blogging

Higgaion has a new home

Dear readers, please update your links and spread the word: Higgaion has moved to a new home. The new URL is http://drchris.me/higgaion; visit the site to grab the new RSS feed or just substitute “drchris.me” for “heardworld.com” in your existing URLs.

Online publishing needs peer review

At the e-publishing and blogging sessions that I attended during the 2010 Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Atlanta, presenters and respondents from the audiences repeatedly raised questions related to tenure and promotion committees’ esteem, or lack of same, for online journals. As far as I know, no one has done any kind of serious research project on this issue, at least as it relates to biblical studies. However, as a member of Seaver College’s Rank, Tenure, and Promotion Committee, I can certainly offer some anecdotal evidence related to this topic. As a blogger, I can also offer my personal opinion without having to pass it through any editorial control—and there’s there rub.

In my experience, it matters little or none whether you deliver your scholarship in physical or digital formats. Tenure and promotion committees, however, almost always draw their members from across the entire college or university. We have eight “divisions” in Seaver College, and our Rank, Tenure, and Promotion Committee consists of one tenured representative from each division plus one untenured representative elected by the faculty at large. Therefore, I—a biblical scholar—must evaluate research done by my colleagues in all other disciplines. The farther we get from the humanities, the farther we get from my ability to independently assess my colleagues’ research, never mind the time involved. Faculty sitting on tenure and promotion committees must therefore rely on the judgments of reviewers in the same field, and that’s why peer review is so important.

In my own applications for tenure and promotion, for example—as well as for research funding and such—I have no reason to think that the relevant committees have considered the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures inferior in any wise to Semeia (to use only two examples) just because Semeia was printed on paper and JHS is (note the different verb tenses!) distributed electronically (though you can get a paper copy). Quite the opposite, in fact: JHS rates higher than Semeia in the eyes of my Seaver College peers, because JHS is peer-reviewed while Semeia volumes were editor-reviewed. Both, however, carry much more weight with our tenure and promotion committee than my most brilliant Higgaion posts, precisely because the JHS and Semeia articles were reviewed by professionals in my field before they were published.

In short, the distinction between print and digital media matters far, far less than the path to publication, for most forms of research. Only if that path goes through an academic editor’s hands, and more desirably through several peer reviewers’ hands as well, will tenure and promotion committees consider the work to be “scholarship.”

When I came up for tenure, I asked Chris Brady to write a letter for my file addressing the value of iTanakh to the scholarly and student communities. However, I did not offer iTanakh to my tenure and promotion committee as “scholarship”; rather, I categorized it as “professional service.” Ditto with Higgaion; I (have) include(d) it in my applications for tenure, promotion, appointments, grants, and such as “professional/public service,” not as “scholarship.” The lack of peer review, in part, drives this categorization.

I very much support Chris Brady’s suggestion for a kind of peer review panel, under the auspices of the SBL, which could undertake such evaluations upon request. However, I think that tenure and promotion committees will still prefer material that has been reviewed before publication to material reviewed post hoc.

One final note: my comments here related to fairly traditional forms of scholarship, such as essays and papers. As Bob Cargill has pointed out repeatedly, including in the blogger session at SBL 2010, we still need to develop new forms of peer review for research that comes packaged in other media.

Giving a civil critique

Susan J. Behrens published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently on the topic of civil critiques. It’s well worth your time to read the article, though online access does require a Chronicle subscription.

Where I have been, where I am going

I haven’t blogged much lately—at least, not on Higgaion. This simply reflects the number of hours in a day, and how I’ve chosen to spend my discretionary time. All work and no play makes Chris a dull boy, and a grumpy one. I’m increasingly trying to separate my work life and home/personal life, getting my pedagogical and scholarly work done on campus 7:30–4:30, and then leaving it behind when I go home.

The thing is, if I get my pedagogical and scholarly work done 7:30–4:30 daily, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for blogging. Occasionally I will take time to post something when I feel I have something important or useful to say. However, I hereby officially, explicitly, and ceremoniously declare myself free of any felt obligation to post stuff. I am not “retiring” from blogging or any such nonsense, just taking a different approach to budgeting my time.

I appreciate all of you who post regularly on your own blogs; thanks to the iPhone, you provide some of my favorite bathroom reading (was that too much information?), even if I don’t comment frequently. I appreciate all of you who have contributed regularly to the comments on Higgaion over the last few years, and I hope you’ll keep Higgaion on your RSS feed, even my posting slows to a crawl.

