Online Reader’s Bible

 Biblical Greek, Christianity, Computing, Webapps and Websites  2 Responses »
Apr 062009
 
Rossano Gospels, 6th century, a representative...
Image via Wikipedia

Mourning the loss of Zhubert? Me too, and I will have an update on the copyright discussions soon, and a new eBook of the GNT as well.

In the mean time there is an excellent new reader’s Bible available that is based on Tischendorf‘s Greek New Testament. Check that out here. It features handy footnotes and popups. You will need Google Gears for it to work, but that’s an easy install.

HT: Justin Taylor

Update:David Stark points out that the site also displays the OT, with notes for both Hebrew and Aramaic.

Posted by Tommy at 12:52 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Academic Earth Helps You Educate, or Get an Education

 Culture, Webapps and Websites  1 Response »
Mar 242009
 

Academic Earth LogoThink Hulu, but for nerds. TechCrunch has the scoop:

Ludlow launched Academic Earth with the goal of building a user-friendly platform for educational video that would let anyone be able to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.”

And here is a description from their web site:

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

That’s right, lots of lectures to listen to! Every nerdlings dream! The selection is somewhat limited at this point (merely an aggregate of what is already out-there on the web), and there does not appear to be a way for smaller academic organizations to easily participate, but this shows great promise, and in the future could be a great way to “get the word out” about great teachers.

In the mean time, why not learn more about Ancient Greece, the Pluto Problem, or measuring space and time.

Posted by Tommy at 1:52 pm  Tagged with: ,

New Bible Search Bar for your Blog (from Logos.com)

 Bible and Hermeneutics, Christianity, Webapps and Websites  1 Response »
Mar 242009
 

bible-search-barIn addition to their excellent reftagger plugin, which provides blog readers with Bible verse popups whenever they hover over a Biblical reference (try it with Heb. 1:1), Bible.Logos.com is now offering a free Bible Search Bar widget to put in your sidebar. Biblical Bloggers should definitely look into this as it makes things easier for your readers. Logos explains:

If you have biblical content on your website or blog, you’ll definitely want to consider adding the new Bible Search Bar to your sidebar. RefTagger allows your readers to have instant access to the Bible passages that you cite in your post, but what if they want to look up a verse that you don’t mention or launch a search for a word or phrase that you discuss? They could manually navigate to Bible.Logos.com, but the Bible Search Bar makes it even easier for your readers to find what they’re looking for.

The sidebar add-in comes in many shapes and sizes, and should be a convenient addition to any biblical blog. You can get it here. And don’t forget reftagger, if you don’t have it installed already, here.

Posted by Tommy at 7:51 am  Tagged with: , , ,

Troubles for the Open Scriptures Project

 Bible and Hermeneutics, Christianity, Webapps and Websites  3 Responses »
Mar 182009
 
Creative Commons Share Alike
Image via Wikipedia

The Open Scriptures Project, which I describe here, has hit a (hopefully temporary) snag. The project is dependent upon James Tauber’s excellent MorphGNT, which is open-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. That license should protect derivative projects, but the German Bible Society has called that into question. You can read that here.

Long story short: I am voluntarily withdrawing my recently published eBook, which is based in turn on the Open Scriptures project, until this issue is resolved. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Posted by Tommy at 10:14 am  Tagged with: , ,

drop.io Gets Streaming and Realtime Media

 Webapps and Websites  No Responses »
Mar 102009
 
Image representing drop.io as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

The excellent web service drop.io has recently received the most significant added feature upgrade since its launch. From their announcement:

drop.io is now fully realtime enabled. this means realtime rich-media streaming collaboration and chat like never before. in one click set up a drop, invite participants, and seamlessly exchange any media on the fly. With full mobile and third party client support, drop.io is the simplest way to collaborate with exactly whom you want how you want.

Check out the launch site, or get more details. There is also a screencast.

Last week drop.io launched playlist.io, which allows you to stream music (or sermons, or lectures) to whoever you want.

Just a quick note that we just launched a new applet at drop.io called ‘playlist.io’ (http://playlist.io) – it is a dead simple way to post your music to the cloud in 3 clicks, and then stream it basically anywhere you want to play it (home, work, etc) — there is a demo video explaining how to use it at http://drop.io/file/playlistio

using the newly release API base iPhone application ‘droppler’ (http://bit.ly/EmZVc) you can even stream your playlist right to your iphone… there is a bit more at http://drop.io/blog if you are interested.

All in all, drop.io is shaping up to be a very handy way of distributing information. It’s a great place to put sermons, for example, or distribute class or lecture materials (which is one way that I use it). There is also a new app for the iPhone or iPod Touch (http://bit.ly/EmZVc) that integrates with drop.io, which makes all this even more portable!

Posted by Tommy at 1:05 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Find, Write, and Rearrange Church Music with Ease

 Christian Living, Webapps and Websites  No Responses »
Mar 102009
 
{{en}} Flatwound strings for fretless bass. {{...
Image via Wikipedia

NPR‘s All Things Considered reported yesterday on an interesting web-app that allows churches to write or rearrange hymns and easily distribute new music. It’s called SongMap and is available through LifeWay Worship. NPR explains:

The Southern Baptist Convention has introduced a new Web-based application called SongMap, which allows music ministers to rearrange hymns and contemporary praise songs with a few clicks of the mouse. For example, the traditional hymn “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross” has four verses and four choruses, but the Web site allows a verse to be cut, a chorus to be added or the song to be put in a new key.

When the song is mapped, a window pops up with a dozen alternative segments. Once those are arranged, the score can be printed out for bass guitar, piano and even a trombone. For a fee, you can download the audio of the custom arrangement.

