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Kirk Lowery's academic career began in the late 1970s correcting hardcopy
printout of a Syriac chrestomathy stored on punchcards. His graduate work at the
University of California, Los Angeles (M.A., Ph.D.) included proofreading of the book
of Judges for the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) effort to create the electronic
version of Biblia Hebraica Stuttargtensia under the direction of H. Van
Parunak.
His dissertation, Toward a Discourse Grammar of Biblical Hebrew,
includes one of the first published algorithms for the determination of clause boundaries in
Hebrew and raised the question of the adequacy of traditional Hebrew grammatical categories and
notions in a computational world. It was also among the first to be printed at UCLA
by a room-sized laser printer, using bitmaps of Hebrew characters created in consultation with
the Department of Computer Science.
Kirk is presently Associate Director of the Westminster Hebrew Institute, Westminster
Theological Seminary, Philadelpha, Pennsylvania. The Institute produces the Groves-Wheeler
Electronic Hebrew Morphology (MORPH), used by most Bible software that offer
access to the original text. He is also Adjunct Professor of Old Testament at Westminster,
Chair of the Computer Assisted Research Group (CARG) of the Society of Biblical Literature,
and is one of the moderators of the B-Hebrew Internet discussion forum.
Among his research interests are the application of quantitative methods from computational linguistics
to Hebrew syntax and discourse, and algorithmic encoding and analysis of linguistic features of the Hebrew
Bible. He believes that mathematical formal systems and symbolic logic hold out real promise for the humanities
in the Information Age.
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Patrick Durusau is the Director of Research and Development for the
Society of Biblical Literature, with primary responsibility to
develop and encourage the development of electronic texts and
software for biblical scholars. Since joining the SBL in January 2000,
he has brought online the SBL membership directory, member
authentication for the SBL website, and is the technical lead for
development of online delivery solutions for a variety of SBL
publications, including the Journal of Biblical Literature.
Patrick is a founding and participating member in the XTM-WG
(XML Topic Map Working Group), an effort to create an XML
version of the topic map standard (ISO 13250). He is also
one of the technical leads for the ETANA (Electronic Tools and Ancient
Near Eastern Archives) project and is involved in the recent ICE
(Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding) project to develop a Unicode
proposal for cuneiform.
Prior to joining the SBL, Patrick was the manager of Information
Technology Services at Scholars Press. While at Scholars Press, he was
the principal encoder for the SELA digital library project, which used
SGML to create online versions of the Journal of the American Academy of
Religion, Semeia and Biblical Archaeologist.
During his last four years at Scholars Press, he was also the managing editor
for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
He is the author of High Places in Cyberspace, a guide to
Internet resources published by Scholars Press. The second edition of
that work was created in SGML markup and camera ready copy was
produced using DSSSL stylesheets.
Patrick has been involved in SGML markup and its partial successor, XML,
for approximately ten years. His primary interests are in the use of
markup for the delivery and analysis of ANE texts and languages.
He holds a law degree from LSU Law School (1978) and a Masters of
Theological Studies degree from the Candler School of Theology (Emory
University, 1995). Most of his course work at the Candler School of
Theology centered on the Hebrew Bible and ANE languages.
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