I've updated the NT Gateway: Podcasts page with the two new podcasts that have been established recently, T. Michael Law's Septuagint Sessions and the T & T Clark Podcast, the first episode of which features Dominic Mattos interviewing Chris Keith.
Update (4 Nov. 2014): the second episode of the T & T Clark Podcast is now available and features an interview with Francesca Stavrakopoulou.
Showing posts with label podcasts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label podcasts. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Monday, October 08, 2012
Lost Gospels on All Things Considered
Yesterday's All Things Considered on BBC Wales featured an excellent discussion of "Lost Gospels". It began with a discussion of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife and goes on to discuss Noncanonical Gospels more broadly. You can download the podcast here; and this is the main podcast page:
All Things Considered: Lost Gospels
One of the guests is Simon Gathercole, who has recently published The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas.
All Things Considered: Lost Gospels
One of the guests is Simon Gathercole, who has recently published The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Pods, blogs and other time-wasters
I have been invited by the Student Advisory Board at the Society of Biblical Literature to speak at a session on the "Wired-in Generation". It is on Saturday at 1pm and the details of the program are at the bottom of this post. My title is "Pods, Blogs and other Time-wasters: Do Electronic Media Detract from Proper Scholarship?"
Putting "pods" at the front of that title is a deliberate and self-indulgent reference to my own attempts at podcasting, something that at this point still marks out my own online output as a little different from others'. In spite of the massive proliferation of academic blogs in recent years, there are still relatively few podcasts around, thinking especially of genuine podcasts, i.e. programmes produced specially for the occasion of disseminating via the internet, and not just online recordings of lectures.
Having produced the NT Pod for over two years now, I am still struck at how podcasting differs from a lot of the other stuff one does online. Somehow, perhaps because it takes so much longer to prepare, record and produce a podcast than it does to blog, it feels like it has a longevity that the blogs lack. But perhaps it is just that it is a relatively new medium. Perhaps podcasts will, in the long run, go the way of other experiments on the net and will come to be seen as "of their time", dated, forgettable, a waste of time.
Putting "pods" at the front of that title is a deliberate and self-indulgent reference to my own attempts at podcasting, something that at this point still marks out my own online output as a little different from others'. In spite of the massive proliferation of academic blogs in recent years, there are still relatively few podcasts around, thinking especially of genuine podcasts, i.e. programmes produced specially for the occasion of disseminating via the internet, and not just online recordings of lectures.
Having produced the NT Pod for over two years now, I am still struck at how podcasting differs from a lot of the other stuff one does online. Somehow, perhaps because it takes so much longer to prepare, record and produce a podcast than it does to blog, it feels like it has a longevity that the blogs lack. But perhaps it is just that it is a relatively new medium. Perhaps podcasts will, in the long run, go the way of other experiments on the net and will come to be seen as "of their time", dated, forgettable, a waste of time.
My title is, of course, slightly facetious given that I have "wasted" a huge amount of my own time in online activities. First, back in the mid to late 90s, it was the e-lists. I still remember the thrill of participating in the e-lists, first b-greek and Crosstalk and later also Synoptic-L and several others. The late 90s were their hey-day. Back then, the whole world was not on email and it now seems extraordinary to imagine that it was actually a thrill to receive an email. And to receive emails from all around the world and to be able to reply instantly, arguing about some element of Greek grammar, or some theme in Historical Jesus scholarship -- it was genuinely exciting stuff.
I have similar memories of the early days of blogging, roughly a decade ago. When Jim Davila began his Paleojudaica blog, I read it avidly. It was the first blog I remember even being aware of. It wasn't long before I wanted to begin my own, then as a sister to the New Testament Gateway site that I had been running since the late nineties, though later under its own NT Blog heading. Back then blogging was easy, innovative and fun. With so few people blogging in our area, there were only a handful of blogs to read, and that gave one more time to write. There was a thrill in exploring the new medium, and I loved it.
