Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary Frequency Lists: Quizzes

My earlier post about biblical Hebrew and Greek frequency lists has attracted a decent amount of interest since I posted it. In this follow-up, I offer biblical Hebrew quizzes based on the Hebrew frequency list.

I very much like being able to offer my vocabulary quizzes in a series tied to attested frequency. By doing so, I know students are getting as much possible "bang for their buck," learning the most frequently-attested biblical vocabulary first.

These twenty quizzes progress from the most common biblical Hebrew vocabulary (Quiz 01) to words that are used only 50 times or more (Quiz 20). I deploy these quizzes over the course of a full academic year. Most quizzes include four categories: verbs; nouns; adjectives; and "particles," including prepositions. I used my beloved Accordance Bible software to generate the original frequency lists.

I say "quizzes," but perhaps I should say "quiz banks": each of the twenty "quizzes" is in fact a list of about 30-35 words. For my part, I have dumped each "bank" into our Learning Management System (Moodle), and for each quiz, a randomized sample of each category is placed into a quiz of ten (10) questions. Students are given the Hebrew, and need to write in an English translation. You can, of course, use these "banks" to create paper or electronic quizzes, and can include as many or as few words out of each "bank" as you like in a given quiz.

Verbs are written without Masoretic pointing (nikkud); all other parts of speech are written with pointing.

In the "11-20" file, I follow every word in each "bank" with a numeral showing how many times it is attested. So, you always know where you are in overall frequency. (I like the idea, but not enough to go back and put those numerals into the 01-10 file!) For example, in Quiz 12, most words are attested 100-125 times, with the particles attested 133-140 times. (I allow the categories to fall slightly out of synch with each other, in order that each quiz can include all four categories of words.)

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Technical notes on download files:

• I offer files in name.rtf and name.txt formats.
• Word for Windows seems to handle the name.rtf files well, and Notepad does well with the name.rtf files.
• On the Macintosh, Word for Mac is a disaster with nikkud, and TextEdit works only fairly well, representing the nikkud well but changing word order. I recommend Mac users open either file in Pages, Nisus Writer, Mellel, or almost any word processor except Word. I also had good luck opening the name.txt file in the free text editor TextWrangler.

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Downloads:

Quiz banks 01-10 in name.txt format
Quiz banks 01-10 in name.rtf format
Quiz banks 11-20 in name.txt format
Quiz banks 11-20 in name.rtf format

I hope readers find these helpful! Let me know if you use them, and whether you have any suggesions for improvement.

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[Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary Frequency Lists: Quizzes was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/04/07. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Teaching Carnival 5.08 is Up

The latest Teaching Carnival is available at Prof Hacker, the permanent home of the Teaching Carnival. Categories for this carnival are "It's about the Students," "Tools of the Trade," "Learning," and "In the News."

The Teaching Carnival is a carnival of blog posts in higher education.

Literary Allusion in the Bible (Book of Daniel): SBL/AAR 2012

One of my two proposals to SBL/AAR 2012 has been accepted, with the other still unreported. "SBL/AAR" is the annual meeting of two societies, the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion.

I will be presenting in the Book of Daniel consultation on "Allusion to Isaiah in Daniel 7-12, in Light of 35 Years of Allusion Criticism." The pitch is to look at the methodological disarray that characterizes the study of literary allusion in the Bible, and demonstrate how a commitment to greater clarity yields better readings and opportunity for more productive exchanges between scholars.

I see that Chris Jones has reawakened the Twitter hashtag #SBLAAR for reporting acceptances. What will you be doing in Chicago this November at SBL/AAR? And is anyone else still waiting for word on any of your proposals?

Hayyom Yom Huledet la'Anu-um-ma

Today this blog is humming "Happy Birthday" to itself while putting down shelf paper and unpacking boxes in its new home. It's had a quiet year while I keep busy with offline writing, with my OT and Hebrew teaching, and with learning and teaching digital learning and teaching. There is some good stuff going on these days that I look forward to writing up…no fooling.

