Radical Open Access Collective
Building Horizontal Alliances
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We are excited to announce the release of our first open access audiobooks! At OBP, we are always looking for ways to meet readers where they are. We are aware of an increased demand for audio formats in recent years, whether that be for accessibility reasons or simply because some readers enjoy listening over reading! We have thus decided to release a small sample of audio titles to gauge reader reception and listen to feedback.
Three out of the four titles in this initial collection were created with the help of AI technology, the use of which presents a number of ethical questions. We are monitoring and reflecting on the energy demands of AI in our effort to be as sustainable as possible in our publishing practice. We hope that in creating these audiobooks, we will save readers the effort (and energy) of using AI audio software themselves.
We also wish to address the potential displacement of human voice actors and other creative professionals involved in audio production. As a small, non-profit press, producing audiobooks read by professional voice actors is unfortunately beyond our means. Though we are thrilled that some of our authors have chosen to record their own books, we acknowledge that this is a time-consuming process which might not be possible or attractive to every writer. AI has enabled us to meet the demand for audio formats within these constraints.
Our decision to experiment with audiobook creation is rooted in our dedication to providing accessible, enjoyable formats for all readers. We would love to hear your feedback on these first titles as we evaluate the potential role of AI in our production process, so feel free to send your thoughts to raegan@openbookpublishers after you’ve had a listen. We hope you enjoy the books and look forward to hearing your feedback!
The following titles are now available as audiobooks:
by Adèle Kreager
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming many sectors, from its role in breakthrough research on protein structure prediction, which recently earned a Nobel Prize, to more controversial uses in film and entertainment. As AI infiltrates our digital world, internet users are increasingly exposed to what has been evocatively termed ‘AI slop’—from seemingly innocuous AI-generated meme trends, such as ‘Shrimp Jesus’, to more demonstrably dangerous outputs, such as AI-generated mushroom-foraging books that contain bogus advice. In turn, AI now powers everyday tools like Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checks, or Gmail’s email filters, often without us even noticing.
Amid this surge in AI capabilities and applications, many industries, including academic publishing, are recognising the opportunities and challenges posed by these tools. AI offers a way to enhance efficiency, streamlining the more time-consuming, repetitive and mundane tasks. Yet these advancements come with ethical and practical considerations that demand careful thought. As a small, scholar-led, non-profit publisher, we are experimenting with how AI can support, rather than replace, the human expertise and creativity that underpin high-quality academic research and its dissemination.
How We Use AI in Our Editorial Processes
We are adopting a cautious but practical approach to integrating AI, using it as an ancillary tool in various stages of the editorial process:
1. Assisting with index topic lists
Developing a list of index topics is a laborious task often shouldered by our authors. We’ve found that AI tools, like ChatGPT, can suggest preliminary lists of topics or place names, which serve as useful starting points. However, these AI-generated lists often focus on broad, main topics, lacking the nuance needed for a comprehensive index. Therefore, human oversight is essential, and we rely on our authors and editors to review and refine the suggestions to ensure that the final index is accurate and usable.
2. Crafting first drafts for book blurbs
We have also experimented with using AI to generate first drafts of book blurbs. By inputting key information about the book, ChatGPT can produce a structured summary that provides a useful point of departure. However, the critical insight needed to highlight a book’s key contributions is something that AI cannot replicate, since the responses are based on algorithmic combinations of text rather than a deeper understanding of the content. This is why these drafts are always reworked by our editors and authors.
3. Creating alt-text for accessibility
Alt-text (alternative text) provides a textual description of images, making content more accessible to people with visual impairments. Assistive technologies, like screen readers, can then translate the alt-text into speech or braille. Alt-text can also be helpful for those with unreliable internet connections, serving as a stand-in for visual content when an image fails to load.
Creating alt-text for images is essential for improving the accessibility of our books, but it can also be a labour-intensive task. Using ChatGPT’s alt-text assistant reduces the time involved in generating alt-text descriptions, and even allows for multi-language output. Still, AI-generated alt-text isn’t flawless: it can struggle to identify the most relevant elements of an image, and can overlook important context. Again, human input is necessary, with all AI-generated alt-text outputs for images reviewed by our team and authors.
