If you are a blogger (and that includes Bibliobloggers!), and you haven’t already heard the news, be aware that new FCC guidelines may affect you. Here’s an explanation from the fine folks at CNET:

Independent bloggers who fail to disclose paid reviews or freebies can face up to $11,000 in fines from the Federal Trade Commission, according to revisions to the agency’s “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” published Monday.

So if you are reviewing a book, and you received that book for free, you now need to note that in your review. Silly, right? Well, I agree, and so does the Internet Advertising Bureau, but we’re stuck with it for now.

On a related note, I receive occasional gift certificates from the always wonderful wtsbooks.com on a click-by-click basis. If that bothers you, then I suggest you don’t click any links for books on this site.

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My dissertation advisor Dr. Dan McCartney has a new commentary out on the Epistle of James that I’m picking up today and looking forward to reading. You can get a copy too from the always wonderful Westminster Bookstore.

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OCR is the technology used to turn an image of text into plain (editable, search-able) text. If you’re like me (i.e., a nerd) you probably have a pile of scanned journal articles and books and such meticulously sorted on your hard drive (PDFs for example). You can read them and print them, but you can’t search them or edit them. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could?

Well, there are a number of free options on the web, but they all have their problems. Google has some of the best OCR technology out there–they recently acquired CAPTCHA to make it even better–and they have apparently been rolling this out into Google Docs. The Google Docs version is not as wonderful as you might like, but it works on high-res documents. Read about how to turn your images into text here.

Update: I was not able to get this to work with PDFs, surprisingly. The web-app only accepts PNG, JPEG, or GIF images right now. That is unfortunate, and I assume will be “corrected” in the future. Has anyone tried this on an image yet?

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1. Send Web Documents Straight to Google Docs
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If you are using the 2.0 Beta version of Zotero then I have good news. Zotero has recently updated their plugins for word processor integration. I have had a couple of problems with the OpenOffice plugin, so I am excited to see that work continues.

It appears that the update is fairly significant. One major change is that the both the Microsoft Word and the OpenOffice plugins are installed as browser components. Previously you had to add them as Word Processor macros, which can be messy and is difficult to upgrade when there are changes. By contrast, the new plugins are always up-to-date because Firefox does the checking for you, and all the messy installation is handled by the plugin itself, rather than the old manual process. In short: if you can install a Firefox plugin, you can install Zotero’s Word Processor integration.

There are a number of back-end changes to the plugins (ie., Java), with the result that everything seems to run a lot more smoothly. Two major problems I had with the previous plugins—errors in footnotes with multiple Zotero fields, and lack of support for adding citations within a table—are now fixed, which makes me an even happier camper than I was before.

How to get it

You will need the latest Beta of Zotero for the new plugins to work. To install the plugins follow the instructions on this page (be sure to install the 2.0 plugins, about half-way down, rather than 1.0 plugins). Once you restart your browser Zotero will do the rest.

If you are not already familiar with Zotero check out my description and guide.

Note for Linux users: if you haven’t already, you will need to install Sun’s version of Java (“sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin” in a terminal).

Related posts:

1. Zotero 1.5 and OpenOffice 3.0: Getting it all to Work
2. A Guide to Using Zotero in Biblical Studies: Collecting, Annotating and Citing Bibliographic Data
3. Zotero: An Introduction, now with SBL support

Phil Gons has some excellent information regarding a newly released site: OpenLibrary.org. It is an offshoot of the already mentioned Internet Archive. In addition to providing a whole host of open-domain books in full text (just over 1 million at time of writing), they have the ambitious goal of dedicating a page for every book ever written!

Check out Phil Gons’s post for the details, as well as a list of other sites that provide free books. It is very much worth a bookmark. As is everything Phil graces us with, like this little gem.

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Now don’t get me wrong, I still think everyone should be using Firefox as their default web-browser. But I’m a realist, and sometimes you just need Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). And if you’re going to use Microsoft, then you should really definitely immediately download IE8, released today at noon.

There are a whole host of reasons to do this—security, speed, eye-candy, convenience, lots of new features—but the most important reason is to support Microsoft in their new not-evil policies. For the first time ever Internet Explorer will be standards-compliant by default. This is good news for browsers, programmers, and Microsoft; it will truly change the web be ensuring that every web page is viewable regardless of Operating System or Browser.

So if you’re running Windows, download today. You’ll be glad you did, and you will be doing something good for all of us!

In the interest of full-disclosure, I should mention that viewing this site in IE7 results in a couple of formatting problems (with 3rd-party widgets and things), but IE8 displays everything perfectly. This is because IE8 is now standards-compliant! Thanks Microsoft!

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1. Microsoft’s Latest Internet Explorer Shaping up to be Not Evil
2. Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8 RC
3. Update on Changing Times

Update: The links to the ebook in question have been (preemptively) removed pending licensing discussions. See here. Perhaps I will have time in the future to provide a Tischendorf version, which is in the open domain.

Having Googled long and hard for a free, accented, open-source, Unicode eBook of the Greek New Testament, and to no avail, I decided to make one myself.

