San Diego, November 2019.
by Gary Deddo, Jerome van Kuiken, Brent Purkaple, Kerry Magruder.
Membership
- Membership:
- 30 new members have joined since the 2018 annual meeting. A running tab of new members is found in the right sidebar of the Member Directory (log-in required).
- To renew or update your membership, click the "Join" link in the header on any page and submit a membership form. Members of the Fellowship must signal their agreement with the Mission Statement.
- Donations:
- Suggested member donation: $10 per year.
- Donations are accepted via a PayPal link in the footer of every page, and at the top of the Join page.
- Newsletter:
- 196 readers opened the October email newsletter.
- Are you a friend of the TFT Fellowship, but just want to receive the newsletter (several times per year) without joining? No problem. Just let us know.
Participatio
- Now available: Supplemental Volume 4: "Torrance and the Wesleyan Tradition" (2018).
- Two issues pending: Søren Kierkegaard; and Biblical Theology.
- Participatio, like all website resources, is now distributed open access. See the /permissions page for how this affects you as a contributing author. The change to open access will allow us to take further steps to increase the visibility of the journal; see the Announcement in News.
Website features
Contact us for any purpose through the "Contact" link in the footer of any page.
- From the home page, access News, an Annual Meetings page with AV from past meetings, the most recent issue of Participatio, and the most recent items in the Sources and Studies bibliographies.
- The Fellowship maintains a comprehensive Sources bibliography of primary publications by Thomas F. Torrance, James B. Torrance, David W. Torrance and their siblings.
- The Fellowship maintains a Studies bibliography of current secondary publications relevant to the Fellowship's mission.
- Submit a Publications Form or send us an email to alert other members to your Torrance-related publications. These publications will be listed (1) in the Studies bibliography, (2) in the Recent Studies list on the home page, (3) in Members Publications, and (4) in the Publications sidebar of your Member Profile.
- Check back often to see notices of recent publications on the Home page.
- A goal for 2020 is to go back and retroactively enhance the Studies bibliography by adding earlier secondary sources.
- Please alert us to relevant new academic publications using email or the same Publications Form.
- Are you a student? Contact us to list your Torrance-related project among Forthcoming Dissertations and Theses. Student membership: If you are a student, in lieu of an annual donation, apply that money toward purchasing a book by one of the Torrance brothers. Then remember us after you graduate!
- Are you presenting a Torrance-related paper or organizing a Torrance-related event? Contact us to list it on our Conferences page.
- Do you teach a Torrance-related course? Consider sharing your syllabus.
- Have you written (or found) an interesting book review or a helpful online discussion of a Torrance-related publication? Please let us know. Reviews are appended to bibliography records, and may be browsed on the Book Reviews page.
- The Fellowship maintains a password-protected Profile Directory, consisting of Member Profiles and Mentor Profiles. These profiles are accessible only to members (log-in first). Profiles provide brief professional introductions, noting mentors and students, family (if relevant), institutional and denominational affiliations, regional locations, select publications and research interests, etc., cross-referenced with the bibliographies and other pages.
- Look at the "Ask me about" section of member profiles to find other scholars with similar interests.
- Instructions for logging in and updating your Member Profile are here: tftorrance.org/help.
- Members may update their usernames or passwords at any point. First log into your account. Second, go to your member profile, and click "edit" toward the top. Third, make any changes to the current information and click "save" on the bottom.
- How might I use the website in teaching? Features we have begun adding to support course instruction include the ability of student members to add non-public annotations (visible to members only) to items in the bibliographies.
- Course Instruction page
- Help page for the Course Instruction block of your Member Profile.
- PDFs and media downloads.
- The site is growing into a digital library as more content becomes available for distribution.
- See /oa for all online resources (PDFs, etc.) distributed open access via the site. Count as of 11/6/2019: 236 open access items.
- See /av for all audiovisual resources. Count as of 11/6/2019: 103 AV items.
- Please let us know if you have relevant copyright-free resources to offer, or if you own copyright on any items in the Sources or Studies bibliographies and are willing to grant us permission to distribute them openly on this website.
- Torrance Oral History Project. See the /2019-OHP-1 page for:
- Description of the scope and purpose of this new project (global, multi-disciplinary, ecumenical).
- List of confirmed participants (six interviews already conducted).
- Opportunities for members to collaborate in the recording and transcription of oral history interviews. Donations toward equipment costs welcomed.
- Call for Materials: Resources and items that you are in a position to grant us permission to distribute.
- Please contact us with general suggestions for improving the website to support your research and communication with other scholars.
Website Development Priorities (how the website will emerge from "beta")
- Text Cleanup for the Sources bibliographies:
- When we imported the offline Sources bibliography into the drupal website, italics formatting was lost and various key words fields were not parsed correctly (Publishers, Series, Genre Type, Colyer Categories, etc.). Therefore, text cleanup in the Sources bibliography became our number one priority after website development passed a threshold of minimum functionality. This is our chief occupation now and in 2020.
- How can I tell? If there is no italics then the record has not beeen touched since importing. The Colyer Categories field may contain key words that belong in Genre Type or other fields. Check the status field in the left sidebar. Records not yet cleaned up have no Status at all.
- What difference does it make? At present, incomplete results occur when using the taxonomies or searching specific fields for known key words. For example, Genre Type terms currently are in either an old key words field (now renamed Colyer Categories) or the specific Genre Type field; they have only been moved to the Genre Type field in records that have been cleaned up since import. Therefore, using a Genre taxonomy term or searching specifically within the Genre Type field will miss records containing the Genre term in the old key words field. Similarly, the Colyer Categories and other taxonomy and key words fields will become powerful tools once they are cleaned up as well.
- We hope to finish text cleanup in summer 2020. Meanwhile, the various key words are indicated on the record and can be found by a general search, just not in advanced searches using a specific field filters. See the Bib FAQ for status updates on the Sources and Studies bibliographies.
- When this task is complete, we will remove the "beta" tag from the website.
- Data entry for Studies, working backwards from present.
- We concentrated on developing the Sources bibliography and the website generally, and have hardly even begun to enter items retroactively in the Studies bibliography. Only the most recent Studies are entered. We'll begin to catch up over 2020 working backwards in time.
- Enhance information for taxonomies (eg Journals, Publishers, Institutions, Series, etc.). In particular, adding information about journals in the journal taxonomies will be a priority for us in 2020.
- 27 views