By the way, I just started reading Ellen van Wolde’s Reframing Biblical Studies: When Language and Text Meet Culture, Cognition, and Context (Eisenbrauns, 2010). This book includes a fully-detailed English-language version of van Wolde’s arguments regarding the sense of ברא in Genesis 1, and I’m eager to read that. So far, I have finished only the introduction (chapter 1), but I can already report that Van Wolde’s argument is far more complex than it appeared when all that we Anglophone bloggers had to go on was a brief report from a Netherlands newspaper. I will share more of my reactions to van Wolde’s book as I work through it—I hope to keep up a page pace (thanks, G.M.!) of no less than two chapters per week, but cannot really aim higher than that at the moment.

שלום עליכם

On irons and fires

I gots me too many of ’em. That’s all there is to it. I had hoped to pick up the blogging and resume the podcasting, and I have—but on the recreational side of my life, not the professional side. The professional side has been focused on immediate professional duties.

So if you care about such things, I apologize for my lack of presence from interesting biblioblogosphere discussions of late, particularly those surrounding the Qeiyafa ostracon. Many thanks to all of you who have blogged regularly on interesting things.

Absence, presence, and biblioblogger status

While I was looking the other way, Jim West and John Loftus got into an argument about whether John properly qualifies as a “biblioblogger,” Hector Avalos came to John’s defense with, in part, a comparison of John’s and Jim’s educational background, and Jim decided that blogging was boring and deleted the latest incarnation (who knew biblioblogs could ride the wheel of samsara?) of his WordPress blog.

In the ensuing discussion, which has been voluminous (too voluminous for me to try to track, though better bloggers have attempted it), my name has been “dropped” a few times in reference to a post I wrote over three years ago during one of my not-terribly-infrequent public disagreements with Jim about home schooling.

When considering any writer’s/speaker’s/blogger’s argument on this or that matter of fact or interpretation (biblical, political, or what have you), educational pedigree doesn’t mean nearly as much to me as what that individual actually says. (Full disclosure: I don’t feel the same way when making faculty hiring decisions, where there are lots of other issues to consider, such as public relations, accreditation, rankings, and the promise of continued scholarly output that gains a hearing in the academy.) Thus, the source of Jim’s (or John’s) highest degree makes no difference to me in terms of weighing what Jim (or John) had (or will have) to say on any subject.

My argument three years ago (and I still agree with it today) is that Jim’s actual educational history (a Th.D. from a distance-learning institution based in Georgia, earned while Jim was pastoring churches in North Carolina and Tennessee) and actual pedagogical practice (teaching in online and distance-learning courses for institutions in Quartz Hill, California and Copenhagen, Denmark—according to his CV online at Quartz Hill School of Theology, last updated in 2005 as of this morning) do not cohere with a passionate hatred of home schooling. Jim’s own doctorate and the courses he teaches (or was teaching as of 2005) depend entirely for whatever legitimacy they have on the students’ self-direction and autodidactic pursuits, much like home schooling. Nobody doubts that some (perhaps many) home schooling experiences end up providing the students with pathetic excuses for instruction, just as some apparent distance education programs are really nothing but diploma mills. These facts do not indict home schooling as such or distance education as such, only certain implementations thereof. Either can be done well or poorly. My point in 2006 was that Jim’s actual practice of post-secondary education thoroughly embraces individual adults pursuing baccalaureate and higher degrees at home with guidance, sometimes quite minimal, from instructors. Jim himself is obviously a skilled autodidact. Yet on his blogs, Jim never failed to exploit any opportunity to criticize people who would apply the same educational logistics to elementary and secondary education.

In short, my comments about Jim’s educational background and teaching practices were not an attack on the quality of the credentials themselves (as I think Hector intends his own comments), but part of a critique of the inconsistency between Jim’s own educational practices and his intense rhetoric against home schooling.

I did not then, and do not now, want to get into a debate about the “worth” of a degree from Andersonville for ministerial or academic purposes. My argument with Jim about home schooling is long-standing and well known to those who have been around the biblioblogging community for a few years. Indeed, I started blogging partially for the very purpose of arguing with Jim about that very issue from a non-evangelical point of view (and because I thought the biblioblogging world, which was relatively small at that time, needed a voice somewhere in between Jim and Joe Cathey on historical issues).

For the record and in the interests of full disclosure, both of my sons (now in kindergarten and sixth grade) attend the California Virtual Academy of Los Angeles, an online public charter school, doing their lessons at home under the direct guidance of my wife and, one day a week, myself. A state-credentialed elementary grades teacher hired by the charter school supervises and assesses the instruction; CAVA curriculum adheres to all California state educational standards, and CAVA students are subject to the same standardized testing procedures (for whatever little they’re worth) as students who physically attend California public schools.

