Thursday, November 15, 2007

Just How Many English Versions?

How many versions of the Bible are there in English? Did you know that there is a Cotton Patch version of Paul's letters based on American ideas and Southern US culture located in the Vancouver Public Library in Canada?

Tyndale House in Cambridge, UK, gives us a list of over a hundred English versions, including brief description & sampling from Genesis 1: 1, 2; Wisdom (of Solomon) 1: 1; and/or John 1: 1-3.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

WordNet -- A Lexical Database for the English Language

OK. This database has some high cool factors. If you like dictionaries, thesauri, and all things that play with the words of the English language, this free internet database is for you.

I'm not saying it has replaced the Oxford English Dictionary (one of our Research Databases) because no one else tracks the usage of our langauge as well, but imagine a dictionary crossed with a thesaurus and you've got some idea.

WordNet® is being developed under the direction of George A. Miller and the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Wikis just got Scholarly

Looking remarkably like the much scorned (just try to cite it in a paper) Wikipedia, is a new wiki called Scholarpedia. It is a free peer reviewed encyclopedia written by scholars from all around the world.

That's right. Scholarly. Written by experts in the field AND THEN anonymously peer reviewed!

Currently, Scholarpedia hosts Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems, Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence and Encyclopedia of Astrophysics. Eventually, these will be published in print form, but they will still be available free on the web & will be updated online.