Hello (Again), World!

I've moved almost everything I want from WordPress here to Squarespace. The Tags didn't make the journey, I'm afraid, so that will be a piece of housekeeping in progress. But, all the old posts are here, and the links should all work seamlessly.

I'll be playing with the décor from time to time, and please let me know if you're having any trouble with the site or with the design.

Squarespace looks like a good home. Let me know what I can do to make this corner more inviting.

Housekeeping

I am in the process of moving the blog to a new location. The URL will not change, but you will see some untidiness for a short while. For example, I'm letting the CSS upgrade lapse, and will lose some of the formatting that I like. In a few days, insh'allah, you'll see a complete makeover once I've moved everything to Squarespace.

The Exegetical Thesis as (Digital) Storytelling

The "exegesis project" is a The Big Project for masters students in a biblical studies course. Usually, it's a paper, of course. This term, I hope to encourage students in my "Book of Daniel" to consider doing the project in the form of "Digital Storytelling." I realize that this calls for a two-part explanation:

1. What makes exegesis "storytelling"?


2. What makes exegesis "digital"?

I am going to take these one at a time. Today, we will stick with the first. In beginning to learn exegesis, one of the big hurdles for students is that they are asked to bracket their spiritual autobiography long enough to attend to the biblical text's own historical context. That being so, what can I mean when I ask them to accomplish their exegesis as "storytelling"? I'll break it down:

What makes it "exegetical"?

• The body of the work asks questions about the meaning of the biblical text for its author, and for the community to whom the author appears to have written, in that author's own social and historical context.


• The work's arguments rely on publicly available evidence and explicit lines of reasoning. They do not depend upon private revelation, confessional dogma, implicit lines of reasoning, or logical fallacies.

What makes it "a thesis"?

• The work is organized around the defense of a single claim, or thesis. A thesis is NOT, then, an opinion, a narrative, an “exploration,” or a review. A thesis should be defensible, relevant, and manageable. By “defensible,” I mean that it is a proposition that can be established by publicly-available evidence (not private revelation or confessional dogma) and an explicit line of reasoning. By “relevant,” I mean that the thesis forces your reader to re-evaluate the biblical text; the thesis "makes a difference" to how the biblical text is read. By “manageable,” I mean that the thesis can be argued comprehensively within the constraints of the assignment; it is not too big an idea for the word count, and also not so small that the paper falls significantly short or has to be “padded up.”

What makes it "storytelling"?

• Even when presenting data (as in a lecture, or a thesis paper), there is a "narrative" of sorts: you lead the reader from a starting place, through a terrain known only to you, to a destination. A good presenter "knows her narrative": you could take away her slides or her paper, and she can still guide you through the "narrative" of her subject matter or thesis (Ask a student about a recently-completed paper; if they can do this, it's probably a good paper.)


• We commonly ask our students to "book-end" their thesis with an introduction and a theological/hermeneutical conclusion. The project should begin with a statement of the student's interest in the biblical passage. It should end with her own assessment of the passage's theological claims as determined by exegesis. (Are those claims moral? coherent with other biblical passages? intelligible to today's reading communities?). This conclusion should also include claims about how the text might, or might not, lend itself to preaching and teaching in particular, well-defined communities of hearers. This is to say, the thesis project is a "round trip," beginning and ending with the student's own pressing theological and hermeneutical concerns.

So…What makes it "digital," if it is?

Stay tuned. In a follow-up post, I will look at the phenomenon of "Digital Storytelling" in the digital humanities, and how it might serve as a platform for "exegesis as storytelling." In the meantime, what do you think of this way of putting things? Does "storytelling" offer a useful lens, or muddy the waters?

[The Exegetical Thesis as (Digital) Storytelling was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/01/30. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Poetics of Scribal Culture in Inner-Biblical Oralities of Allusive Redaction-Echoes, and Stuff

My main research focus, when I can get to it, concerns literary allusion in the Bible (also called "inner-biblical interpretation," or "inner-biblical exegesis").

