Written by: Ryan Rotz

Ok, so it wasn’t BibleTech:98. But, in 1998 Billy Graham was invited to give a TED talk on technology and faith. The presentation is embedded below. The run time is 26 minutes, so grab a cup of coffee and enjoy.

Special thanks to former BibleTech presenter, John Dyer, for pointing out the video on his blog Don’t Eat the Fruit.

Written by: Sean Boisen

The program for BibleTech:2010 has been up for a couple of weeks now, and i’ve been delinquent in failing to point that out. We’ve got a full roster of really interesting talks that span the gamut from friendly warm technology to hard-core geekishness: Bible translation, social media, Biblical linguistics, mobile computing, preaching, publishing, tweeting, and more. And this year, it’s in San Jose, CA: i’m hoping that will open up attendance to some folks who have the misfortune to not live in the beautiful Pacific NW. The dates are March 26-27, 2010.

I’ll be giving two talks this year: here’s my abstract for the first one, on the Libronix Logos Controlled Vocabulary.

The Libronix Logos Controlled Vocabulary (LCV) organizes content from multiple Bible dictionaries to integrate information across the Logos library. As a controlled vocabulary, the LCV identifies, organizes, and systematizes a specific set of terms for indexing content, capturing inter-term relationships, and expressing term hierarchies. Like other kinds of metadata, this infrastructure then supports applications in search, discovery, and general knowledge management. The initial version of the LCV (shipping now with Logos 4) comprises some 11,100 terms, and continues to grow as more reference works are added. It also provides the backbone of http://topics.logos.com, a website for user contributions.

This talk will describe the building of the LCV, how we’re using it now, and how we plan to use and extend it in the future. This includes some interesting new capabilities for machine learning from existing prose content. For example:

• what are the prototypical Bible references, names, or phrases used to discuss a topic?
• can we learn anything about the importance of topics by looking at how much is written about them, how many dictionaries cover them, and other kinds of automated analysis?
• what knowledge can be gleaned from the topology of terminology linkage (what links to what)?

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Sean Boisen

The Society of Biblical Literature has received a planning grant to

… develop a website, “The World of the Bible: exploring people, places, and passages.” The site is intended for general audiences and will share scholarly views and encourage critical engagement with the Bible, including its ancient contexts and interpretive legacy.

We encourage you to share this survey with people who are not bible scholars—your students, perhaps, or friends and family. The goal is to gain a diverse representation of our intended audience and to assess their current level of familiarity with and interest in the Bible.

Please feel free to post this link in your blog or webpage.

Here’s the link to the survey: if you’re in their target group, i’d encourage you to give them some feedback. I’ve had some discussion with the principals, who know about Logos’ work on the Bible Knowledgebase (but we don’t have any official role in the project). This could become a useful resource for translating some of the scholarly work on Biblical studies to a wider audience.

(Hat tip: Mike Heiser’s Naked Bible blog)

This post originally appeared on Blogos