Getting the Book

You can download the NA26/UBS4 Greek New Testament eBook in the following formats (right-click and “Save File As”): Kindle, Palm, mobi, and xhtml. Follow the instructions for your device. The Kindle version is the best, so use that if your device supports it. You can convert eBook files using the free application Calibre.

iPhone and iPod Touch users can use the free application Stanza with this guide to get everything set up (it’s easy).

If you need another format for your reader, try Stanza’s Desktop Reader to convert one format to another.

I will post about new releases and improvements on this site, so if you like what you see you may want to subscribe. There are a couple of improvements I would like to make–like sub-chapters and a better Table of Contents–but that will have to wait for another time. Stay tuned!

Licensing

The source text is for this eBook came from the MorphGNT with UBS4 (ver. 5.08) by CCAT and James Tauber, as produced by the Work Viewer web-app created by the Open Scriptures project. It is the same Greek text you will find on the much more robust Resurgence Greek Project and was originally derived from NA26.

This eBook is distributed and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, as allowed and required by the use of MorphGNT.

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From the Logos blog:

The Göttingen Septuagint (a.k.a. Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum. Auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottingensis Editum) is the most important edition of the Greek translation of the Old Testament ever published. At present it spans 24 print volumes and nearly 7,000 pages, setting the bar high for text-critical studies.

For optimal use in Logos Bible Software, these 24 print volumes will be split into 65 digital resources. This means you’ll be able to view the Greek text right alongside of the apparatus, and in several cases multiple Greek translations with multiple apparatuses. By linking them all together, they will stay in sync as you scroll or jump from passage to passage.

Logos is making this resource available for $299.95 for a limited time. Get it here.

You can find a short but concise introduction to this edition of the LXX here. If you would like to learn more about the relevance of the Septuagint for Old and New Testament studies, Karen Jobes’s Invitation to the Septuagint is an excellent resource.

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It is my privilege to announce a new journal: Ecclesia Reformada. Anybody with an interest in cutting-edge Reformed scholarship and its relvance to pastoral ministry should consider a subscription. From their site:

Ecclesia Reformanda is a new journal for pastors, theological students, and scholars, that seeks to serve the Church in its ongoing reformation according to God’s Word. The editorial board believes that historic Reformed theology offers the best expression of the theology of Scripture, and so the journal is confessionally Reformed. However, a genuinely Reformed theology is always looking for God to shed new light on his Church from his Word. It is therefore always reforming.

Ecclesia Reformanda is distinctively Reformed, with a contemporary cutting edge. It presents some of the best in British Reformed thinking and writing to serve the Church, her teachers, and her Lord.

The articles in the first edition look both interesting and timely:

The journal covers all of the theological subdisciplines, and early issues will include articles on intertextuality in Romans 2, poetry in James, the place of children in the new covenant according to Jeremiah 32, Jim Jordan’s hermeneutics, Herman Bavinck’s theological method, and John Owen’s doctrine of justification. Future editions will contain articles on ethics, public theology, and pastoral counselling.

I was particularly encouraged by the editorial, which emphasizes that the purpose of the journal is to serve God’s church—a welcome focus in the current scholarly climate:

All true theology is Church theology, conducted by the community of God’s people, to serve the community of God’s people, in the power of the Spirit, for the glory of God in Christ. This is not to despise academic theology, but simply to locate it properly in the service of the Church. Ecclesia Reformanda therefore exists to serve the Church, primarily by serving pastors, theological students, and those who train them. Although the journal will seek to advance theological knowledge, and so contribute to academic theology, the primary goal is to equip pastors and teachers in the Church to discharge their ministries more fruitfully and faithfully. Our intention is thus unashamedly pastoral.

My friend and colleague Ros Clarke is on the board of editors. Her work is extraordinary, and so I expect the journal will follow suite. You can check out her blog here or her site dedicated to academic work here.

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Digitalization is the way of the future, and with the recent deal between authors and Google books, that future may in fact be bright for all parties.

In the course of my dissertation work I often have to track down primary sources, and when those sources are particularly rare it becomes difficult. Or it used to be difficult. Now I Google it.

Exhibit A: This morning I needed to track down some homilies of Hebrews by Chrysostom. Being a dedicated Greek Geek, I wanted the “original,” which means I need Patrologia Graeca volume 63. Where am I going to get it? Google Books of course–they have the entire series digitalized and downloadable for your convenience. This is what sites like Google Books and archive.org are made for—primary sources in the open domain.

Image view of v63 of Patrologia Graeca

Here are some screenshots for you. The first is the standard scan, downloadable as a pdf. The second is Google’s attempt at a little OCR, which obviously is struggling with both the Greek and the Latin. This is to be expected. I did a little natural language processing way-back-when; a lot of OCR software will “guess” the letters based not only on shape, but on the software’s (limited) understanding of the language, which for Greek and Hebrews is probably NULL. Still, I was impressed, and this is a harbinger of great things to come.

OCR view of v63 of Patrologia Graeca

So what primary sources have you been trying to track down? How do you use research tools like these? Post in the comments!

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