Insofar as I have a Big Idea, it mostly involves running around like Chicken Little and yelling that the field of biblical studies isn't producing a coherent conversation about "inner-biblical allusion" because we quarantine ourselves (as we so often do) from the secular ancillary scholarship (in this case, on the poetics of literary allusion).

What disturbs and intrigues me recently is, I think that there is another scholarly context to which I'll need to tether my continuing work in biblical allusion. You know it well, and most recently, it looks something like this.

Upside: maybe I get to blow the dust off my Akkadian again. Downside: Hier werden deutsche.

[Poetics of Scribal Culture in Inner-Biblical Oralities of Allusive Redaction-Echoes, and Stuff was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/01/16. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Learning to Code the Web with Code Year

On January 9th, I received my first unit of Code Year, a one-year, weekly lesson in Javascript programming offered freely by CodeAcademy. A short time later, the Boy and I were working through it together.

Javascript is the programming language on which most of the Web is built, and is one of the simplest coding languages to learn. And, just as natural human languages share most of their basic features with one another (nouns, verbs, adjectives, &c), the elements of Javascript are also used in other programming languages like Perl or Ruby.

Any of you who know me--or who see how rarely I've posted here lately--know that I am pretty extraordinarily busy these days. So why would I take ten minutes, a few evenings per week, to learn something of computer code?

How much of your work is accomplished on the Web or by means of some digital tools or other? Whatever percentage that is, remember that those environments and tools are the way they are because somebody decided that that is how they should be. Learning to code means learning what some alternative possibilities might look like. If we understand something of programming code, we begin to join that community of deciders.

If you are in the Humanities, you may well already be a "Digital Humanist": do you ever use digital tools to accomplish Humanities research? Or, do you ask Humanities-questions about the growing digitalization of our information and our practices? You don't have to code to be a digital humanist, but learning something of how the Web is coded may spark ideas for you about tools or processes that could improve your research and writing.

Do you have kids in school? If they even have "computer class," that's likely to mean, "Learning to use things made by Microsoft," rather than "Learning to build cool things that don't yet exist but could." The weekly units in CodeYear are broken down into several short lessons, perfect for children's lower stamina and shorter attention spans. (Okay, by day's end, my own stamina and attention span are pretty well shot as well.) Sit together on the sofa for ten minutes in the evenings, and learn together the language used to create on the Web.

If you are interested, you can read what others are saying about Code Year, or about Code Academy. But I recommend you just jump right in and sign up for your weekly email lessons. Have fun, and tell me if you decide to get started learning to code.

[Learning to Code the Web with Code Year was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/01/13. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Letters of Reference Check List

So, one of the duties that feature heavily this time of year is “letters of reference”: for Ph.D programs, for scholarships, for employment. (The other duties you know also: students need help planning Winter or Spring courses; students struggling with current course work are looking for life lines; and grading for the current term, so well managed up to this point, has just now spun out of control.)

Sometimes it’s hard to write a good letter. Scratch that: it’s always hard to write a good letter, in the same way that it’s always hard to get to any of the housekeeping that fills itself in around course work, administration, office hours, and (hear my hollow laughter) scholarship. What tends to really make the difference is the student herself, by performing at a high level in the first place, by getting the request in to me nice and early, and by giving me lots of information instead of requiring me to make of the letter a whole new research project. It’s arithmetical: time not spent housekeeping a letter is time spent writing the letter.

Over time, I have developed a “check list” that I return to students who ask me for a letter of reference:

The Check List

1. Whenever possible, please plan to have given me 30 days to write. If not, give me as much time as possible.


2. If I have written a letter for you in the past, please remind me of this, telling me when that was and who it was for.


3. Please include the full name and appropriate title for recipient of letter.


4. Please include the full address for recipient.


5. Please include any information materials about the program/scholarship/job/etc, unless that information available clearly on a web page (see next). This can be in electronic form or hard copy.