4. Expanding access with AI-generated audiobooks
AI also has the potential to make academic content accessible to a broader audience by converting texts into audiobooks through Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, at a fraction of the cost associated with professional audiobook production. Audiobooks can provide a new way to engage with scholarly content, especially for those who prefer listening over reading. The audiobook conversion process isn’t entirely automated, and adjustments like excluding bibliographies and non-essential footnotes are necessary to ensure the listenability of the end product.
However, while we don’t have the resources to employ professional narrators, we are mindful of the ethical implications of using AI narrators, which risk displacing human voice actors. Striking a balance between efficiency, accessibility and ethical responsibility is a challenge to take seriously, and we welcome reader and listener feedback on the few AI-generated audiobooks we’ve made available so far. If there is demand for audiobooks, producing them in-house is more environmentally friendly than leaving the conversion to individual readers.
How We Use AI in Our Marketing Processes
AI has proved helpful in compiling lists of relevant journals and societies for marketing purposes. However, we’ve noticed that AI chatbots often prioritise Anglo-American journals. To ensure broader international representation, we adjust our prompts to include foreign-language journals, allowing us to reach a more diverse audience. The same strengths that make chatbots effective for drafting preliminary blurbs also make them handy for condensing our policy statements into more succinct, audience-friendly summaries for marketing materials.
How Our Developers Use AI
Our developers integrate AI into their coding environments to streamline specific tasks, such as code explanation, generating snippets of code and automating test writing (a tedious activity that AI can handle efficiently).
How Our Authors Are Using AI
Since the summer of 2024, we have asked our authors to disclose any use of AI tools in their research and writing, with the aim to understand how AI is being integrated into academic work and to ensure transparency in the research process. Although uptake has been relatively limited so far, some authors have reported using AI for tasks such as translating texts, clarifying complex ideas, improving language accuracy, and providing feedback on grammar, vocabulary and style.
Zooming Out: Ethical Considerations for AI in Publishing and Beyond
As AI becomes more embedded in academic publishing, it raises a host of ethical questions, with implications within and beyond the industry itself.
1. Data, accountability and algorithmic bias
AI’s outputs are shaped by the datasets used to train it, many of which are harvested without the consent of creators. In turn, these datasets can be biased or incomplete (often underrepresenting marginalised groups), leading to baked-in algorithmic biases that can perpetuate social inequalities. For this reason, we avoid using AI for editorial decision-making, especially in evaluating research: a practice that could effectively institutionalise past prejudices through new technologies.
2. The environmental cost of AI
AI is an extractive industry, at multiple levels: not only is it exploitative of human labour,[1] but it is highly resource-intensive, with a single request made through ChatGPT consuming nearly ten times the electricity of a typical Google Search. Data centres consume significant electricity, produce harmful e-waste, and rely on the extraction of critical minerals, which are often mined unsustainably and traded in areas of conflict (as discussed in one of our recent publications). AI may appear as a kind of disembodied computation, but its material, environmental impacts are very real.
3. AI and job displacement in creative fields
Widespread use of AI in creative industries risks crowding out human expertise and creativity, depending on its implementation. A revealing comment made by OpenAI’s former CTO, Mira Murati, earlier this year—that ‘Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place’—is darkly suggestive of the company’s priorities and attitudes towards AI’s role in the profit-driven workplace.
AI: A Complement to Human Expertise
At OBP, AI currently plays a useful but limited role in our workflows. We use it to streamline repetitive or time-consuming tasks, enabling our staff and authors to allocate more time and energy to the critical and creative work involved in high-quality academic publishing. As we explore AI’s potential, we remain committed to responsible use, ensuring that human creativity, transparency and fairness remain central to our work.
[1] ChatGPT-creator OpenAI not only faces accusations of intellectual property theft by training their systems on works under copyright, without consent; they also employed contractors in Kenya, earning less than $2 per hour, as content moderators to label horrific and harmful content.
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Since the theme for this year’s Open Access Week is ‘Community over commercialisation’, we thought we would offer some thoughts about how our focus on community, rather than profit, has benefited our press—and some reflections on the potential for community-driven open access (OA) to grow over the next few years.
