With “Sacred Techs” we wanted to bring together information focused upon using technology in the real of biblical and ancient studies. It will be periodically updated, on a monthly basis at the least, with articles and interviews on various topics around this general theme. We are very hopeful that others will be willing to contribute to the site, there are many within the world of online ancient studies who are very (and more) adept in these areas, many who are creating the very technology that we will be reviewing, citing, and discussing. This is particularly true if you use something other than Apple products and MacOS, iOS, or Android software. It is not that we are prejudiced against other platforms, but the reality is that Robert and I both tend to use those products and platforms. If you are interested in contributing please drop us a line or leave a comment!

So welcome to Sacred Techs and stay tuned for what we hope will be a great year. First up on the podcast (see below!) is an introductory discussion and then we will follow up with a few interviews from 2011 SBL. Be sure to let us know whom you would like to hear us interview and what products you would like reviewed or compared.

@Targuman @sacredtechs @xkv8r Here’s one. How can Bible software help non-experts evaluate translations as never before? Long term effects?

 

Make your own at QR-Code Generator. Now, for those wondering what this is for, if you have a smart phone there is a free app out there with which you can take a picture of this image and it will redirect you to this website…or give you all my contact info (if I had set it up for that). This has made me think that wouldn’t it be great if SBL put this on their name badges? At PSU when just had an IT conference where we had these on our badges. My brother now has them on his new business cards, makes it easy to get his contact info right into your electronic address book. Here is some basic contact info about me:

 

My PSU colleague Chris Long has written about his “Evolving Digital Research Ecosystem” and has long encourage me to consider Zotero and Mendeley. However, see above. Mendeley in particular strikes me as overwrought. Both, however have the benefit of being free. Clearly what I needed to do was to prioritize my needs and consider the options. Like Chris I wanted to close the circle on my digital research process (see my earlier post regarding using the iPad for research) and I think I have found the solution, albeit not a free one.

Criteria for a solution:

• Available on both Mac and iPad
• Store both bibliographic information and associated files (images, PDFs, etc.)
• Allow annotation of PDFs
• Synchronize between Mac and iPad
• Integrate with Nisus Writer Pro, my word processor of choice

There are, to the best of my knowledge, only two solutions that meet the first criteria, Papers and Sente. Both have an iPad app (Papers has an iPhone app as well) and a desktop app. Papers is a bit cheaper on the iOS, $14.99 as opposed to $19.99, but Sente offers a free Sente Viewer (does not allow markup). Papers desktop app is $42 while Sente is hefty $89.95. Both offer student discounts but Sente allows you to use the license on up to 3 machines (e.g., my office and home machine and my grad assistant’s machine). So as I said, not free. Fortunately both offer the chance to demo the desktop software for free (something that will not be possible with the new Mac App Store, they will have to do “lite” versions, as in the iOS App Store).

I did not get very far in testing Papers because early on I was told that it only supports journals, not books and does not allow you to annotate PDFs. The first sounds dubious to me (how could they possible not include all forms of bibliographic data?) but the second was a deal breaker. As much as I like iAnnotate I want the benefit of a complete ecosystem. That left me with Sente and so far I can say that I am very pleased.

The best way to offer this review is simply to describe h0w events transpired. Eric (my GA) took the Bookends¹ database that a previous GA had prepared with about 170 entries and we had a folder (shared on Dropbox) of about 90 PDFs. Eric exported the Bookends file into an Endnote format and the imported it into Sente desktop app. Perfect! Everything came right in with no troubles. He then associated the PDFs with the relevant citation/entry. (You can have Sente store these all in a bundle or as a folder that it will automatically organize for you. I chose to have it import the PDFs and organize them for me and I will later delete the original folder of PDFs.)

At this point we were sharing one database file via Dropbox. This works but you need to be careful not to have it open in two places at one. Fortunately Sente has a solution for this: Sente 6 Synchronized Libraries!

Work on your library on any of your computers and always have up-to-date information everywhere. Or, share one library with any number of colleagues, and give each person the appropriate level of access to your data.

I won’t bore you with the details of the process, but suffice to say that I have the main DB on my office Mac (all are actually backed up via Dropbox) and open the synchronized library on my machine at home, as does Eric. I take notes on a PDF, either in Sente app on the desktop or on the iPad and all copies of the PDF update. One major caveat: you must markup the PDF only in a Sente app. You can open them in other apps but the changes will not be synchronized. As Eric adds new bibliography and PDFs all copies of the database update and the various “smart folders” like “recent changes” make it easy to see what my collaborator has been working on. You can also create status tags (and sort by them) so he can flag something as “follow up” and I will see it immediately.