6. If the scholarship provider, program, employer, etc. has a web presence, please include an URL for that web site.


7. Please remind me what classes you’ve had with me, and what term(s) they took place. Or, remind me of our other ties. (Sorry, I really can remember, but if you save me these minutes, I’ll put them to better use for you working on the letter itself.)


8. Please give me clear instructions for delivery: mail directly, return sealed to you, &c.


9. Please include a portfolio of work you have done for me in the past. (This may not be necessary, I usually still have anything that we have exchanged in electronic format, but at least check with me about this). Material can be electronic or hard copy.


10. Please offer me a few sentences on how I can really help you with this. What talking points would be helpful? What are the details of the impression you hope to convey? How does my letter contribute to your overall package?


11. Always remember that a letter writer’s “stock in trade” is honesty. The very best way to secure good letters of reference is to distinguish yourself from your peers early and often in course work. Thanks.

The whole point is to be able to quickly organize the resources that will inform an interesting, positive, distinctive letter.

What do you think? If you teach, have you composed a similar check list? If you are a student, do you have any thoughts about these kinds of requirements?

[Letters of Reference Check List was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/11/17. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

THATCamp Pedagogy This Weekend (Picking My Feet Edition)

Have you ever been to Poughkeepsie?

I'm on my way this morning to THATCamp Pedagogy (ProfHacker post), an unconference on teaching and learning as an aspect of digital humanities (THATCamp home). The unconference is in Poughkeepsie NY, and is sponsored by Vassar College.

Besides the "unconference" sessions, there are planned "boot camps" on:

• integrating digital projects into undergraduate courses;


• teaching with Omeka;


• the undergraduate's voice in digital humanities;


• "So Long, Lecture."

I will plan to live-Tweet as opportunity allows. On Twitter, you can follow me for the weekend at @anummabrooke to see my Tweets alone, or follow the hashtag #THATCampedagogy (note the single "p") to follow all Tweets on the unconference.

[Addendum: the hashtags actually used at the unconference have been #THATCamp and #pdgy]

Have you ever been to Poughkeepsie? (Not Safe For Work!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd5wCpR8Cg4&feature=youtu.be#t=00m30s [Update: cut from French Connection since blocked on copyright grounds]

[THATCamp Pedagogy This Weekend was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/10/14. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Biblical Scholars: Care to be Interviewed?

I have assigned my "Introduction to Old Testament" students to interview a "real biblical scholar." Students will collaboratively come up with questions for their interviews during October, and conduct their interviews by phone or Skype in early November. They will then write a report on their interview.

Here is how I describe the report to them:

The student will have already prepared and refined a list of questions, independently and in collaboration with colleagues. She will have contacted the subject, arranged the interview, and held the interview, in accordance with instructions.

The report should demonstrate that the student asked questions appropriate to academic biblical studies, while also appropriately inviting the subject to reflect on “essential questions” related to the practice of academic biblical studies. The report should contain an introduction, a list of questions, and a body that communicates the subject’s responses to each question, and a conclusion. The report should show evidence that the interview has prompted the student to “step back” and reflect on her practice of biblical studies both for our course work and longer term.

I would like volunteers to either have a completed PhD, or else be ABD with a full-time academic job in biblical studies.

If you are interested, you can respond here in comments, or else email me at my work address: brooke dot mylastname at garrett dot edu.

Thanks!

[Biblical Scholars: Care to be Interviewed? was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/09/20. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

If You're Happy and You Know It (biblical Hebrew songs, cont'd)

So, mostly what I've been doing is supporting my faculty colleagues in their transition from Blackboard to our new Moodle learning management system.

But, partly what I've been doing is continuing with the biblical Hebrew resources in my series, "A Foundation for Biblical Hebrew," a series that uses communicative learning tools as a supplement to an elementary biblical Hebrew curriculum.

This is, "If You're Happy and You Know It." Some points I had to work through, and on which I welcome feedback:

• I decided that being happy and knowing it was best expressed with perfect verbs joined by we-gam.