Open Book Publishers (OBP) is an independent, non-profit, scholar-led OA book publisher. We were founded in 2008 by academics with a clear mission: to make high-quality academic research freely accessible everywhere. In order to serve this mission, OBP was founded as a Community Interest Company (CIC), a regulated non-profit that is obligated to serve a community purpose.
This structure meant that OBP has had a community focus since its beginning—but it was a practical and strategic choice, as well as a principled one. As a CIC, OBP has never had to meet obligations to shareholders on top of its running costs. This has enabled the press to be light and agile, to innovate, and to grow at its own pace.
This was important in the early days of OBP: OA was a new way of publishing that demanded new workflows, business models and infrastructures. Being a non-profit financed by grants and a loan rather than by investment capital gave the founders and directors, Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti, the time to experiment and pilot these while publishing only a very small number of books a year.
It also made it more feasible to resist the Book Processing Charge model of funding, an inequitable approach that requires an author (or funder) to cover the costs and, in some cases, the expected profit margin of a book before publication as a hedge against OA reducing sales. This deeply risk-averse model is common among presses that usually publish closed access, for whom OA is an occasional and unfamiliar mode of publishing—and the fees tend to be higher for presses that are expected to return high dividends to their shareholders (or for those university presses that return a substantial amount of money to their parent institutions every year).
Instead, OBP piloted a Library Membership programme in 2015 to provide an additional income stream, employing a mixed model to fund our costs via income from i) sales of paperback, hardback and EPUB formats, ii) the income from our Library Membership programme, and iii) any grant funding that the author is able to secure. (Publication does not depend on funding, and most of our books are published without it—last year, 35 out of 49 books were published with no additional funding.) The directors began to grow the press by taking on more staff and publishing more books only once this model began to provide sufficient reliable income.
Choosing not to impose fees on authors means we are not limited to only working with those who can afford to pay, thus broadening the communities of scholars we serve. Some have chosen us for precisely this reason—Geoffrey Khan, Regius Professor of Hebrew at University of Cambridge and the series editor of ‘Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures’, writes about the importance of not excluding authors from his series in a recent blog post, as well as reflecting powerfully on the extractive relationship closed-access research can have with communities that are studied.
Once OBP began to grow, its non-profit status and community focus enabled the directors to set a strategic direction focused on the press’s mission, without the need to pursue higher levels of revenue as an additional responsibility. Currently OBP publishes around 50 books per year and, if the directors chose, we could put all our energies into our own growth and development (as we might if we had a commercial imperative). But instead, Gatti and Tosi decided there was a potentially more exciting and impactful route to be taken by collaborating with like-minded presses, libraries, funders, community organisations and infrastructure providers to build open, non-profit infrastructures and networks that could enable many more presses to publish OA books in an equitable way. This is now a core component of OBP's company ethos, and it is an approach that Copim has described as ‘scaling small’.
This mindset governed our involvement in Copim, an international partnership funded by Arcadia and Research England that, among other developments, has created the Open Book Collective, a community-governed charity currently supporting 13 publisher and service provider members with more than £674k raised from 79 supporting libraries, and which will also award more than £84k in small grants to mission-driven OA initiatives by 2026. Copim has also supported the development of Thoth, a non-profit open metadata management and dissemination service (also a Community Interest Company) that has more than 27 publishers using its platform to manage & disseminate open metadata for OA books (as well as underlying OBP’s own revamped catalogue).
We co-founded ScholarLed, a group of seven independent, academic-led, OA book publishers sharing skills, knowledge and resources to further all of our work, as well as the Open Access Books Network (OABN), a broad and growing community of publishers, librarians, authors and others interested in learning more about, and developing, OA book publishing. Hosting open events, fostering collaborations and sharing free resources, the OABN has also recently been involved in the EU-funded PALOMERA project, exploring why so few OA policies involve books, and what might be done to change this.
As well as contributing to these communities, we are supported by them. Infrastructures built by Copim are part of our workflows; collaborations fostered by ScholarLed and the OABN inform and improve what we do. Essential funding flows from our Library Members, whose substantial contribution is so necessary to our work, and our advisory and editorial boards offer invaluable advice and expertise as we look to innovate and grow our impact in different ways. Some readers choose to donate to us in support of our approach. Finally, our community of authors trust us with their work, the foundation of any publisher’s activity, and in return we do all we can to share that work as widely as we can, in the best form possible.
