Written by: Sean Boisen

New York Times article: “Macmillan … is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.” That includes rewriting and deleting individual paragraphs.The effort is hosted at DynamicBooks.

This is yet another step in what Nicholas Carr has called “the Great Unbundling“, freeing the smaller bits of content embedded in print objects like newspapers and books to live their own independent digital lives.

It raises all kinds of interesting questions, some of which are addressed in the NYT article:

• who controls the changes? (in Macmillan’s case, they claim to not control it, but also that they will “rely on students, parents and other instructors to help monitor changes” and remove inappropriate changes. And how do they decide exactly who qualifies as an instructor?)
• how does this affect style? (from the article: “there’s a flow to books, and there’s voice to them”)
• what about divergent points of view? (from the article: “if an instructor decided to rewrite paragraphs about the origins of the universe from a religious rather than an evolutionary perspective, said, “I would absolutely, positively be livid.””)

Macmillan’s choice to really put this out in the open is bold: i’m not sure i’d go that far. But i have no doubt that blurring the line of who owns the content is the direction of the future.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Sean Boisen

I’ll be giving a talk at the Semantic Technology Conference, June 23 from 7:30AM – 8:20am (ouch!), in San Francisco, CA. The talk title is “Using a Controlled Vocabulary for Managing a Digital Library Platform“: no talk page yet, but the abstract follows. If you’re there, come by and say hello!

(Astute readers will note some similarities between this and my upcoming BibleTech talk. But the audiences are quite different, so the content will be too. This talk will provide “a practical case study on semantically organizing reference material to support search and navigation, using a controlled vocabulary.”)

Abstract

Encyclopedias and other subject-oriented reference books frequently present the same content using different names: and users often look for this information using other names altogether.

The Logos Controlled Vocabulary (LCV) organizes parallel but distinct content in the domain of Biblical studies to integrate reference information and support search, discovery, and knowledge management. The LCV captures

• preferred and alternate terminology
• inter-term relationships
• term hierarchy
• linkage to other semantic information

The initial version of the LCV (now shipping in the Logos digital library platform) comprises some 11,000 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 to terminology and content.

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.

Keywords: controlled vocabulary, publishing, reference, terminology, SKOS

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Sean Boisen

My colleague Steve Runge (Logos bio, blog) made a new connection for me today, between the kind of data work we do at Logos and an old Johnny Cash song. I won’t spoil the surprise if you haven’t heard the song (and we don’t do it by stealing!), but there’s a commonality to the methodology: fact by fact, relation by relation, that’s the way to build a database. And with enough time and perseverance, when you’re done you too can say “… ’cause I have the only one there is around.”

Johnny Cash – One Piece At a Time – on YouTube.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Sean Boisen

I blogged a funny story last week about Logos CEO Bob Pritchett’s attendance at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) conference. But here’s a serious comment from Mark Coker of the Huffington Post that warrants quoting (italics are mine):

The Best Presentation at TOC

My favorite presentation of the conference was from Bob Pritchett of Logos Bible Software, in a session titled, Network Effects Support Premium Pricing. I remember attending his presentation four years ago at the first TOC in San Jose, so I knew I didn’t want to miss his presentation this time. They’re doing amazing stuff at Logos. They face an interesting challenge, one that every author and publisher faces: How do you compete against free? In their case, they sell about 10,000 bible study ebooks. How much has the bible changed over the last two hundred years? Not much. But what Logos excels at is making this information more accessible than ever before. They take a database-centric view of their vast and ever-growing library of content.

When you purchase a book from them, you’re not just getting a static ebook, you’re buying into a dynamic, integrated online application environment that becomes richer with each new publication, and with each new member to their community. Even if Bible study isn’t your thing, check them out for future-of-publishing inspiration. I can’t do them justice here.

High praise indeed from somebody who isn’t necessarily into Bible study, but recognizes that what Logos is doing is really quite unique in the entire publishing industry. Our “database-centric views” are only getting stronger, so you can expect to hear more about this in the months to come.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Sean Boisen

Time spent on the web can be oh-so tedious if you’re constantly cutting things from one page and pasting them elsewhere just to get to another, related page. Someday Linked Data may make this all better, but until then, we all get by with helpful tricks.