• I decided to use the masculine plural pronoun suffixes; sorry, but there's just no room in the song for a more up-to-date solution to the problem of gender inclusivity. In English, I usually use the feminine singular as the "representative human" ("each student must see to her own work").


• "Let your lives show it": going with the jussive here, naturally, verb-subject.


• For the commands, I abandon personal pronouns: "clap a palm"; "stomp a foot"; etc. Again, only so much room in the scansion. This—leaving pronominal suffixes off of body parts where they are the objects of verbs—accords well enough with biblical usage (Psa 47:1; cf. Isa 37:22; but Ezek 6:11).


• Main learning points: body parts, the masculine plural imperative, the masculine plural pronominal suffixes -tem and -kem; the conditional particle ʾim.

Feedback encourages, as always.



[If You're Happy and You Know It (biblical Hebrew songs, cont'd) was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/09/12. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

The Wise Man Built His House Upon a Rock (Biblical Hebrew)

I’ve worked into biblical Hebrew the children’s song, “The Wise Man Built His House upon a Rock.” I happened to hear the Boy singing it one morning, and I found myself putting most of it into Hebrew while shaving. [update: the following version updated from original posting.]

I like it as an exercise for my students because it’s simple, and because the vocabulary is so well attested biblically: build, descend, ascend, fall; wise, house, rock. The choices I made about verb patterns could give rise to fruitful conversation about the qatal, yiqtol, and wayyiqtol. It’s good for me, too: I had initially been drawn to the Infinitive Absolute for the concurrent action of rain falling and floods rising, until my search for biblical parallels suggested I was on a wrong track. (I’d be on firmer ground if the two verbs shared a single agent.)

Another song I plan to put into biblical Hebrew is a version of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” While not all of this vocabulary is biblically well-attested, it has value for communicative teaching of Hebrew: it uses words that have high “pay off” for daily usage. (So, I’d be open to songs that use body parts, colors, numbers up to thirty, and everyday objects.)

A third song I have planned is “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” A fourth is a surprise.

How about some revision of “I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,” with all biblically-attested animals? More advanced would be a revision of, “Hush, Little Baby (the Mockingbird song).”

What other simple children’s songs can you think of that might be put into biblical Hebrew? The song should be fairly short and simple. Ideally, they should EITHER 1) feature vocabulary that is biblically well-attested, OR 2) feature vocabulary that has high pay-off in terms of everyday nouns and concepts like body parts, colors, numerals, and so on.

[The Wise Man Built His House Upon a Rock (Biblical Hebrew) was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/07/05. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

MultiMarkdown and Me

MultiMarkdown: All I Never Knew I Wanted:

When I write, I want to write text files that are ready to be published either as word processing files or to the Web, with full formatting, while still already human-readable simply as text. And I didn’t even know how badly I wanted that until I discovered that it’s possible with Markdown. This is probably easier to show first, then tell.

• Download sample in *.txt format: this is the blog post you’re reading now, as I wrote it in plain text.


• Download sample in *.rtf format: this is the same document as exported to RTF, readable in almost any word processor.

As you can see, the *.txt file is human-readable, and I get the same formatting results whether I publish to *.rtf (for word processing) or to HTML (for web publishing as you’re reading it now). This is the point.

Results Explained:

These examples illustrate the gist of it. As a writer, this is what I gain from MultiMarkdown:

I get to create a human-readable document that can nonetheless be exported to the Web as HTML. Have you ever seen a page of text that is marked up for HTML, that is for web viewing? It’s a blizzard of tags that make the actual content unreadable. (You can see an example if you select, in your browser, View: Source or Page Source.) But with MultiMarkdown (or just Markdown: see below), I have a document that is prepared for the web, but which is also totally readable in plain text.

