Vision
Churches with the resources God intended them to have in facing life's challenges: a life of faith modelled in the Psalms, in a medium that speaks powerfully to their culture.
Today, the obstacles are many. There is an abundance of resources for Greek (New Testament), but not for Hebrew (Old Testament). Those resources that do currently exist are intended for an academic audience with high English proficiency, and they are focussed on biblical narrative, not poetry. Simply understanding the Psalms seems out of reach for many in the world.
Strategic timeline
2021
2022
2023
Year one: develop templates for each layer and generate the first draft of resources for Psalms 1-6.
At first, all resources are manually generated, to permit the freedom and flexibility required to adapt everything to the needs of the translator rather than the constraints of a given piece of software.
We will simultaneously start reducing our analyses to data models, assessing how much of the required data is already available from existing scholarly work, and building a system to manage and integrate the new and existing data. We will design rendering engines to programmatically generate any of the visualisations we can, both testing the rigour and replicability of our work as well as accelerating the process of preparing future materials.
Year two: field-test the materials for Psalms 1-6 across the globe.
We plan to work with translation teams who are just beginning to translate Psalms as well as some who are now revising a translation of Psalms. We are partnering with ethnomusicologist Dan Fitzgerald, who specialises in helping translators to make translations that can be comfortably sung according to cultural standards. As was once said, "Make Proverbs singable, and you've fed an individual. Make Psalms singable, and you've fed a church." The cost of the field-testing is being provided by Prescience Labs.
During the second year we will hone our own data and programming, as well as decide our distribution mechanisms (whether Paratext, Paratext-Lite, etc.) and additional interfaces for other audiences (such as pastors and students). By the end of the second year we will have finished materials for Psalms 1-15.
Year three: complete materials for 20 Psalms each year, continue workshops, and prepare to integrate our work into standard translator training throughout the world.
Scriptura replaces Cambridge Digital Bible Research (CDBR) name to better reflect our mission and goals.
By year ten, we expect to have resources for all 150 Psalms complete. By then our materials should be well incorporated into training programs and workshops, and we will consider moving on to other biblical books.
and
beyond
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