Monday, April 12, 2004

"TECHNOLOGY AND THE TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLICAL TEXT" is a new article by James R. Adair on the SBL website (via the Bible and Interpretation News website). Excerpt:
Most diachronic studies of the biblical text focus on the message itself and its development in the oral and written stages as it was transmitted. Several recent studies shift the focus to the scribes and other tradents who copied, corrected, and in many cases enhanced the text as they passed it along to future generations. One other, frequently overlooked, aspect of the process of transmission is also a candidate for scholarly consideration: the technology used to transmit the text. Technology includes several interrelated tools and concepts, such as the material on which the text is written and read (media), the tools used to inscribe the text (input devices), the script (encoding scheme), and procedures, rules, and conventions for inscribing the text (encoding strategies), among others. It is convenient to use the first of these categories, media, as a way to divide the history of the transmission of the biblical text into distinct periods of time, characterized by the newest medium on which the biblical text was recorded. According to this scheme, scribes have transmitted the biblical text in its written form in four eras: Scroll, Codex, Printed Page, and Web Page.

And here's another one, by Robert A. Kraft, who has been a major pioneer in the application of computers to biblical studies. Excerpts:

How I Met the Computer, and How it Changed my Life

Robert A. Kraft

Now that I'm officially "Emeritus," although not fully "retired," I've been asked to write an autobiographical retrospective on my involvement with computers and textual studies, which began in earnest around 1970. I was 36 years old at the time and an associate professor with tenure at the University of Pennsylvania. Before that I knew, somewhat vaguely, about the use of computers in Father Busa's Aquinas project (begun in 1949!)[1] because my office mate, a Patristics scholar named Robert Evans, was taking a computing course and occasionally mentioned such things as he shuffled his stacks of IBM punched cards. This would have been in the late 1960s (he died unexpectedly in 1974). Even before that, as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester (1961-63), I had also been intrigued by reports of the use of computers in analyzing the problems of Pauline authorship (A. Q. Morton, 1961-64).[2] I was a good candidate for such temptations, having done quite well in math and science in high school, even winning the Renselaer Polytechnic Institute Achievement Award my senior year. But it took much more to stir my latent curiosity to action. (Did you know that the University of Manchester and the University of Pennsylvania were rivals for the distinction of having developed the first operational computer?[3] Neither did I. Retrospection can sometimes be cool.)

[...]

Of course, my computer world didn't end in 1994, even if I consciously withdrew from the "Offline" overexposure. Somewhere in that period, I decided that electronic publication was here to stay and that, as a fully tenured publishing faculty member, my imagined audience would be best served by my henceforth issuing my work in electronic form as the primary medium. If someone wanted to put my contributions into hard copy, I had no objection, as long as it was understood that the main publication was the electronic one, over which I retained control. I have been happy with this decision, although the increasing demand of contributing to Festschriften for aging colleagues has produced an unanticipated wrinkle. They're still producing conventional books. Still, as I nudge along into more leisurely "retirement," I hope to have time and energy to complete the task of electronifying all my past, present, and future contributions (an electronic auto-Festschrift of sorts to myself) and to participate in the new waves of productivity and imagination that this technology permits ? and hopefully encourages. Let the one who has ears to hear, and eyes to see, take note and join in the parade!

No comments:

Post a Comment