Bookmarklets are one essential weapon in the arsenal of the web-info-warrior. Usually they’re little JavaScript programs stored as a bookmark in Firefox, providing one-click access to some simple functionality like looking things up elsewhere, resizing your window, etc. I’ve blogged previously about bookmarklets to find local library sources for a book on an Amazon page (or PaperBackSwap).

I dusted off my bookmarklet skills this past week and came up with some nifty tools that i wanted to share.

First off, imagine you’re looking at a website with Bible references whose benighted author somehow failed to include RefTagger. So rather than a nice pop-up with the text of the reference, or even a helpful link to that text on some Bible site, you’re just looking at a inanimate, unlinked string: boo. The Bible Reference Bookmarklet to the rescue! Simply select the text of the reference, click the bookmarklet, and you’ll be whisked off to that reference at Bible.Logos.com. If you haven’t selected any text first, you get a dialogue box asking for it.

To get this goodie in Firefox, first make sure the Bookmarks Toolbar is showing (View > Toolsbars > Bookmarks Toolbar must be checked). I’d love to give you a link to just drag onto the toolbar, but i don’t seem to be able to get the code past WordPress. So go to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks, and select Organize > New Bookmark. Give it a useful name like “Bible Reference Lookup”, and paste the code below in Location field.

javascript:(function(){%20function%20getSearchString%20(promptString)%20{%20s%20=%20null;
if%20(document.selection%20&&%20document.selection.createRange)
%20{%20s%20=document.selection.createRange().text;%20}%20
else%20if%20(document.getSelection)%20{%20s=%20document.
getSelection();%20}%20
if%20(!%20(s%20&&%20s.length))%20{%20s%20=prompt(promptString,'');%20}
%20return%20s;%20}%20searchString%20=%20getSearchString
('Bible%20Reference%20to%20look%20up%20:');%20
if%20(searchString%20!=%20null)%20{%20if(searchString.length)
%20{%20location%20='http://bible.logos.com/#ref='+escape(searchString);%20}%20
else%20{%20location%20='http://bible.logos.com/';%20}%20}%20%20})();


After you’ve clicked ok, you should see it on your toolbar.

You can do similar tricks for a wide variety of strings that you just want to look up elsewhere (i discovered one here while writing this post that lets you look up articles on Wikipedia). This isn’t fundamentally different from copying the string into a search box: but sometimes it’s more convenient.

Descending into more esoteric purposes (to give you ideas for your own bookmarklets): as part of an earlier post on Tools for Personal Knowledge Management, i mentioned my use of TiddlyWiki for quick organization of hyperlinked notes. Like other wiki software, TiddlyWiki has its own link syntax, that looks like

[[Link text | URL]]

When linking to lots of other web pages, i was getting tired of copying the URL, pasting that in, then typing the square brackets, link text, vertical bar, and more square brackets, all in the right format. Wouldn’t it be more convenient to just construct this expression from the title of the page and its URL, rather than having to type it myself? YES! and the TiddlyWiki Page Link bookmarklet does just that, putting the result in a little pop-up window where a triple-click selects the whole thing, ready to copy and paste into your tiddlywiki (and tailor as desired: the title isn’t always what you want, but it’s often easier to edit and throw things out rather than type afresh). This one you can just drag to your bookmarks toolbar and use right away.

TiddlyWiki Page Link

Also, i’ve switched to a much better library lookup bookmarklet (and a service to help you create one for your local library) from WorldCat. Among other things, it generates the list of all the different ISBNs that might exist for a title (which can be very long indeed), and when there are many, it provides links for alternate searches in case the first group comes up empty handed.

Some other cool bookmarklets in my collection include:

• CiteULike Popup Post and kin to make it easy to add (certain kinds of) articles to your reading list management. Adds more value for sources whose structure it understands.
• Show del.icio.us citations of the current URL (you can find it there)
• Resize your browser window to 1024 x 768 (if you want to see how a page will look on a smaller monitor or projector): the bookmarklet follows, just drag to your toolbar. 1024 x 768
• A CSS validator for the current page: see Pete Freitag’s page.