It's also worth noting that several of these larger ongoing initiatives were first sparked by small grants. The Polonsky foundation funded OBP to develop an open source metadata database and website, which was a crucial seed for the idea that became Thoth. And an OpenAIRE grant brought together the presses that founded ScholarLed (itself a subset of the Radical Open Access Collective) which went on to devise the initial bid for Copim. These early, small grants brought like-minded people and organisations together and facilitated deeper collaboration and opportunities for development—so by enabling collaboration, these smaller grants made space for alternatives to commercialisation.
Open Access Week offers a moment to reflect on developments in OA, and, given our investment in community ways of working, we are particularly interested to see the founding and development of other communities of practice based around OA. These include the Open Institutional Publishing Association (a UK network), as well as the New University Presses in the Netherlands, the Irish Open Access Publishers. (There is also the recently-announced University-Based Publishing Futures group in North America, which we're keen to learn more about). These organisations are invested in growing equitable and resilient OA publishing via mutual support and collaboration rather than competition, which is a spirit we recognise from our work with Copim and other communities. It is an approach that is developing fast.
A focus on community is also being driven by the increased profile of Diamond OA, with the DIAMAS project in Europe, the UNESCO Global Diamond Open Access Alliance, and the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access helping to drive debates about whether Diamond is ‘just’ a model (free to read and free to publish) or whether it also requires community ownership and/or control over the publishing outlets themselves. Understanding what that control might look like requires a firm focus on governance, a topic that is currently not receiving the serious attention it deserves in conversations about OA.
The increased emphasis on community has not gone unnoticed in commercial circles either, and casual claims of being ‘community-driven’ are cropping up more often. We would encourage caution when hearing these warm words—what do they mean in practice? Can they be backed up by robust governance models, or by evidence of tangible investment in the communities in question, or are they simply a marketing label designed to part libraries and funders from their cash?
It will be fascinating to see where these currents have taken us when we arrive at next year’s Open Access Week.
By David Clarke
Image: David Clarke and Vijay Rajput, Recital Room, Newcastle University, 25 April 2024. Image: John Donoghue (www.jdphotographer.co.uk). Licence held by Newcastle University.
‘Bi-musicality’ was a term first coined by the ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood (1960). It was an aspiration of his programme at UCLA in the 1950s, that students should explore the music of an unfamiliar culture not by ‘passive observation’ or ‘museum studies’, but through practical, first-hand engagement: they were to acquire a second musicianship in the way you might learn a second language. To this day, experiential immersion in the music of other cultures (and its modes of pedagogy) lives on as a fundamental tenet of ethnomusicological fieldwork.
Nowadays, however, you don’t hear the word ‘bi-musicality’ itself so much. Ethnomusicologist John Baily (2001), for example, favours the more prosaic phrase ‘learning to perform’ when he writes of his own apprenticeship on the Afghan dutār and rubāb. Even so, I still find Hood’s original notion suggestive. It captures something of the inner and outer game of learning another’s music: a dialogue, a negotiation—between cultures, between people, between different facets of your musical mind and being. This is certainly what my own experience as a westerner learning North Indian classical music has felt like. And that experience is under the skin of my book Rags Around the Clock, produced collaboratively with my Hindustani vocal teacher, Dr Vijay Rajput.
Vijay ji is an outstanding singer in the North Indian khayāl style, a disciple of the much-feted Pandit Bhimsen Joshi. Vijay relocated from New Delhi to Newcastle upon Tyne in 2004, not long after I had taken my own first steps into Hindustani music (my first Indian-music teacher, a remarkable musician called Arun Debnath, had returned to India a couple of years earlier). Previously, I’d trained as a western classical musician; and my academic role at Newcastle University was focused on western classical music and theory. Gradually, with Vijay as my new guru, and with the experience of a several trips to India, I absorbed more and more of Hindustani classical music and the culture that underpins it. Crucially, however, this journey never meant relinquishing my prior identity as a western musician. For me, the two experiences have always jostled together, with all their differences and similarities.
