Ken M. Penner – Digital Biblical Studies

Create Multiple-Choice quiz questions

In the courses I teach, when I assign a reading I typically give a quiz to be completed before the class in which we discuss it. This quiz is to be written on Moodle, and consists of ten multiple choice questions based on the reading. Those who have completed the reading have no trouble answering the questions, and are rewarded for being prepared for the in-class discussion.

But creating these quizzes can be time-consuming if I use Moodle’s question-creation user interface. So I wrote an AI bot that will digest a text and generate ten multiple-choice questions in a format that Moodle can import. It uses Poe.com’s services, so it can process texts up to about 70,000 words long, even for Canadian users. (Poe provides access to Anthropic’s Claude-2 100k engine, which is not available to Canadians directly.) I’m calling the bot MCQ-Aiken5. Note that access to the bot is limited to a couple of quizzes per day unless you subscribe to Poe.

Microsoft Word VBA macro to delete unused styles

Bing AI helped write this code that deletes Microsoft Word styles that are not in use in the active document. Other solutions on the web tend to only act on styles not in use in the main body of the document, and therefore they delete styles used only in footnotes or headers or footers. This version checks all StoryRanges to see if a style is in use, including footnotes, endnotes, headers, footers, etc.

Sub DeleteUnusedStyles()
    Dim oStyle As Style
    Dim oRng As Range
    Dim bInUse As Boolean
    For Each oStyle In ActiveDocument.Styles
        'Skip built-in styles
        If oStyle.BuiltIn Then GoTo Skip
        'Check if style is applied to any text in any story type
        bInUse = False 'Initialize flag
        For Each oRng In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges 'Loop through all story types
            With oRng.Find 'Use Find method to search for style
                .ClearFormatting
                .Style = oStyle.NameLocal 'Set style name as criterion
                .Text = ""
                .Forward = True
                .Wrap = wdFindStop
                .Format = True
                If .Execute Then 'If style is found, set flag to True
                    bInUse = True
                    Exit For 'Exit loop if style is found in any story type
                End If
            End With
        Next oRng
        
        If bInUse = False Then 'If style is not in use, delete it
            'Show status message
            Application.StatusBar = "Deleting style: " & oStyle.NameLocal
            oStyle.Delete
        End If
        
Skip:
    Next oStyle
    
    'Restore the default status bar
    Application.StatusBar = False
    
End Sub

Comprehensive Bibliography of the Septuagint

Edited by
Aaron C. Fenlason,
Ken M. Penner,
and
William A. Ross

Introduction

In A Comprehensive Classified Bibliography of Septuagint Scholarship, we update and consolidate the bibliographic work begun primarily by Brock, Fritsch, & Jellicoe in 1973, and Dogniez in 1995, in the bibliographies published by Brill.[1] Every few decades a bibliography of the Septuagint is produced. After almost thirty years again it is time to bring such a reference work up to date.

Our work follows the pattern set by these two models: items are organized under similar headings, and include an introduction and an author index. Where our update differs is in its scope. Whereas the 1973 bibliography limited its coverage to publications from 1900 to 1969, and the 1995 update covered 1970-1993, this collection aims to be comprehensive, so that researchers will not have to flip through three or more volumes to find the relevant literature.

Acknowledgements

Since the publication of those bibliographies in book form, we three editors have each individually been collecting references to published scholarship. We appreciate the contributed bibliographies from the United Bible Societies (Sarah Lind) and Joel Kalvesmaki. We also bring together the items included by Wevers, Tov, Lust, Léonas, Meiser, De Troyer, Cox, Jones, van der Louw, and Pass in their bibliographies,[2] as well as the relevant resources cited in the prime journal of Septuagint scholarship, the BIOSCS/JSCS.[3]

Our work curating these resources has been made possible by the assistance of our research assistants: Connor Sutherland, Dustin King, Emma MacDonald (St. Francis Xavier University), Benjamin A. Pass, Christine Welles, and Dwight Crowell (Acadia Divinity College). We wish to thank James Darlack for providing a scan of Emanuel Tov’s Bibliography, and Tov for permission to use it. We are indebted to Bob Kraft and Glenn Wooden for their early advice regarding this project.

[1] Sebastian P. Brock, Charles T. Fritsch, and Sidney Jellicoe, A Classified Bibliography of the Septuagint, ALGHJ 6 (Leiden: Brill, 1973); Cécile Dogniez, Bibliography of the Septuagint = Bibliographie de la Septante: (1970-1993), VTSup 60 (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

[2] John William Wevers, “Septuaginta – Forschungen,” TRu 22.2 (1954): 85–137, 171–19; John William Wevers, “Septuaginta Forschungen seit 1954,” trans. Hannelis Schulte, TRu 33.1 (1968): 18–76; Emanuel Tov, A Classified Bibliography of Lexical and Grammatical Studies on the Language of the Septuagint (Jerusalem: Academon, 1980); Emanuel Tov, A Classified Bibliography of Lexical and Grammatical Studies on the Language of the Septuagint and Its Revisions, Revised and enlarged edition. (Jerusalem: Academon, 1983); Johan Lust, “Selective Bibliography of the Septuagint,” February 1999; Alexis Léonas, “The Septuagint in Premodern Study: A Bibliography,” BIOSCS 41 (2008): 93–113; Martin Meiser, “Gesamtbibliographie,” in Die Septuaginta: Texte, Kontexte, Lebenswelten, ed. Martin Karrer and Wolfgang Kraus, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 219 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Kristin De Troyer, “The Seventy-Two and Their Many Grandchildren: A Review of Septuagint Studies from 1997 Onward,” CurBR 11.1 (2012): 8–64, https://doi.org/10.1177/1476993X11418446; Claude E. Cox, “LXX Bibliography,” 1 June 2021; Jennifer Brown Jones, “The Septuagint and Contemporary Study,” in T&T Clark Handbook oF Septuagint Research, ed. William A. Ross and W. Edward Glenny (London: T&T Clark, 2021), 381–96, https://doi.org/10.5040/9780567680280; Theo A. W. van der Louw and Benjamin A. Pass, “A Bibliography of Zacharias Frankel’s ‘Vorstudien zu der Septuaginta’ with Hyperlinks,” 2021; William A. Ross, “The Past Decade in Septuagint Research (2012–2021),” C B R 21.1 (2022): 293–337, https://doi.org/10.1177/1476993X221125481.

[3] Marcus Sigismund, “Index zu den Artikeln und Buchrezensionen in BIOSCS und JSCS 1 (1968) – 50 (2017),” Journal of Septuagint and Cognate Studies 50 (2017): 216–38.

01 Bibliographies

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02 Introductions

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03 General Studies and Handbooks

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04 Collections

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05 State of Scholarship

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06 Personalia

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07 Significance

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08 Digital Tools

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09 Editions

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10 Commentaries

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Discovering ZotPress

I just ran across this plugin that looks amazing for generating bibliographies. It’s ZotPress. Here should be the Brainwashing collection from my Cults group library in Zotero, presented in ASA format:

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And my own publications from the Dead Sea Scrolls group library, in SBL format:

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My vision

My grand vision is for a set of interoperable standardized tools for digitizing ancient texts in a variety of languages, enabling an efficient workflow for activities from posting photographs of manuscripts, to transcriptions, to grammatical tagging, to critical editions, translations, commentaries, and bibliographies.