New Syriac Digital Corpus

A new Syriac Digital Corpus was just announced (25 May 2018). James Walters, the General Editor, wrote:

On behalf of the editorial board, I am delighted to announce the publication of a new open-access resource for digitized Syriac texts: the Digital Syriac Corpus: https://syriaccorpus.org
This project is the fruit of much labor over the past few years. In particular, credit is due to Kristian Heal and David Taylor, who have been collecting these texts in transcribed form. Having now built the infrastructure for display and searching, we will be adding many more texts to the collection in the coming months.

I would also like to draw your attention to the Submissions page, where we are asking for people to contribute to the project in various ways, including a call for new digital editions of Syriac texts to be published in the Corpus.

In the coming weeks, we will also be adding more training resources, both on how to use the Corpus and how to contribute.

The full NT Peshitta is there (Based on the 1905 The New Testament in Syriac edited by G. H. Gwilliam, J. Pinkerton and John Gwynn) along with a number of other Syriac works. The OT Peshitta is not available at this time.

The notable and excellent aspect of this corpus is that the words of the text are hyperlinked to the Sedra resource which means that each word is analyzed and glosses are provided in English and French, all just a click away.
Thanks to those who created and are sharing this resource!

New ZoteroBib free online bibliography creator

I have been a fan of Zotero in the past, and I encourage all my students to use it if they don't already use bibliography software which allows for note-taking, linking, sharing, and collaboration. It is free and open-source and is available as a standalone for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and there are also 'connectors' which make it even easier to use from Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. What's more, it has word processor plugins (Microsoft Word, LibreOffice) that make for quick citation and footnote and bibliography generation in thousands of possible citation formats, including SBL.

Today Zotero announced ZoteroBib, a spinoff that makes for quick bibliography generation.

ZoteroBib is a free service that helps you build a bibliography instantly from any computer or device, without creating an account or installing any software. It’s brought to you by the team behind Zotero, the powerful open-source research tool recommended by thousands of universities worldwide, so you can trust it to help you seamlessly add sources and produce perfect bibliographies.

I gave it a try and retrieved a variety of resources using author/title search, ISBN, and URLs. Works great. The bibliography is editable, and can be copied out in a variety of formats and options.

I still recommend using the full Zotero, but if you need something quick and easy, check out ZoteroBib.

Biblia Hebraica, Septuagint, Greek NT, Apostolic Fathers Free Android Apps

These are simple but very nice Android apps for reading the Biblia Hebraica, Septuagint, Greek New Testament, and Apostolic Fathers. If you don't already have an app, these look great and provide gloss and parsing info. Each app has specific features, and the most full-featured is the SBLGNT:

- Text: full text of the SBLGNT
- Glosses: quickly displays glosses and parsing for a word by touching it
- Concordance: full concordance displayed by touching any word
- Vocab: keep track of the vocab you need to learn for each chapter. Use the Vocab Wizard to automatically add words based on your reading level.
- Audio: audio playback available for every chapter
- SpeedRead: displays text one word at a time at an adjustable pace to improve your speed reading ability
- Reading Plans: choose a reading plan to track your progress and encourage your reading!

I'm not sure who Matt Robertson is, but he deserves thanks for providing these handy, original language Bible reading apps.
HT: John Linebarger on FB