The email lists have not gone away, but their importance has diminished massively now that we are all desperately fighting to stay on top of the hoards of daily emails, longingly imagining that simpler world that we once inhabited with its letters, memos and time for reading. Looking back on the heyday of the e-lists, I can't help thinking that I must have wasted a huge amount of time on them. It really felt like it mattered when one was deep in debate with someone about some point of Greek grammar, or some argument for the existence of Q. But what value was it really? I am embarrassed to think of the boldness with which we circulated our half-baked opinions and relieved to think that lots of that stuff has vanished from the net, never to be seen again.
But what about blogs? What about the time spent blogging? Could it have been spent more profitably doing something else instead, like reading a book, taking a walk or sleeping? I remember how people would sometimes comment on the time stamps on my posts, so often written in the early hours of the morning. I used to say that that was the only way that I could find time to blog, and I think I believed it. Why didn't I just take life a little easier? Or why didn't I write more real stuff and get more published?
3,604 posts in eight years. Hundreds of thousands of words. Hours, days, weeks of time wasted. Why did I bother? Why do any of us bother? After all, I am not the most prolific blogger, not by a long shot. How much time has been burned up by the likes of uber-bloggers like James McGrath, Jim West and Joel Watts?
Back in the early days of doing scholarship on the internet, I remember being asked by another scholar about the value of this sort of work, not, at that point, blogging, but e-lists, websites and the like. I was working in the UK at the time where we had a thing called the "Research Assessment Exercise". I wouldn't be able to submit any of my internet stuff to that, would I? I was a little take aback by the question. It had never even occurred to me that the internet stuff might be taking me away from proper scholarship, the kind of stuff that one could submit to the RAE. Perhaps he was right; perhaps this is not the way for a true scholar to behave.
Anyone who has had a blog for a while will be aware of just how short our memories are. When the same old question comes back around again -- there is a kind of blog cycle -- it is rare for one of us to say, "Oh, I remember a great post about that two or three years ago." Blogs are ephemeral. Blog posts do not endure. Even if you keep a full archive of everything you have ever posted, the vast majority of your posts, the great bulk of activity, 99% of your output evaporates from consciousness. Here today, gone tomorrow.
I have often been surprised at what I forget of my own blogging activity. I was pleasantly surprised to find a reference in a recent article written by John Lyons, and published in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, to something I had once said here about the conflict between the criterion of multiple attestation and the criterion of embarrassment in historical Jesus research. It was a good thought, I think, but one that I had completely forgotten.
But here is another thought. Perhaps I would have forgotten that idea forever if I had not blogged it. Perhaps this is one of the values of a blog -- it is the chance to put down a marker in the sand, to share some thoughts, to put things out there and to see what happens. Indeed, this is one of the values of the medium -- it is a little more than the casual conversation but a little less than the published piece. It can occupy a kind of middle ground. It is a sketch pad, but it is also interactive. If you are lucky, people talk back.
A New Testament scholar once asked my advice on starting a blog in order to support his new book that was coming out, to give it a bit of extra publicity and to provide a place where people could come and interact with him about the book. I advised caution. Blogs that are set up to support publications seldom last very long, not least because they end up being rather self-possessed and narrow. The most successful blogs, or the ones that I like reading, are those that range widely, blogs that chat about topics that are outside the narrowly defined area of a particular scholar's research interest, and touch on ephemera related more broadly to the discipline.
They are great for intellectual tidbits, the things you just can't resist sharing but know will never make it into one of your publications. They are places for notes about teaching, for reflections on the funny side of scholarship, for research ideas that would otherwise never see the light of day. And it's worth thinking too of those ideas that are better left to the blog alone, or would have better left even off the blog. Sometimes blogging is all you need to do to convince yourself that an idea does not have legs and can be quietly dropped.
I don't think I'd advise anyone to start a blog unless there was a chance that they would be become an enthusiast. In the end, it has to be its own reward. The same is true with those other bits of public technology, podcasts, gateway sites, even the ones that now look long in the tooth, the e-lists, the scholarly websites. That's why I don't regret the time I have spent online. I have enjoyed it and it is just possible that it has made me a better scholar. It's certainly given me some practice in writing, in interacting with others, and in improving my teaching.