Once you have set up the Sente iPad app you have access to all of your bibliographic material, attachments and all, automatically synced. (You use the iTunes interface to initially add the synced library file and from then on the updates occur over the air, no hardware syncing required.) Inside the iPad app you can highlight, quote, and annotate your PDFs. They obviously have to be OCRd before you add them to Sente to be able to use the quote feature, but even if they are not OCRd or simply are graphics you can use a box tool to lasso the relevant portion (which is then saved as an image in the note) and you can add your annotation as you see fit. You can then send the notes, bibliographic data, and quoted text to someone via an email. I have included a number of screenshots below from the iPad app. I should add that the app can be slow to respond when reading and annotating a PDF. Since iAnnotatePDF regularly warns its users about sluggishness due to large PDFs I am assuming it is a memory issue. It is certainly usable, but does merit some patience at times.

Both the desktop and iPad app make it very simple to add both references and PDFs from within the app using their integrated browser and database searches.

I have not yet tried to use Sente within a paper for citation and bibliography creation. All accounts on the user groups are that it works fine with NWP and is built right in to Mellel. It also integrates well (so I read) with Word.

Everyone has their own work habits and patterns so Sente may not be for you and some will always only insist on using free options. So far I have found it to not only be incredibly solid but a great tool for collaboration. While I am reading an article I can highlight a footnote and send it in an email to my GA asking him to follow up on the references. All from within Sente. (And because Eric is so good, the next day I had a half a dozen new entries in my library with their PDFs!) This is some pretty tight integration and has certainly helped me in my research. YMMV.

 

1. Apparently they too are working on an iOS app.

Thanks for contacting me. Here’s a bit more about the online Bible dictionary:

This Bible dictionary is intended to fill the niche between popular-level and academic resources by providing in-depth articles free from the scholarly jargon that would be confusing for a reader who does not have a background in Biblical Studies. The articles should give an in-depth look at current scholarship in each area, but in a non-technical language. We are looking for writers to contribute articles of about 1000 words in length. We’re offering compensation in Logos Bible Software products. Currently, the final date of submission is January 31st, 2011.

Below my email signature is a list of 1000 word topics that still need entries written. If you are able to write 10 entries for us before the end of January, you’ll earn $200.00 in Logos software products. If you can take on five entries, that will earn you $100.00 in software.

Please let me know if any of these pique your interest.

Sincerely,

What do you think? How many of you graduate students feel this is a fair deal? Are any concerns you had regarding editorial control addressed? Do we need this? (And the related question, doesn’t wikipedia already fill this niche?)

 

So far just a few niggles. When you go to easy install it took me a few tries for it to load the complete listing of my available modules. Unfortunately that included Atlas files which cannot be installed on the iOS device. Every text has the book and verse reference on every line. You can turn that off in the desktop app but I cannot find the option to do that in the iOS app. You can only open two texts at once, not really a complaint, even on the iPad you cannot really see more than that usefully, but I could not close the Bible text pane in order to open just the Hebrew and English Mishnah texts.

And all of those comments should be seen as minor. This is an incredibly welcome app to the iOS and further moves it to my only device on the road. I will post a more complete review next week, in the meantime, it is FREE so download it now!

 

Today I was reading a story about the legality of using your iPhone to record a conversation without notifying the other parties. I added a few comments along with the link and it occurred to me that no one may read them, stuck over in the sidebar. So here is how it appears on my Shared Google Reader page:

Court OKs Covert iPhone Audio Recording | Threat Level | Wired.com

via www.wired.com on 8/19/10

Targuman:

Very interesting ruling. With the iPad note apps capable of recording I have wondered how to legally and ethically use this in lectures and meetings. (Lectures are considered “public” so fair game, but departmental meetings, for example?)

Using an iPhone to secretly record a conversation is not a violation of the Wiretap Act if done for legitimate purposes, a federal appeals court has

So please feel free to check the sidebar, go directly to my Shared Google Reader page, or comment here about the items you see there.

 

Believe it or not, that is Accordance on an iPad!

(I was using it in landscape mode, hence the sideways screenshot.)

 

My brother and Tony have been talking up HDR, the process by which one can achieve “High Dynamic Range” images that compensate for lighting difficulties and differences. A search of flickr for “hdr” reveals some pretty dramatic results. There are lots of software solutions out there (including Photoshop) but me, I’m cheap. So I was thrilled to find HDRtist, a free solution for the Mac. It is simple, elegant, and produces some stunning images. You can see one of my more serious attempts from my recent trip to Finland here and at right. These rocks were shot with my Sony alpha and I intentionally bracketed with three separate shots. I used the extreme setting in HDRtist to show how far you can take the HDR effect in HDRtist.

Below is an example of what it can do with some fairly mediocre images. These two images were taken with my iPhone 3GS and nothing but my big ‘ol body to stabilize the camera. You can see how in the first screen shot the images are slightly off. HDRtist aligns the images (this takes a few minutes and in my case required cropping out the non-overlapping bits). Then you simply use the slider below to get the level of effect you are looking for. The result here is not great because the starting images were not very good. But when you compare the result with the sources, wow! Now I have a reasonable image worthy of being placed on flickr. (OK, not really, but I put it up anyway to illustrate this post.)

Verdict: For free you often get what you pay for, in this case free gets you an excellent and easy to use app that does what it advertises. For a hack who is not interested (right now) in serious HDR manipulation, it is darn near perfect.