Friday, February 24, 2012

A Tribute to F. W. Danker

The eminent lexicographer Frederick W. Danker passed away on February 2nd 2012. He was born on
July 20th, 1920 in Frankenmuth, Michigan. He completed his studies in the Concordia Seminary and obtained a PhD in Classics at the University of Chicago, Illinois. From 1954 he taught in Concordia Seminary.

Danker’s contribution to New Testament scholarship is one of the most substantial in recent history. He is best known for his thorough revision of the English version of Bauer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, which was released as the 3rd edition in 2000. It is said that for ten years, Professor Danker worked on BDAG for twelve hours a day, six days a week.

In 2004, a Festschrift with the title “Biblical Greek Language and Lexicography: Essays in Honor of Frederick W. Danker” was published to celebrate Danker's work, including 18 essays by Peter R. Burton, Rykle Borger, William A. Johnson, Richard E. Whitaker, Trevor Evans, Stanley Porter.
Prof. Danker was Christ Seminary-Seminex Professor Emeritus of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago, Illinois.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Zotero - a review

For many of us, typing and editing footnotes and the bibliography can be a real chore. Thanks to reference management software, this task has been made easier. However, after a not so good experience with a few programs two years ago (i.e., compatibility issues) and wasting my money, I decided to surf the web and search for a software that will organize my bibliography for free. True enough, a few weeks ago I chanced upon Zotero. For someone who is not computer savvy, I find Zotero very user-friendly, especially with its simple step-by-step user guide. Since Zotero works with the web (i.e., Firefox), it can grab the bibliographical data from materials in those sites that it recognizes, like Google Books. This means no more typing of bibliography entries, although you may need to do a bit of editing for some parts of the entry, like adding the place and year of publication. Finally, what I consider to be the best features of Zotero, are (1) it allows you to store bibliographical data and (2) you can use it to cite sources for footnoting and bibliography in your written work – and both these actions for FREE. However, if you plan to store your pdf files in your Zotero account, you need to increase your storage capacity and this means you have to pay. I still need to explore the other features of Zotero and I don’t know what problems I may find, but for now I am very happy there is a program called Zotero!

If you want to check it out, here is the link to Zotero: http://ica.library.oregonstate.edu/tutorials/626--Introduction-to-Zotero

Joan Infante
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