Bi-musicality is not an explicit theme of Rāgs Around the Clock. Yet this dual standpoint has shaped the work, as have the many dialogues between Vijay and myself. The book and its audio materials offer a resource for the study of North Indian classical music in general and the khayāl style in particular. It includes materials—songs and their notations—useful to student practitioners. It comes with two online albums by Vijay, which provide windows onto the many colours and subtleties of rāg – an essential concept of Indian classical music. It provides contextual, theoretical and historical perspectives informed by recent research, including from western scholarship. And it ventures analysis of Vijay’s recordings, and of the conventions and complexities of the music. This last aspect, which perhaps represents the book’s principal research contribution, is informed by both my own insider knowledge of singing this music and by many years as an analyst of western music. In other words, like so much else in this project, it emerges from the crucible of becoming a musician and musicologist twice over. We hope that there is something for everyone to enjoy in this compendium, regardless of their prior level of knowledge of Indian music or their cultural entry point.
REFERENCES
Baily, John (2001). ‘Learning to Perform as a Research Technique in Ethnomusicology’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology10(2), 85–98.
Hood, Mantle (1960). ‘The Challenge of “Bi-Musicality”’, Ethnomusicology 4, 55–9.
Rāgs Around the Clock is available now. Read for free or get a hard copy here. Listen to an audio sample from the book here.
By Roberto Morales-Harley
Comparing Theaters
Any well-read person who has had the pleasure to read both Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā will probably know that the differences between the two far surpass their similarities. The Greek tragedy begins with a deathly plague, progresses through several ominous oracles, and touches on themes like murder, suicide and self-injury, only to wrap things up with a protagonist defeated at the hands of fate, as well as an audience likely pitying him and fearing suchlike disgrace. The Sanskrit nāṭaka, on the other hand, covers such a wide range of topics as the idyllic life of hermitages, the ludicrous nature of buffoons, the power of curses, the ways in which bad and good luck can tilt the scales, and the relationship between gods and men, all this while both characters and spectators ride along in an emotional roller-coaster, encompassing not only the joy of a love story, but also the didactics of genealogy. Apples and oranges.
It is also likely that not many people will know the complexity of each of these theatrical traditions. Besides Tragedy, Greek theater has Comedy. But more importantly, even the Greeks were not as dualistic as often thought of, since they also developed a third subgenre in the form of Satyr Drama. In Rome, the scene is still more intricate, since tragedy is not viewed as monolith but treated separately as either Fabula Crepidata or Fabula Praetexta, and likewise, comedy manifests itself in the forms of Fabula Palliata, Fabula Togata, Fabula Atellana, and Mimus. India is no exception, given the fact that there are as many as ten main forms of theater: Nāṭaka and Prakaraṇa, but also tragic-like subgenres like Aṅka; comic-like subgenres like Prahasana, Bhāṇa, and Vīthī; and even heroic-like subgenres like Samavakāra, Īhāmṛga, Ḍima, and Vyāyoga. Some mix and match between all this can at least allow us to compare varieties of apples.
The Greek Influence Hypothesis
In 1852, Albrecht Weber first formulated what then came to be known as the “Greek Influence Hypothesis”. According to him, (a) we have no preserved early Sanskrit plays, but (b) we have testimonies of Greek plays being represented in Bactria and in North- and West India; therefore, (c) it is possible to presuppose a Greek influence in the origins of Sanskrit theater, even though (d) there seems to be no specific manifestations of such general influence.
Since Weber, new developments allow us to rethink these four statements. (A) In 1906, Ganapati Shastri discovered thirteen Sanskrit plays and attributed them to the early playwright Bhāsa. (B) In 1975, Paul Bernard discovered a building that used to function as a Greek theater in the region. (C) Greco-Roman influences in Sanskrit romance, fable, and epic have been argued for, respectively, in 1940 by Vittore Pisani, in 1987 by Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, and in 2008 by Fernando Wulff Alonso. If influences happened not only in theater but also in other literary genres, we could move on from considering it a mere possibility and start talking about a highly probable practice. (D) Lastly, specific borrowings from Roman theater into Sanskrit theater were suggested in 2012 also by Francisco Rodríguez Adrados.
When comparing some Greco-Roman texts to some of the Sanskrit plays attributed to Bhāsa, the parallelisms are shockingly detailed: paintings being described in words, intentional avoidance of death and violence on stage, merging of two plots into one. I believe that any Indologist who reads this short list would without a doubt be reminded of Sanskrit theater. But I assure you that the same would happen for a Classicist thinking of Greek or Roman theater! Could this be more than a series of lucky coincidences?
