Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Mark Wessner <mark AT wessner.ca>]

Hi All,

I normally keep pretty quiet (ie, I'm another of the "lurkers"), but I have 
to jump in and agree with Trevor.  One of my activities is teaching 
undergraduate courses in religion/Biblical studies via the Internet.  That 
is, most of my students communicate with me and do their research 
on-line.  And, what I have seen over and over again, is that students who 
research/read on-line (or with computer based texts) only, is that they 
seldom see things in context.  They find the word/phrase they are looking 
for, but they have no idea how it fits in with the rest of the texts, or 
why the author even bothered to write it (and therefore they have no idea 
if/why they should agree or disagree).  I have read a lot of papers with 
some very questionable conclusions, simply because the student had poor 
research skills.  Easier/faster isn't always better.

I have BibleWorks and I love it (and it does things that I could never do 
with just paper books), but there is a lot to be said for picking up a book 
or two and just thumbing through the pages - it is amazing what I have 
discovered/learned this way.

Thanks!

Mark


----------
Mark Wessner
mark AT wessner.ca

Professor of Religion (Adjunct)
American Public University System
http://www.apus.edu

Ancient Wisdom, Modern Faith
http://www.wessner.ca


At 10:57 AM 22/01/2004, Trevor Peterson wrote:
> >===== Original Message From Lance Petersen <petersenlance AT yahoo.com> =====
> >None of these things are possible with paper documents. (My BDB is *So* two
> weeks ago!) This helps make for what I would call effective study.
>
> I just have a couple of thoughts here. First, in response to what you say
> above, I agree that having computer access to things like dictionary and
> concordance lookups is a lot more efficient. In fact, the last time I was
> trying to make more room in my library, I ended up loaning some Greek and
> Hebrew concordances to my church library, because I just never use them.
> BibleWorks is much more versatile in what it can find, and I can link 
> directly
> to the contexts without having to flip madly through BHS. Even so, there 
> is at
> least one drawback that I can think of--a significant enough drawback, that I
> would encourage you to keep BDB handy. Consider the difference between
> shopping in a bookstore and at Amazon.com. In a bookstore, you go find the
> section you're interested in. Maybe you're looking for a new release, or 
> maybe
> you have the topic in mind. You might even know exactly what book you want,
> but to find it, you have to do a little browsing through the shelves. 
> (Make it
> a used bookstore, and the adventure only grows.) At Amazon.com, you simply go
> to the search engine and plug in whatever--the title if you want a particular
> book, or keywords if not. Often it will take you directly to the book for 
> you.
> Other times, it might give you a small subset to choose from. But there is no
> meandering through a given section in the store. For one thing, there are 
> just
> too many books to do that productively. For another, most of the need is 
> gone.
> Amazon.com might try to keep you there a while by recommending other books,
> but it's pretty easy to pass them by. Another difference is that you have 
> only
> limited ability to pick up a book and flip through it. They're getting better
> about providing sample pages, but it's a pretty restrictive approach.
>
> Anyway, my point here is that looking up words can be much the same as
> shopping for books. Along the way to finding the word you're concerned with,
> you just might see something interesting. By restricting yourself to
> computerized links, this possibility is seriously minimized. Particularly 
> with
> BDB, the arrangement according to roots (although problematic at times) can
> afford several interesting connections.
>
> [snipped]
>
> >Let those problems get hammered out now. That way, I , or someone
> >li
> > ke me,
> > won't see years worth of work on a pet project go up in flames because 
> of a
> software oversight.
>
> My second thought is that things are perhaps not as dismal as you might 
> think.
> ASCII isn't going anywhere. Unicode was specifically designed to make sure it
> would retain the same coding. You might want to keep your font under lock and
> key :-) but otherwise, I wouldn't worry too much about your library becoming
> obsolete. (If Peter et al. can provide you with a means to convert the whole
> thing, well and good. I'm just saying you shouldn't think your life's work is
> down the drain because Unicode now exists.
>
> Trevor Peterson
> CUA/Semitics
>
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