I suppose that what I am saying to the graduate students is that it really is a waste of time to blog, to podcast, even to tweet, if you are doing it for its own sake, to gain recognition or something like that. But if it's something you'd enjoy, it does have its rewards. I sometimes think, "That's bloggable!" even if I don't get around to blogging it. Or "I could do a podcast on that!" even when I never find the time to sit down and record. And that's something that can keep you sane, which can't be a bad thing.
A New Testament scholar once asked my advice on starting a blog in order to support his new book that was coming out, to give it a bit of extra publicity and to provide a place where people could come and interact with him about the book. I advised caution. Blogs that are set up to support publications seldom last very long, not least because they end up being rather self-possessed and narrow. The most successful blogs, or the ones that I like reading, are those that range widely, blogs that chat about topics that are outside the narrowly defined area of a particular scholar's research interest, and touch on ephemera related more broadly to the discipline.
They are great for intellectual tidbits, the things you just can't resist sharing but know will never make it into one of your publications. They are places for notes about teaching, for reflections on the funny side of scholarship, for research ideas that would otherwise never see the light of day. And it's worth thinking too of those ideas that are better left to the blog alone, or would have better left even off the blog. Sometimes blogging is all you need to do to convince yourself that an idea does not have legs and can be quietly dropped.
I don't think I'd advise anyone to start a blog unless there was a chance that they would be become an enthusiast. In the end, it has to be its own reward. The same is true with those other bits of public technology, podcasts, gateway sites, even the ones that now look long in the tooth, the e-lists, the scholarly websites. That's why I don't regret the time I have spent online. I have enjoyed it and it is just possible that it has made me a better scholar. It's certainly given me some practice in writing, in interacting with others, and in improving my teaching.
I suppose that what I am saying to the graduate students is that it really is a waste of time to blog, to podcast, even to tweet, if you are doing it for its own sake, to gain recognition or something like that. But if it's something you'd enjoy, it does have its rewards. I sometimes think, "That's bloggable!" even if I don't get around to blogging it. Or "I could do a podcast on that!" even when I never find the time to sit down and record. And that's something that can keep you sane, which can't be a bad thing.
Engaging the "Wired-In Generation": Knowledge and Learning in the Digital Age
11/19/2011
1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
Room: 3002 - Convention Center
11/19/2011
1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
Room: 3002 - Convention Center
Theme: Hosted by the Student Advisory Board
Teresa Calpino, Loyola University of Chicago, Presiding
Mark Goodacre, Duke University
Pods, Blogs, and other Time-wasters: Do Electronic Media Detract from Proper Scholarship? (15 min)
Christian Brady, Pennsylvania State University
On the Internet No One Knows You're a Grad Student, Or How Social Media Can Help You, Build You Up, and Tear You Down (15 min)
Kelley Coblentz Bautch, St. Edward's University
Videoconferencing in the Classroom: Broadening the Horizons of Students through Interactive Scholarly Exchange(15 min)
Discussion (30 min)
Mark Goodacre, Duke University
Pods, Blogs, and other Time-wasters: Do Electronic Media Detract from Proper Scholarship? (15 min)
Christian Brady, Pennsylvania State University
On the Internet No One Knows You're a Grad Student, Or How Social Media Can Help You, Build You Up, and Tear You Down (15 min)
Kelley Coblentz Bautch, St. Edward's University
Videoconferencing in the Classroom: Broadening the Horizons of Students through Interactive Scholarly Exchange(15 min)
Discussion (30 min)
Friday, April 16, 2010
Philip Pullman on the Gospels on the Daily Bacon
One of my favourite podcasts these days is the Daily Bacon. I never thought I would warm to Richard Bacon when he took over from Simon Mayo in the BBC Radio FiveLive afternoon slot earlier this year, but the programme is great, and I rarely miss the podcast.
Yesterday's featured Philip Pullman talking about his novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. It turns out that Pullman is surprisingly well informed about the Gospels and the interview is so interesting that it almost persuades me to read the book. At this stage it is only "almost", though.
The podcast will be available to download for the next six days or so. [Subscribe to the Daily Bacon; Programme details].
