As usual it is full of interesting tips and links (though also as usual it is a NT Gateway free zone; I hope David is not boycotting me!). The theme this month is Full-text books and articles on the web. There are several links of interest. The first is something called Red Light Green. Here's the link:

Red Light Green

I've added to the NT Gateway: Bibliography (Search Engine) page with this description:

Project emerging from the Research Libraries Group "designed for undergraduates using the Web and the libraries that support them". RedLightGreen.com delivers information from RLG members about more than 130 million books for education and research; and it links students back to their campus libraries for the books they select.

While updating that page, I noticed that the BSW Multi-Library Search is still not working so I've relegated it to the bottom of the page and added a note to that effect. I think it's not been working for some time now and so I'll drop the link soon if there's no change.

Tyndale Tech Email

I referred the other day to the latest Tyndale Tech email. David Instone Brewer has now uploaded it to the web:

Tyndale Tech, October 2003: Lexicons for Biblical Languages

AHRB Greek Bible Project

One link from the latest Tyndale Tech (see previous blog entry) is:

AHRB Greek Bible Project

From their site:

This project, directed by Dr Tessa Rajak and Dr Sarah Pearce, with Dr James Aitken as Post-Doctoral Research Fellow and Dr Jenny Dines as Research Associate, will provide a re-evaluation of the Greek Bible as a source for Jews' interpretation of the political, social and intellectual culture of their hellenistic world (defined as continuing into the period of the early Roman Empire).

It's based at Reading University. There is some material of interest (but no link to the NT Gateway -- what?!) and a trial run for the following:

The Database of Septuagint Greek

This looks like it will be a really valuable resource in time. It's described as "A database of political legal and administrative words in the LXX and contemporary literature". I am particularly encouraged to see major projects like this having a strong web presence -- it would be excellent if the results are all disseminated via the web. At the moment the web design of the database wants a bit of work -- you have to go to 1024x768 to view it properly, a bit like the old SBL site prior to the revamp. And there is a lot of scrolling down to do in Netscape 7. And they need to switch their spellchecker on. But these are minor gripes -- I look forward to seeing this develop.

Tyndale Tech

The latest Tyndale Tech newsletter has just appeared from David Instone-Brewer. The theme for this one is Lexicons for Biblical Languages. The emailed version has gone out but it's not yet on the web (check Tyndale Tech Emails for older ones). There are some interesting links in the new one that require some exploration.