Welcome to DigitalBiblicist.org

This is the bare beginning of a site meant to be a meeting place and resource for the community of scholars and practitioners working with the Bible in digital form. A site for the producers (not mainly the consumers) of Biblical studies tools and resources.

A "Biblicist" is simply an expert on the Bible; a "Digital Biblicist" is thus an expert on the use of Digital media for Biblical studies. Perhaps it could also be a computer that is itself a Biblicist; but those are somewhat rare.

The name is inspired by digitalclassicist.org and digitalmedievalist.org, similar sites for other fields within humanities computing.

In any field, but especially in interdisciplinary fields such as these three, "experts" come in many flavors and many levels. Some "Digital Biblicists" may be professors of theology who use computers to help in their research (though Google, EndNote, and MS Word probably don't count). Others may be programmers or software engineers who uses their skills to enhance Biblical studies as avocation or devotion. Others build open-source or commercial tools such as Bible search engines, manuscript and authorship analysis systems, and so on. Each is unique.

In the fairly early days of humanities computing, practitioners were few and scattered. Even at universities considered hotbeds of the field, it was typical to have only one or two computer-savvy graduate students in each humanities department; and fewer professors. An email list called "Humanist" was created as a forum for these folks, and had a huge impact on the field.

In my view, Digital Biblicists are now situated similarly to digital humanitis scholars of the 80s: much is going on, but people are scattered, working in isolation or in small groups. Effort can be pointlessly duplicated, sometimes because people simply don't hear about each other. It has gotten better, and the outlook is promising; but I hope this site can help move things along.

My favorite example of how it shouldn't be is (fortunately) an old one: around 1980 when I needed a Greek New Testament with part-of-speech tags for some analyses, I discovered five in existence, but only one group would share their data with me, and that after much negotiating and payment. Some years later I ended up producing a sixth. All the hoary questions are there: publication and priority, copyright and fair use, creativity vs. sweat, not to mention money, tenure review, and plain old turf.

I hope Digital Biblicist will become a place where we can build a community of people who care deeply about the Bible, and who want to make excellent use of computer technology to make the Bible far easier to access, analyze, study, and yes, even apply. Will you help?

Goals

Here is an initial, rough, list of some resources I hope to be adding to the site; help and advice are not only welcome, but essential!

• A forum for Biblicists.
• Lots of texts -- That's what we're about, right? Bibles, dictionaries, commentaries, notes; you name it. But, I strongly believe in these principles for what texts will be here:
  1. The whole text should be available in one file, so you don't have to waste time clicking 66 or 100 links and saving each one, or writing scrapers to do it for you.
  2. Unicode. Not betacode, not Latin-1, not CP1252. Unicode, so you don't have to worry about complicated character-set conversions.
  3. Standardized Bible book abbreviations, verse reference punctuation, and so on, so you don't have to implement all that cleanup for every text you use.
  4. Whatever other formats might also be there, everything should be available in one very standard format, so you don't have to deal with every file differently. XML is clearly the only representation powerful enough (barely!) and widely enough implemented. Among XML schemas, the only viable candidates I see are TEI-Lite, OSIS, XSEM, and XML-ified ThML. I favor OSIS, and I will back that up by providing tools.

  5. Serious header information that says just what version of the text you've got; what was and wasn't marked up; how well proofread it is, what the copyright status is, etc.
  6. Clear statements of what rights and restrictions are involved in using the text. I'm very reluctant to put up anything that can't simply be used freely.

  In short, I hope it will be totally trivial to come here, get a text, and start using it productively. All the issues above, if not taken care of in a standard way, get in the way and cost countless hours. I want the texts here to be ready to go.

• Conversion tools -- preferably open-source, especially for getting things into standard forms; but also for getting to delivery forms. For example, XSLT to take multiple Bible versions and make a polyglot edition.
• Simple resources such as fonts, stylesheets, and templates.
• Tools to check texts for completeness and accuracy (how many verses in that chapter? are there any TUrkish characters in that Tlingit Bible translation?)
• A directory of relevant people, organizations, projects, and tools. We obviously can't and needn't host everything -- but if it's relevant to the Digital Biblicist, it should get linked from here.
• In keeping with current movements, Semantic Web resources such as ontologies:
  1. An ontology of all Bible people, place, and event names, and basic relationships (such as parent-of).
  2. Ontologies of the "objects" of Biblical scholarship: I have still not managed to find anywhere online, a complete list of Biblical manuscripts -- how can that be???? Likewise, we need dependable lists of languages, Bible translations, parts of speech, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic words, and so on -- all in standard formats (perhaps OWL) so we can just get down to work instead of wasting massive amounts of time organizing data.
• Statistical information (and tools to extract it) -- how frequent is that word in the Bible? In Paul? In this translation vs. that one? As a past-tense verb?
• Eventually, I'd like to see a Bibliography of directly relevant works -- they're published in so many different places, they're easily missed.

That's way too much for me to make happen. A Wiki might help. But I have two questions for you:

1. What do you want to see first?
2. Are you willing to help make it happen?