Yesterday's featured Philip Pullman talking about his novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. It turns out that Pullman is surprisingly well informed about the Gospels and the interview is so interesting that it almost persuades me to read the book. At this stage it is only "almost", though.
The podcast will be available to download for the next six days or so. [Subscribe to the Daily Bacon; Programme details].
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Biblical Studies on iTunes list
Joel Watts links to a useful page on Text, Community and Mission that lists Biblical Studies (and related stuff) on iTunes U. There is a lot of material of interest on there, and I have added something to the comments section to note that (shock!) the NT Pod is not yet listed.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Higgaion Podcast
I am delighted to see Chris Heard launching a new podcast on the Hebrew Bible, the Higgaion podcast. Episode 1 is out today and provides an enjoyable introduction to the series, with great theme music. It's five minutes long, even shorter than the NT Pod (though the NT Pod began at 5 minutes and grew to 10-12). I am looking forward to more.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Audio and Video
There has been a lot of talk recently in the biblioblogs about audio and video in the NT Studies area, and the usefulness of new audio and video resources in teaching (e.g. AKMA and Homilia of a Budding NT Scholar, among others, commenting on St John's College, Nottingham Youtube videos). This has made me realize that it is high time that I begin the task of integrating links to audio and video resources into particular areas of the New Testament Gateway, and not just in gather-all pages like the one I recently added on podcasts. It is early days yet, but I have added pages on Historical Jesus: Audio and Video and Paul the Apostle: Audio and Video. So far, I have added links mainly to BBC documentaries and discussions (all audio streaming) and some podcasts, but next I'd like to work out how to link to some video too, including projects like the St John's Nottingham one. There is a lot more work to be done in this area, but it's exciting to have this new beginning. Suggestions, of course, are welcome.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Podcasting -- everyone's at it!
In the words of Lily Allen, "everyone's at it". Well, six of us in the biblioblogging world, anyway! Steve Wiggins has a new podcast over on Sects and Violence in the Ancient World. I first saw reference to this on Daniel and Tonya's Hebrew and Greek Reader. There are three so far, the latest, Whence Monotheism, out today. It's a bit longer than 5 Minute Bible and the NT Pod. Because of this steady growth in the number of podcasts in our area, I have set up a new page on the NT Gateway on Podcasts (see also the recent NT Gateway blog post) and I'll be adding Steve Wiggins's next, though I'm hoping he sets up a separate tag for the podcasts because at the moment they simply occur among the other blog posts. Also today, a new Targuman podcast from Chris Brady.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Codex Sinaiticus Podcasts
While I was away, I didn't get chance to blog on the big news event in our area, the launch of the online Codex Sinaiticus on July 6. Now, ITSEE news notes some new podcasts from the British Library all about the Codex Sinaiticus project, and it features some familar names. They are between 7 and 12 minutes long and there are five of them altogether. Here at the NT Blog, we like podcasts, so here is the link to the page:
These podcasts are part of the From Parchment to Pixel: The Virtual Reunification of Codex Sinaiticus exhibition at the British Library. These five podcasts mostly take the form Juan Garcés conducting telephone interviews with David Parker, Amy Myshrall, Rachel Kevern and Timothy Arthur Brown. The first is an introduction by Juan Garcés himself.
The British Library's embedded media player (Windows Media Player) does not seem to be working in Firefox or Chrome, though it is working in IE. If that is the case for you too, they have a link to each podcast that you can use instead.
There is a great line in the podcast featuring David Parker, where he says that today is the most exciting time to be editing texts possibly ever.
The British Library's embedded media player (Windows Media Player) does not seem to be working in Firefox or Chrome, though it is working in IE. If that is the case for you too, they have a link to each podcast that you can use instead.
There is a great line in the podcast featuring David Parker, where he says that today is the most exciting time to be editing texts possibly ever.
Friday, June 12, 2009
New Podcast: the NT Pod
I have a new podcast on the New Testament and Christian Origins now available and it is called the NT Pod. I am aiming to produce an episode every week or so. My plan is to keep it short and sweet -- just five minutes or so of comment on a topic of interest. The site for the NT Pod is here:
Episode 1 is on Matthew 1.1-17 and you can download it or subscribe to listen to each episode as it becomes available. Within a few days, you should be able to find me on iTunes and iTunes U but for the time being iTunes users can subscribe manually by using the podcast feed.