Hat tips:

• Jon Udell who popularized the Library Lookup idea
• Bookmarklets.com
• Pete Freitag’s collection, which were easily modifiable for my purposes above.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Sean Boisen

I’ve been reading an enormous amount of user feedback lately on the Logos Forums about Logos 4. A lot of it is immensely helpful, as our passionate users tell us what they like, what they hate, what they miss from Libronix 3, etc. It can also be immensely frustrating, as it’s often full of misunderstanding, misinformation, second-guessing about our motivations and actions, hubris, bluster … just the things that characterize many other human communications (along with many refreshingly positive interchanges where people speak kindly, counsel understanding, and plead for cooperativeness).

One result of all this is a new appreciation for concreteness in such forums: reading for the 100th time “Logos 4 is so slow” just doesn’t help as much as a careful description of what the circumstances are (including the hardware environment), what operation is slow, what “slow” means (a few seconds? a few minutes? it just “feels” slow?), etc.

So, in the spirit of concreteness and positive contributions rather than complaining, and following up on some blog-chatter about the recent “shootout” at SBL, i’d like to tackle a nice “pop quiz” i recently found here about keeping your Bible software skills sharp. The original context was performing these tasks with BibleWorks. But i thought it might be useful to identify how to perform these same tasks in Logos 4, both for honing my own skills (i’m not just an employee, i’m a user), and for other users. Please note that i’m not trying to start (or fuel) any “my software can beat your software”-type competitions, or take pot shots at other products (i assume BibleWorks can do all these tasks just fine). I just liked the practical, objective orientation of this list as a learning exercise.

So without further ado, here’s the test (reproduced verbatim except as noted), the process i used to tackle each item, and the results i got.

1. Find all ESV occurrences in Paul of words beginning in, but not the word in.

   Process

   I opened the Search pane, selected Bible Search, and set the search scope to a custom range “Rom-Phil” that i called Paulines. I selected ESV as the Bible, and used the wildcard search expression in* ANDNOT in.

   Result

   This returned 94 results in 84 verses, in about a minute (wildcard searches tend to be slower).

2. How many Greek OT verses are there with the forms g:kurios AND g:theos? [note: i haven't figured out how to render Greek in my WordPress-backed blog, so i've represented these the way somebody without a Greek keyboard would enter them into Logos. Just to be clear, this is an issue with WordPress, not Logos.]

   Process

   I opened the Search pane, selected Bible Search, and set the search scope to Old Testament (Gen-Mal). I selected Septuagint (with Logos Morphology) as the Bible, and used the search expression g:kurios AND g:theos.

   Result

   This returned 1367 results in 592 verses, in less than a second.

3. How many Greek OT verses are there with the lemmas g:kurios AND g:theos?

   Process

   Same steps as above, but using Morph Search this time. As above, i used g:kurios AND g:theos in entry, which the search dialog then converted to the proper Greek forms as before. Then i edited them to have lemma: (not greek:) as the prefix, and @N as the morphological class. There’s a minor gotcha here: you might think you could use search syntax like lemma:kurios in Bible Search rather than Morph Search, but you’d be wrong (or at least you wouldn’t get the results you expect).

   Result

   This returned 3319 results in 1335 verses, taking about 3 seconds.You can see some inflected forms in the last verse included in the screen shot.

4. What’s the difference between these two searches? BGM .?????? and BGT .??????[again, i can't reproduce the Greek, but i'd enter it in Logos as g:iesous]

   Result

   Not being a BibleWorks user, i don’t actually know what this means. Maybe it’s searching two different texts? If somebody can translate this for me, i’ll see if i can determine an equivalent.

5. How many times does the word translated “creation” in Genesis 1:1 appear in the Pentateuch?

   Process

   I assumed “word” here meant lemma. I opened the NRSV, clicked the Interlinear button to display the interlinear text, and selected “created” (not “creation”, but i assume this was the intent) in the English text, which highlighted the corresponding Hebrew term. Then i right-clicked on that term, selected the Lemma tab in the right-click menu,  and selected Search This Resource. That searched the whole Bible (2 seconds), but the question said only the Pentateuch. So then i just changed the scope from All Passages to Pentateuch (i may have created this custom range before, i don’t recall).

   Result

   14 results in 11 verses.

6. g:agape is most common in what book of the Bible, when judged with regard to the book’s size?

