Category: Uncategorized

Listen, children, I remember way back when your Uncle Joi pronounced email officially broken. We’re still using email two years later, but today I shut down Trackback on this blog; I like Trackback when it links two related blogs, but the unmoderated character of pings has made Trackback too attractive a target for parasites. I’ll code in a “Threadorati” link tomorrow, probably. tonight, I’m just turning off the valve.

[Later: Done. I should’ve noted that the first few words of Shelley’s post prompted me to take the plunge. Now, all I have to do is go back and turn off Trackbacks on every post so far. . . .]

Via Mark’s New Testament Greek Gateway, a copy of Herbert Weir Smyth’s Greek Grammar as a PDF — you can’t beat that with a stick!

[Later: Well, you could beat it with a stick if the PDFs were actual text instead of scanned images. But it’s still Smyth, and it’s still free.]

Well, at Mark’s request, anyway, I’m resuscitating the Seabury “wet hay theology” thread. It got lost in one of Seabury’s transitions from one server configuration to another..

The formatting will be a little wonky, I suppose, but I’ll add the first few entries here, drop the rest into the extended entry area, and the comments are open once again. So, here we go:

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January 10, 2003

Scripture and Mission

This idea that Jesus changed his mind and saw the larger horizons of ministry is a difficult one for me. I can appreciate a mission only to the Jews or a mission that is Gentile-friendly and I certainly don’t have a problem with Jesus learning things or learning things from a woman, but I struggle with what it means about God’s mission that Jesus potential audience could change.
Posted by Trevor Bechtel at January 10, 2003 08:20 AM

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Comments

I think this is right
Posted by: Trevor on January 10, 2003 09:39 AM

I think it’s full of wet hay!
Posted by: AKMA on January 14, 2003 01:54 PM

Since when was wet hay wrong?
Posted by: Trevor on January 14, 2003 10:17 PM

You’ve GOT to be kidding!
Posted by: Mary on January 15, 2003 06:45 PM
Continue reading “By Popular Request”

Margaret insists that the King of Nepal is standing in front of a crest, but I prefer to read the image on this page as one really ornate regal coronet. You be the jury —

Yesterday Bruce resolved the problems that our upgrade had caused Seabury’s Moveable Type infrastructure, so when you all fired up your browsers this morning and went to the Seabury website you saw our new design.

Oh, and I hereby tag this entry with the Techn.icio.ickr tag “SWTS”SWTS. I’m going to tag the Seabury flickr site’s photos with “SWTS” too. Seaburians — and I am given to understand that some of you read this page — tag Seabury-relevant images and posts with the “SWTS” tag, and the Web will find them and draw them together.

“Tagging — it makes David happy.” Isn’t that reason enough? (So now I have to tag this entry with “tags” and “taxonomy,” too.)

I really must grade papers furiously today, because class meets tomorrow and I want to hand back the papers that have come in — and Margaret will be home for the weekend, huzzah!, so I won’t be spending a lot of time thinking about stacks of unmarked assignments. (It looks as though France 2 TV actually will come to St. Luke’s on Sunday to interview me — but that’s another strange story in the making.)

But before I resume my regularly-scheduled academic obligations, I was intrigued to notice that (a) Microsoft bandies around the word “trademarked” as casually as this — after all, isn’t restrictive intellectual property profiteering part of their business plan?* — and that on a Microsoft typography page, someone misspelled “ellipsis” five days ago, and it hasn’t been corrected since.

*I love the spin-control correction banner on that page, reminding readers not to call it Palladium any more, but NGSCB. OK, right.

Happy Groundhog Day, Dave! And a blessed Feast of the Presentation of our Lord Jesus Christ to Christian theological readers. . . .

Seriously.

I realized that the next hefty post I write will turn out to be one of those frighteningly comprehensive tracts so typical of my neighbor to the west (only without X-rated illustrations), wherein it turns out that every topic that’s ever crossed his mind is related to every other topic, and they all converge on a vitally important, hard-to-articulate point.

But when you see a post entitled something like “Visual Hermeneutics, Podcasts, Ceremonies, the Semantic Web, Tags, and Truth,” get out your tinfoil headgear, your special X-ray shaded glasses, and either skip ahead without looking closely or fasten your seatbelts. Me, I plan to skip ahead. . . .

An idea had been lurking behind all the persiflage of the last couple of days, engendered by Dan’s post and gestating undeveloped in my own long-winded intrusions.

If I were engineering tags so that they’d really catch on, I’d want them to be reader-generated (as in del.icio.us and flickr), but also to involve some sort of affirmation-disapproval mechanism, so that if a couple dozen people think that David Weinberger should be tagged “genius,” but one Lenny Bruce impersonator thinks he should be tagged “schmuck,” the two tags don’t have equal weight. (I don’t know whether the heroes of the information revolution at Technorati (“Technorati: the tag-related site that actually begins with an upper-case letter!&#822!:), flickr, and del.icio.us are already on top of this — iot hasn’t looked that way, and the “MLK” brouhaha suggests that weighting tags hasn’t gotten that far).