The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre
The book The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater tackles an issue that, although first raised nearly two centuries ago, still had not received a full-length treatment in the form of a monograph. The study is based on three literary motifs: the embassies from Iliad 9, Mahābhārata 5, Euripides’ Phoenix, and (Ps.-)Bhāsa’s The Embassy; the ambushes from Iliad 10, Mahābhārata 4, Ps.-Euripides’ Rhesus, and (Ps.-)Bhāsa’s The Five Nights; and the ogres from Odyssey 9, Mahābhārata 1, Euripides’ Cyclops, and (Ps.-)Bhāsa’s The Middle One. But the comparisons do not end there. Other plays by the Greek playwright Aeschylus or by the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence are also compared here for the first time with some works of Sanskrit theater. Hopefully a study like this will start a long-overdue conversation between Classicists and Indologists about these subjects.
Access The Embassey, The Ambush, and the Ogre for free at: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0417
By Christian Canu Højgaard
Law texts are not usually the literature you would prefer for learning about culture, ideas, and values. They are often tedious, repetitive, and essentially impersonal. They must of course be impersonal because they present the laws of an authority and not any personal opinions. Ancient laws are similar to modern laws in many respects, but there are also import differences.
My own interest in ancient Near Eastern laws was sparked when I encountered scholarly works done since the 1990s on the laws of the Hebrew Bible. Scholars such as the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that Leviticus and other legal books of the Hebrew Bible were not merely legal stipulations but articulations of a certain worldview that needed other interpretational tools than Biblical scholars have normally used.
The so-called Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26) is a case in point. Alongside its lists of stipulations of various sorts, it contains concrete—even heartbreaking—cases that are meant to impress the hearer/reader. For example, when a fellow is pictured as literally shaking of poverty (Lev. 25.35).
Through this lens of personal experiences and concrete, everyday disputes, the Holiness Code deals with issues that continue to be relevant: poverty, inequality, immigration, religion. Not in abstract ways but by exemplifying how poor immigrants should be helped and included while preserving the core identity of the community.
The community of the Holiness Code is relatively small. I found it to consist of 59 members, some of them concrete persons like Moses or Aaron, but most of them representing social groups such as peasants, women, priests, immigrants, and poor. The Holiness Code is therefore a model community that represents the most pressing issues in the eyes of the legislator.
It is interesting to see how the community is intertwined in so many different ways. It is clear that encounters with an immigrant do not only affect the ones encountering him but the entire society because ideas and physical goods are exchanged and diffused through the society.
To capture and visualize this intricate network of social roles and relations, I developed a social network model. The benefit of applying social network analysis (SNA) is that it is sensible to how the interactions between two members of a community or between a member and an outsider affect the entire community.
The social network model proposed in my book diverges from most other SNA-approaches in at least three ways:
1. The social network of the Holiness Code is naturally derived from a text. This is not unusual, and there are many interesting social network analyses on the basis of written literature. I have tried to advance this area of research by applying a semi-automatic, computational approach to capture and delineate the persons of the text (chapter 3).
2. Unlike traditional social network approaches, which focus on one particular type of interaction (e.g., marriage ties, friendship, or economical transactions, etc.), the model I created took into account all possible types of interaction including communicational, juridical, cultic, economical, and emotional ones. The benefit of which was to glean as much information from the text as possible. In order to compare quite diverse interactions, I sought out to measure the interactions on the basis of how much agency was required to perform the event (chapters 4–6). For example, speech and harvest are very different events, but each of them requires a certain amount of agency which can be measured given an appropriate linguistic framework.
3. I came to realize that SNA of a text must somehow take into account the structure of the text because the role of a person is not only dependent on his/her interactions but also on how it is positioned in the text. Accordingly, I included the syntactic structure of the text as a third dimension to the social network apart from persons and interactions (chapter 7).
The social network of the Holiness Code is complex but illuminating. As a law text, it offers a glimpse into how an ancient society dealt with pressing issues of immigration, poverty, and increasing inequality. And by capturing the interactions as a social network, we can detect patterns of behaviour that reveal ancient ethics.
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