I get to create a human-readable document that can nonetheless be exported to a word processor as *.rtf (RTF). Have you ever seen a page of text that is marked up as *.rtf, for opening in Word or another word processor? It’s even worse than with HTML. (You can see an example if you take the RTF file linked above, change the suffix from *.rtf to *.txt, and open it in Apple’s TextEdit or in Microsoft Notepad.) But again, with MultiMarkdown, I have a document that is prepared for export as *.rtf to almost any word processor, but again which is also totally readable in plain text.

I get to write this file just once, and archive it as a single file, no matter whether I used it for word processing or web publishing. The same file, written in MultiMarkdown, can be exported as an *.rtf document, easily read in almost any word processor, or as HTML, easily read by any browser or pasted into a blog post or web site.

I get to compose this file in plain text, in any application that suits my stage in the writing process (collecting ideas, outlining, drafting, editing, publishing). It doesn’t feel like I am writing “markup,” it feels as much as possible like I am simply writing. The beauty of Markup is that most of it derives from email conventions: a line of white space between paragraphs, or asterisks surrounding a word or phrase to mark emphasis, or two asterisks for strong text. There are multiple ways (see below on Gruber’s Markdown) to write Web links that are wonderfully readable, completely unlike HTML web link markup.

I get to be sure that it will be readable in twenty years, without a word processor or web browser to render the formatting. Do you have any old files that you cannot read anymore because they only exist in an obsolete format like “AppleWorks”? The stuff I wrote during my Masters work can only be opened as plain text, and the text is entirely buried in obsolete markup and code. But the stuff I write today in Markdown is already human-readable in plain text, and will remain human-readable for as long as we have plain text.

This is the beauty of MultiMarkdown: plain text files, easily readable to the human eye, but already marked up for headers, sub-headers, ordered or unordered lists, emphasis, and footnotes…both for word processing via *.rtf or for web publishing via HTML. Yeah, it’s the writer’s holy grail.

What is MultiMarkdown?

John Gruber developed Markdown with the web-publishing end in view. Markdown allows almost any formatting one will need for most purposes: emphasis (usually italics), strong text (usually bold), paragraphing, lists, block quotes, hyperlinks to the web, and more. However, Gruber’s Markdown exporter only exports as HTML, because web-publishing is what Gruber has in mind.

Fletcher Penney developed MultiMarkdown as a supplement to, or extension of, Gruber’s Markdown. It accomplishes two things:

• It exports Markdown as *.rtf rather than only as HTML. (It also exports to OPML, LaTex, and other formats that you may or may not know about or be interested in.)


• It adds syntax for things like bibliography, footnotes, tables, and more.

So, MultiMarkdown incorporates all the features of Gruber’s Markdown, and extends the idea beyond web publishing to word processing. Note that you do have to install Fletcher’s MultiMarkdown script and support package in order to export MultiMarkdown plain text files as HTML, *.rtf, or other file formats.

My Workflow

I like this because I often don’t know where doodling, note-taking, and outlining might leave off and “writing” begin. I am learning to write in MultiMarkdown all the time, in every stage, because any of that stuff may, at some point, become part of the written piece. Composed in Markdown, anything I write is legible while I play around with it, and it won’t require additional formatting for word processors or for the Web once that writing sits in the final, published piece.

For example, this blog post was

• begun as a note in NotationalVelocity,


• moved into OmniOutliner while I played with structure and began some drafting,


• imported via OPML into Scrivener for continued drafting and editing. From Scrivener I can compile it as HTML (as for this post in WordPress), or as *.rtf for word processing. I save it in Scrivener, but also compiled as plain text ( *.txt) for archiving.

At any of these stages I can compose freely in MultiMarkdown, working in whatever tools suits my present location and purposes, knowing that the result will be a human-readable plain text file formatted for word processing or for the Web.

What do you think? It can sound complicated, and there is a bit of a front-end learning curve (not much, for anyone who already habitually writes in “email style” paragraphing), but once learned, it is all simplicity itself. Can MultiMarkdown do for you what it does for me?

[MultiMarkdown and Me was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/05/02. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

RBoC: Not-Yet-End-of-Term Edition

End of term? Not even Spring Break yet! (Next week, insh'allah and the creek don't rise).