It also takes care of all the licensing and legal stuff for you, and charges you on that basis. Being only moderately musical, I have not tested any of this, but those who lead worship might want to check it out. And feel free to report back in the comments!

Posted by Tommy at 12:43 pm  Tagged with: , ,

A Plethora of ESV Options

 Webapps and Websites  1 Response »
Mar 052009
 

Justin Taylor lists all the ways you can get free access to the ESV.

Posted by Tommy at 5:01 pm  Tagged with:

Even More PDF Tools

 Research Tools, Software, Webapps and Websites  No Responses »
Mar 052009
 

PDFAs a follow-up to my previous post, here is an excellent review of some more great PDF conversion and manipulation tools.

Also I am happy to report that I have had good success converting PDF images to plain text with OCR terminal, so give it a try!

Posted by Tommy at 4:00 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Search your PDFs with OCR

 Computing, How to, Software, Webapps and Websites  1 Response »
Mar 032009
 

PDF

Paper isn’t going away, of course, but having all your documents on such an antiquated medium is often less than ideal. There is at least one major disadvantage to paper: searching is much more difficult. That’s just one of the reasons PDFs are so popular! Anybody can open a PDF file for free, search it for the information they need, and store it for later browsing without any significant impact on harddrive space.

Not all PDFs are Created Equal

But perhaps you don’t know that there are two kinds of PDFs. The best kind of PDF is the kind generated by computer software from a text file. These PDFs are searchable because the text is preserved.

But many PDFs are generated from images rather than text. If you create a PDF by scanning a document in a photocopier or image scanner then the result is usually an image-based PDF, rather than a text-based PDF. This means that your PDF will not be searchable because you computer does not have access to the underlying text, even though you can read it just fine.

Searching any PDF with OCR

So how can you overcome this difficulty? By using Optical Recognition (OCR) software. OCR tools look at the image and try to convert it to plain text, which can then be searched, copy-and-pasted, and indexed just like any other document (I worked with several such software systems during my undergraduate degree).

There are several good free OCR tools available for converting PDF documents to plain text. The best out there is that used by Google, which powers its Google Books services. The problem here is that you don’t have direct access to their software. You need to go fishing and wait for Google to bite. You can find instructions for doing that here.

If you want more control over your software, and you probably do, check out this list of handy PDF tools, many of which are OCR converters. There is also a lot of great software on this list.

Finally a new service, PDF-to-word, currently in invite-only Beta, accurately converts PDF images to MS Word documents. You might have to just bookmark this one since it’s not yet available to the public, but you might find an invite code online, such as here.

Conclusions

One remaining limitation of all this is that the OCR software listed above is optimized for English. Problems often occur with German and French, and don’t even bother trying it on Greek or Hebrew. Nevertheless the advantages for English scanned images are worth investing some time experimenting with one of these systems, especially if you have a lot of scanned PDF documents.

Posted by Tommy at 9:00 am  Tagged with: , , , , ,

The Open Scriptures Project

 Bible and Hermeneutics, Christianity, Computing, Research Tools, Webapps and Websites  2 Responses »
Mar 022009
 

We have had many occasions to mention the variety of online resources available for reading and browsing biblical texts here on Nerdlets.org. There is a lot of data online, and the continuing digitilazation of texts means the wealth of data is growing every day.

Rabbula Gospels, Eusebian Canons
Image via Wikipedia

Here’s the problem: every website or resource database or web-app has a different way of representing that data and the information that describes it, and not all of them provide ways for external sites and apps to interact with that data. The bottom line here is that it is currently impossible, or at least very difficult, to seamlessly “mashup” information from various sources.

For example, say you want to compare the text of John 8 in a couple of ancient Greek manuscripts, all of which are available online, but from different institutions. Currently you would have to go to each site independently, use the disparate methods to extract the data you need, and then mash-them-up yourself using a Word Processor or other tool. Cumbersome, no?

The Open Scripture project has the ambitious goal of solving this dilemma. From their web site:

Open Scriptures seeks to be a comprehensive open-source Web repository for integrated scriptural data and a general application framework for building internationalized social applications of scripture. An abundance of scriptural resources are now available online—manuscripts, translations, and annotations are all being made available by students and scholars alike at an ever-increasing rate. These diverse scriptural resources, however, are isolated from each other and fragmented across the Internet. Thus mashing up the available data into new scriptural applications is not currently possible for the community at large because the resources’ interrelationships are not systematically documented. Open Scriptures aims to establish a scriptural database for interlinked textual resources such as merged manuscripts, the differences among them, and the links between their semantic units and the semantic units of their translations. With such a foundation in place, derived scriptural data like cross-references may be stored in a translation-neutral and internationalized manner so as to be accessible to the community no matter what language they speak or version they prefer.

It’s still in its infancy, but they have released their first application, the Manuscript Comparator:

This tool allows two or more Biblical (currently New Testament) manuscripts or manuscript editions to be easily compared in side-by-side and unified views (no original unedited MSS are yet incorporated). It demonstrates a fundamental concept in the Open Scriptures framework: semantic linking. All of the contributing manuscripts are merged together to produce a single unified manuscript containing every attested variant; additionally, while merging, a manuscript’s words are linked to their corresponding words in the unified manuscript.

A full review of this tool is coming to Nerdlets.org soon.

The Open Scripture project is open-source, licensed under the excellent GPL 3.0. The source code is available on Google Code.

The people behind Open Scriptures will be presenting at the BibleTech 2009 conference.

HT: Biblical Studies and Tech Tools

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