So if you see (saw) my name popping up in comments and such surrounding Hector’s criticisms of Jim’s declarations that John doesn’t count as a biblioblogger, please do me the courtesy of keeping the context in mind. If you disagree with my assessment and think that Jim’s Th.D.-granting institution and his teaching appointments c. 2006 (I don’t know whether anything has changed since then) are irrelevant to his criticisms of home schooling, that’s fine. I disagree with your judgment on the matter. But please don’t get or give the impression that one day I just woke up and decided out of the blue to write a blog post criticizing Jim’s educational background, as that’s an extremely distorted picture of what happened halfway through 2006.

By the way, while I’m on the topic (and I’ve been on this topic far too long this morning), I might as well say something about John Loftus and biblioblogging. Back when the “Biblioblogger/SBL Affiliate” badge started popping up all over the place, I raised the following concern, among others:

2. The whole idea of constituting “Bibliobloggers” as an official group threatens to enshrine the perpetual “who’s in, who’s out” nonsense as a permanent feature of discourse within the group of bloggers who happen to blog frequently about academic biblical studies. Witness the recent flare-up of the perennial “Where are the female bibliobloggers?” question. Can’t we just blog about what we enjoy discussing without trying to define group boundaries (even if in/out status is self-selecting)?

Interestingly enough, in comments to that post, Jim West hotly insisted that he had no desire to arbitrate the boundaries of biblioblogdom:

Rochelle [Altman?] wrote: Official ordering of bloggers is a step towards controlling the content on the web through controlling independent bloggers.

Since when is Jim West a spokesperson for all bibliobloggers? That already implies an organization, which does not exist.

It’s not the carnivals that started this trend. Whoever started the top 50 opened the door for exactly this type of control. …

The SBL now has a self-elected blog czar. And if you do not check on Jim’s blog daily, you are now letting the the SBL and anointed bibliobloggers down — and those who do not bow to pressure will be marginalized.

Jim West wrote: you guys- you should take your comedy show on the road.

if you really, in your hearts, believe im trying to do ANYTHING besides organize a program unit for the sbl you’re idiots.

After raising the concerns I mentioned, I was assured over and over again on various blogs that neither Jim nor anyone else would attempt to draw boundary lines defining the “insiders” and “outsiders” of biblioblogdom. Not long thereafter, the new management (not including Jim) of Biblioblogs.com began to draft criteria for inclusion in Biblioblogs.com blogrolls, and a couple of months later, here comes the Jim-initiated fuss over whether John Loftus can play in the “Biblioblogs Top 50″ game.

Enough, already!

Blog about what you want to blog about. Read the blogs you want to read. Offer support for the ideas and arguments with which you agree. Offer critiques of the ideas and arguments with which you disagree. Stop arguing about names and labels (evangelicals and biblicists of all stripes may wish to invoke 1 Timothy 6:4 and/or Titus 3:9–11 at this point). Just write. Read. Comment. And enrich us all by substantive discussion of things that matter, not of artificial lines drawn in virtual sand.

Please.

Biblical Studies Carnival XLVIII

Doug Chaplin, a.k.a. Clayboy, hosts the Biblical Studies Carnival for December with a roundup that manages to combine both breadth and depth. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out!

But then Doug raises pesky questions about whether the BSC should continue in the same vein, or transmogrify itself into something altogether different. I’ve seen responses from Tyler Williams and Loren Rosson; other bloggers have probably opined, but I haven’t read those posts yet. Why don’t you give those a read, too, and weigh in (if you have an opinion) on those posts or your own blog. I don’t really have a strong preference myself. But I don’t agree with Tyler that a theme post + comments can’t be called a “carnival,” as that is exactly the model followed by some other carnivals (the role-playing games carnival, for one).

Bible Babel blog

In roundabout fashion, at the SBL Annual Meeting, Moira Bucciarelli introduced me to Kristin Swenson, who works on Hebrew Biblical texts and writes a blog called Bible Babel that, as far as I know, has not been well known among academic bibliobloggers of the sort that gathered at Cafe Giovanni tonight. Give it a look and expand the conversation!

Ah, but you’re so wrong about that, Chris!

Chris Brady, I mean, when he opines against twittering or blogging about the SBL meeting from the selfsame meeting. And Jim’s wrong too, when he says that we do it for people who aren’t here rather than for people who are. Well … partially wrong (over-the-top rhetoric can gain readers, though). I don’t really mean to criticize either Chris or Jim, though. I just wanted to offer this case in point in favor of blogging at the SBL for other SBL attendees: if not for Daniel and Tonya’s post, I wouldn’t have known about the new Accordance syntax database. I plan to go down for a demo tomorrow.

Malware on Higgaion?

Yesterday, I learned from faithful reader G.M. Grena that his anti-malware software had suddenly started giving him warnings about Higgaion. The Scribd reader that I embedded in the post about John Walton’s commentary on Genesis seems to be the cause of this warning. If you’re seeing this warning, it should disappear once that post cycles off the main page. I apologize for any inconvenience.

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