I have in mind some writing on pseudonymity and nymity in blogging, on a recent Chronicle op piece about keeping quiet in faculty meetings, on ancient language “reading examinations,” and on “feeling like a writer.” This is what I’m doing instead:

• Facilitating faculty training on our new Moodle learning management system (so long, Blackboard);


• Arranging to offer similar training to our platoon of TAs;


• Preparing biblical Greek reading exams for 2nd-year Greek students and Ph.D. candidates;


• Catching up on a self-paced UWM online certification program in online teaching and learning;


• Working up a couple of videos for our seminary admissions page;


• Keeping up on quizzes, exams, and papers for Elementary Hebrew, Elementary Greek, and Intro to OT;


• Experimenting with a couple of new productivity helps to organize the above and more;


• Eat, sleep, you know. Maybe try for a haircut.

What do you find this week  among your RBoC?

[RBoC: Not-Yet-End-of-Term Edition was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/04/12. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Plagiarism Paralysis

I’ve want to write a post about plagiarism, with reference to an excellent series of educational “what-is-plagiarism?” posters that I recently discovered.

But, the company publishing the posters won’t return my emails asking for permission to reproduce them.

[Plagiarism Paralysis was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/04/06. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities 2011

Along with everything else in life that you’ve been missing, the Day in the Life of Digital Humanities (“Day of DH”) 2011 came and went a couple of weeks back. What are the “Digital Humanities,” you ask? You could settle for me telling you that it’s humanities accomplished digitally, or you could ask the Wikipedia about it; or best of all, you could simply hear the explanations offered by those who have self-identified over the last three years as working in “digital humanities.” Here are just a few:

Digital Humanities is the application of humanities methodologies and theories to modern technology research. -Andy Keenan, University of Alberta, Canada

Under the digital humanities rubric, I would include topics like open access to materials, intellectual property rights, tool development, digital libraries, data mining, born-digital preservation, multimedia publication, visualization, GIS, digital reconstruction, study of the impact of technology on numerous fields, technology for teaching and learning, sustainability models, and many others. -Brett Bobley, NEH, United States

I think digital humanities, like social media, is an idea that will increasingly become invisible as new methods and platforms move from being widely used to being ubiquitous. For now, digital humanities defines the overlap between humanities research and digital tools. But the humanities are the study of cultural life, and our cultural life will soon be inextricably bound up with digital media. -Ed Finn, Stanford University, USA

On the Day of Digital Humanities, hundreds of folks who see their work in this way agreed to write a blog post about what they were doing that day, March 18, 2011. (This was the day that I became aware of the term, "digital humanities,” because the Day nosed its way onto my Twitter feed, whereupon I followed the tag #dayofdh for the rest of that day and the next.)

You will be excited to know that I’ve saved the best news: Because the fine folks at Day of DH have made the RSS feeds for the blog posts available as an OPML file (or, to translate, “Because blah blah the internet is cool”), I have been able to place the blog posts on my public NetVibes page! And you have a whole year to peruse them before Day of DH 2012!

[Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities 2011 was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/04/05. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Teaching Carnival: Backstory (and New Carnival)

The newest Teaching Carnival (4.8), by Annie Vocature Bullock, is available!

Linking to this edition of the Carnival, ProfHacker Jason B. Jones also fills us in on where it began, and how one can host or contribute to a Teaching Carnival.

It is through the Teaching Carnival that I began to get to know most of the blogs in my Academic Blogroll. (See my right sidebar, underneath my regular Blogroll.) While I don’t love the other Carnival in my life less, it is the Teaching Carnival that most often makes an immediate difference to my daily practices of teaching and writing.

You can always find past Carnivals on the Teaching Carnival Home Page.

[Teaching Carnival: Backstory (and New Carnival) was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/04/04. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

No Fooling

Anumma blog is two years old today.

Now be careful out there today. (Or is one of these things not like the others?)

[No Fooling was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/04/01. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]