Originally blogged by Peter Brassington on Feb. 13, 2024 HERE
I recently realised that across the different bible apps on my phone I have access to over 30 different audio Bibles, read from different versions, in many different voices, and with or without a backing track, but I didn’t realise until yesterday that I had the entire New Testament sung by award winning Gospel artists to a piano accompaniment.
As any EMDC’er knows, the problem of bringing the Bible to the multimedia digital cultures where we now spend more and more of our time is increasingly critical for the Church.
Bible Society is excited to announce an upcoming online event, scheduled for Thursday, September 7 at 7:00 pm UK time, that promises to be a convergence of minds and ideas – a platform for digital theologians, church leaders and pioneers to come together and discuss the vital endeavour of culturally translating the Bible for every digital culture.
Read More »Exploring the Intersection of Faith and Technology : Bible in Digital Media Online Event
As God’s Word becomes available in languages around the world through Bible translation, Scripture is added to digital Bible resources. You can access these Bibles online or download the apps for Android or iOS.
Read More »Digital Bible Translations in the World’s Available Languages
In the era of the Internet and global communications, immeasurable amounts of digital information are being created, shared and consumed. From emails, SMS text messages… Read More »Understanding the Impact of Digital Language Support
“The digital landscape is changing very quickly, and so are user expectations. It can be a struggle for a single Bible Society to keep pace with it all. There are so many questions to consider, on number of levels… It can be overwhelming for one Bible Society to handle this all alone. The good news is: you don’t need to anymore! BibleBooster offers you products and services to help you to develop and implement your digital strategy.”
The Bible has the distinction of being translated and read in the largest number of languages across the world. Technology has come to the aid to present the Word to all people groups speaking diverse languages. The divine plan of God behind such developments can be understood when we examine the recent historical account. The technological advancements are making major contributions to the fulfillment of the last command and associated Bible translation activities. The relevance of technology in mission activities in the 21st century is highly significant. In order to share the gospel as well as for church activities, most churches and mission organizations are extensively using digital technology. In today’s digital world, social media serves as a powerful communication channel to reach out across the world with great speed. To present the Word to a larger group, digital media takes precedence in the present time. The emergence of the Apple store on 10 July 2008 and the Android market (Google Play store) on 22 October 2008 marked a paradigm shift in receiving the Word at our fingertips. Read More »The Word at Our Fingertips
We know that it takes a lot of reading material in a non-dominant language community to make reading worthwhile and give the practice needed to develop true literacy. We help language communities to create these reading materials using Bloom. The Bloom Library holds over 10,500 books that these language communities can download to translate into their own languages. Bloom is software that facilitates translating the book into their own language, recording an audio reading of the book and then publishing the books in various print and digital forms. Bloom Reader is a smartphone app that allows language communities to download the talking books that Bloom creates and it highlights the text as the reader listens to facilitate learning to read.
“most churches don’t intentionally exclude people with disabilities. But because the world is, by default, a poor fit for people with disabilities, the church is also a poor fit, unless we intentionally include people of all abilities.” – Ryan Faulk joniandfriends.org/the-largest-unreached-people-group-youve-never-heard-of
We encourage church and mission leaders to think not only of mission among those with a disability, but to recognize, affirm and facilitate the missional calling of believers with disabilities themselves as part of the Body of Christ. The Cape Town Commitment II-B-4
Sadly we can end up excluding many people, unless we are intentional about doing more to include them. Read More »Designing for users with accessibility needs
In a survey done by Barna Research, it showed that 51% of the U.S. churchgoers do not know the Great Commission and 63% could not even correctly identify Matthew 28:18-20 as the Great Commission when given 5 verses to choose from. Media and social media have played a major role in desimination of information whether true or false, and have lead to response and action among people. Are we creating enough digital awareness through videos and on social media about the needs of the Unreached People Groups?
PTXprint is a stand-alone program which allows you to create high quality PDFs for trial publications of Scripture. It has a multitude of easily configurable options allowing a whole range of outputs. The interface is user-friendly, enabling anyone to produce Scripture for testing within their local context.
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Digital Dialogue Daring to stay relevant in an era of information overload Author: Andreas Ernst (2021) Effective media is not about the right products or numbers,… Read More »Digital Dialogue – Daring to stay relevant in an era of information overload
Fourth Edition – Revised for 2019
It is not hard to convince those involved in Scripture access and Scripture engagement of the value of listening to audio Scriptures. We want to assist communities in making strategic choices about how best to make them available and how best to encourage people to engage with them. One of the ways people listen to the Bible today is using a digital audio player. But since there are so many different audio players to choose from, how do we make a good choice?
This in-depth review (66 pages) compares a range of today’s digital audio players including the Proclaimer (from Faith Comes By Hearing), the Envoy 2 (from MegaVoice), the Audibible K1 (from Kivah Distributors), the Papyrus and The Torch (from Renew World Outreach), the Kulumi Mini and Lost Sheep from Hope Tech Global.
Six months ago YouVersion hit a milestone of scripture in 1500 languages via Bible.com and the YouVersion apps for Android, iOS, Amazon Echo. Since then they have added over 200 versions in over 160 languages.
The answer to “And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?”, isn’t that they can Google.
Romans 10:15 doesn’t say, ““How beautiful are the phones of those who bring good news!”
Technology is a huge asset but for most people engagement with scripture still involves someone telling them about it. Who will you tell?Read More »Scripture in 1660 languages on YouVersion: tell someone!
We are living in exciting times for the digital publishing of Scripture. The Bible is being made available in ever more of the world’s languages, as audio downloads, Smartphone apps, Scripture videos, on social media and language-based websites.
But good products alone will not ensure success. The diagram below, developed by a multidisciplinary team within SIL, illustrates several key themes that need to be considered in a comprehensive digital Scripture access and engagement strategy.
Read More »Developing a Digital Scripture Access and Awareness Strategy
“Publish early, publish little, publish often – enabling users to engage with the content in small quantities, hopefully on frequent occasions and with sustained interest.”
This paper explores features of digital publishing and associated technology that are transforming approaches to Scripture translation and publication in minority languages. Understanding the nature and harnessing the potential of the small units of information that make up digital media products is a key theme.
The paper recommends that digital publication starts at an early stage in a translation project, making small units of Scripture available to the language community in audio and text formats as they are translated (Scripture as micro-content). It explores the idea of iterative and incremental publishing as a Scripture engagement strategy.
The following is a question that I regularly get asked by “on-the-ground” workers- “How can I find out what scripture/ministry media is available online in my people’s language so I can download and use in our outreach?” The below are the main websites I know to point people to that allow them to search for and download media in their language:
The EMDC blog is new but we represent a large community of experts and explorers in new technologies and techniques. This post is written for newcomers and experts alike and covers the Five W’s. These are sometimes also referred to as the six W’s (adding “how”) to the list.
In other languages they may start with different letters but the concepts are the same. We need to ask basic questions whether writing a blog post, designing a site, or creating any content.
Read More »Five W’s to think about when creating content for the web