Episode 1 is on Matthew 1.1-17 and you can download it or subscribe to listen to each episode as it becomes available. Within a few days, you should be able to find me on iTunes and iTunes U but for the time being iTunes users can subscribe manually by using the podcast feed.
Thank you for listening and thank you in advance for any feedback. It's still a learning process for me at the moment and I am hoping that the technical side of the podcasts will improve as time goes on.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Biblioblog Top 50 Latest
The new Biblioblog Top 50 is now available:
Biblioblog Top 50: April 2009
As usual, a huge amount of work has gone into it. If the author would step out of the shadows, I would enjoy thanking him personally (the author is, of course, male and goy).
I had not realized that Andrew Bernhard had begun a blog at his gospels.net site, and it's good to see it doing well. I am also pleased to see the NT Blog doing OK too.
A bigger surprise is to see my experimental podcast featuring among the list of new blogs. I will blog about this in due course but since it gets a mention and a link, let me fill in some background. I am planning to release a proper public podcast in the coming weeks but decided to experiment first by recording short podcasts for students on my Historical Jesus course, in order to get on top of the technology and to experiment with the format. It has been an enjoyable experience and the students have reacted well to it. Indeed, I am inclined to make this a more regular feature of my teaching. I think I am now ready to move on to a podcast aimed at a broader audience, but I should stress that what you see (hear) on the site mentioned above has the word "experimental" stamped on it.
Biblioblog Top 50: April 2009
As usual, a huge amount of work has gone into it. If the author would step out of the shadows, I would enjoy thanking him personally (the author is, of course, male and goy).
I had not realized that Andrew Bernhard had begun a blog at his gospels.net site, and it's good to see it doing well. I am also pleased to see the NT Blog doing OK too.
A bigger surprise is to see my experimental podcast featuring among the list of new blogs. I will blog about this in due course but since it gets a mention and a link, let me fill in some background. I am planning to release a proper public podcast in the coming weeks but decided to experiment first by recording short podcasts for students on my Historical Jesus course, in order to get on top of the technology and to experiment with the format. It has been an enjoyable experience and the students have reacted well to it. Indeed, I am inclined to make this a more regular feature of my teaching. I think I am now ready to move on to a podcast aimed at a broader audience, but I should stress that what you see (hear) on the site mentioned above has the word "experimental" stamped on it.
Monday, April 06, 2009
Syneidon Podcast: Exploring the Gospel of Mark
Regular readers will know if my enthusiasm for the University of Birmingham's Syneidon Project, which is run by Richard Goode and Helen Ingram. Helen is already known to many of you through her blog The Omega Course, recently mentioned at the Biblioblog T0p 50 website, and to others she is famous for her church organ renditions of rock classics. Both Richard and Helen are University of Birmingham PhDs in New Testament and it is excellent news that Syneidon now have their own podcast:
Syneidon Podcast
The first episode is entitled Exploring the Gospel of Mark - 1. Richard is the compère and has a fine voice for radio. He is joined by another Birmingham graduate, from the Queen's Foundation, Robert Foster (who was in my first ever Greek class in Birmingham some years back!). And there is an interview with David Parker. Helen supplies the music, her own composition and not Metallica.
I hope to add a page to the NT Gateway soon on Podcasts, encouraged by the fact that I hope to have my own podcast available soon. I will have details there and here when it is available.
Syneidon Podcast
The first episode is entitled Exploring the Gospel of Mark - 1. Richard is the compère and has a fine voice for radio. He is joined by another Birmingham graduate, from the Queen's Foundation, Robert Foster (who was in my first ever Greek class in Birmingham some years back!). And there is an interview with David Parker. Helen supplies the music, her own composition and not Metallica.
I hope to add a page to the NT Gateway soon on Podcasts, encouraged by the fact that I hope to have my own podcast available soon. I will have details there and here when it is available.
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