The sense that my link-tag-vote counts in a cumulative way — “I should really tag David as a genius, lest the ‘schmuck’ votes defame him” as opposed to “now somebody’s tagged David as a genius, so I don’t have to” — that motivation might give this project legs.

I myself, of course, think that David Weinberger is a genius of unparalleled insight and profundity, as long as the monthly check clears.

Despite my positive remarks about tags in this and the previous post, I’m still reluctant about the whole enterprise. I suppose that thinking about the topic spurs me to pay closer attention to some of the positive prospects, while having actually to do something about it triggers my already-overloaded-ness. On the other hand, I’ve now begun going back through my del.icio.us bookmarks. . . and tagging them to make them more useful to me and others. It makes sense, durn it!

After Dave Winer cited my Friday post about tagging, I’ve been remonstrating with myself for saying only part of what I wanted to say. Yes, there’s a problem with the present state of tags (and the fact that Roland and Dan chimed in tends to reassure me that I wasn’t just being cranky). Yes, the overhead of effort presently imposes a high tariff on early adopters (Dan appositely cites the contrasting example of entering music information in an online database). Still, as I said before, I love the idea of tags, and I see plenty of reason to care about them.

Here’s a Shirky-an reason for my remaining hopeful about tags. In my biblical-interpretive line of work, and especially given my idiosyncratic interests, I spend a lot of time wrestling with the ways that the Library of Congress classification system parcels out the books I care about. Since I specialize in theological hermeneutics, I have to look for books (all intimately connected with one another in my imagination) shelved under specific New Testament books or authors, particular theological themes, philosophical hermeneutics, and comparative literature (to take only four disparate examples). These books reside in different parts of at least three different libraries at Northwestern. Top-down classification systems impede my work, and tend to reinforce a view of knowledge current at the moment the system was devised; if the organic semantic Web were a few degrees easier, more rewarding, to implement, with the prospect of durable return-on-time-invested, I’d be all over it.

And for ad hoc purposes, tags already have shown their usefulness. A week ago Saturday, I wrote on a chalkboard at Seabury, “flickr tag blogwalkchicago.” within minutes, flickr and Technorati showed a satisfying array of posts and photos. It also points to a weakness in the concept: if you look simply for “blogwalk,” you’ll find a fuller array of references, many of which don’t show up on the more specific search even though the more specific search term applies equally to them (and I’m not sure I tagged everything I posted with the simpler “blogwalk”).

So yes, if (as Dan points out) the rewards were not so thin relative to the effort, if (as Roland points out) software support more frictionlessly relieved tagging of its nuisance factor, if (as Shelley points out) we didn’t confront a multidimensional spam/bother/imprecision/then (as David points out) a ground-up, user-oriented tagsonomy would rock. Something like that still seems like the likeliest alternative to an metascheme for organizing all online knowledge (in which this blog would be destined to be relegated to the BS section, as are my books (BS 476.A32, BS 476 .H24, BS 2397 .A32, to pick three). But we haven’t turned up the device that’ll kick that engine into gear, not yet.

Jane Ellen sent me this cartoon, wondering if it explains why the constabulary gave me a hard time when I was using a laptop outside the Nantucket Atheneum this past summer. . . .

Last week, Micah pointed me to the cover story in The Prospect, which I (in turn) called to the attention of my Writing Workshop students. At one point the author, Richard Jenkyns, quotes the canonical essay on bad English, George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” with devastating force:

Orwell found certain faults common to all of these passages – ugliness, staleness of imagery and lack of precision: “The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.”

As I reflected on this point — so vividly (or, more to the point, so dully) reflected in daily discourse — I remembered the wounded disclaimers I’ve so often encountered from people who wrote or said clumsy things. Somewhere, somehow, many people have gotten the idea that it should be easy to communicate exactly what they want to communicate. That belief has attained the status of an axiom for these writers, so that the repeated evidence that communicating accurately is not that easy tends not to disconfirm the axiom, but rather to demonstrate that everyone else bears the fault.

So I must reckon not primarily with the problem of teaching such writers as these to communicate well, but more fundamentally with the challenge of persuading them that communicating precisely may require more effort than they want to think. If you express yourself so vaguely that I can only guess at what you mean; or if you express yourself so tediously that it’s hard to pay attention; or if you give me no clues from which to infer the point of your discourse; or if you say something foolish, or wrong, or self-contradictory, or injurious, it’s not your reader’s problem — but yours. And it’s up to you to do something about it.