   Process

   Here i used the Bible Word Study: the Lemma section provides a small sparkline-style graph with relative frequencies. Clicking on this opens up a larger pie chart that’s much easier to understand, but the counts here are absolute, not relative. However, the bar and column chart options let you select various display options, one of which is number of hits/number of verses in book (which i think is the intent of the question).

   Result

   Since i had a nice option to export the graph to PowerPoint, that made it easy to reproduce the results here. The winner is 2 John (i had assumed it was 1 John!).

7. How many times does g:agapao appear in the LXX vs. the GNT?

   Process

   Again, Morph Search using lemma:agapao (which magically turns into Greek), over two ranges: LXX, vs NA27, all passages in both cases.

   Result

   LXX returned 272 results in 256 verses. NA27 returned 143 results in 110 verses.

8. g:agape is in how many Louw and Nida semantic domains?

   Process

   Since i know Volume 2 of Louw-Nida has a Greek-English index that lists the domains for each term, the direct way is to just navigate there (using the table of contents) and count. That felt a little like cheating, but i don’t know of another approach that’s closer to the spirit of the exercise.You can of course search the resource for the term, but that produces lots of additional hits. There may be some deeper search magic that could be applied here.

   Result

   Two domains: 25.43 and 23.28.

9. How many ESV occurrences are there of words beginning inter or enter?

   Process

   This is pretty much like task #1, but with the range as All Passages, and the search expression inter* OR enter*.

   Result

   This was a slow search (76 seconds), which returned 450 results in 413 verses (assuming “enter” was to be included in the set).

10. How many GNT verses are there with g:uper alone vs. g:uper as a prefix?

    Process

    Like the search above, once you appreciate that wildcards word in Greek too. So these are both Morph Search operations, one with (the result of) lemma:uper, and one with greek:uper*.

    Result

    As a lemma, 150 results in 135 verses (2 seconds). As a prefix, 209 results in 184 verses. The screen shot is of the latter.

Some closing reflections on this exercise: overall, though it took a little time, i feel like i have a much better understanding now of how to perform tasks like these in Logos 4. The g: prefix syntax for entering Greek terms proved very handy (both for using the software and for blogging about it!), and performed just the way i’d want it to. There are some subtleties about Bible vs Morph Search on original language texts, but they make sense to me in retrospect. These counting tasks aren’t really the heart-and-soul of Biblical studies, but of course all the counts reflect a concordance that gives direct access to the verses in their context. So i’m encouraged that Logos 4 was able to address all these tasks quite easily, quite quickly, and with what i will assume are accurate results (until somebody lets me know evidence to the contrary )

Update (12/3): please see the comments below for discussion of a few things i got wrong.

• for #1, the range expression should be Romans-Phile (Philemon, not Philippians)
• there are some subtleties about selection order in Logos that matter to getting the Greek text right for #2 and #3, as Mark Hoffman explains in his comment

Also, credit where due to Charlie Gibson, BibleWorks trainer, as the source for some elements of the quiz (thanks for pointing that out, Mark Ward).

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Sean Boisen

There’s an interesting article in Wired UK on “Transmedia tales and the future of storytelling“. “transmedia” is my new word for the day: in the article, Henry Jenkins (former MIT professor and author of  Convergence Culture) is quoted, defining transmedia storytelling as

“a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels.”

The basic idea is to go beyond the traditional print medium (a novel) and deliver stories through a combination of print, video, TV, on-line activities, and even real-world artifacts, all working together to engage the reader consumer. The article provides a nice overview of some ways this is happening today.

This is all well and good for contemporary fiction, and it seems like an interesting approach for stories that are unfolding afresh for the first time. The fundamental difference from telling the Biblical story (aside from the fact that we don’t treat it as fiction) is that the narrative itself isn’t “new”: it’s already been “out” in the culture for thousands of years. But that doesn’t mean everybody knows it (clearly they don’t), nor does it mean the presentation can’t be new.

How might transmedia be used to communicate Biblical stories in a way that’s faithful to the text, not speculative (i’m not convinced we need more of these), but still engaging for today’s media-savvy younger generations? As an example, i could certainly imagine a transmedia re-telling of David’s adultery with Bathsheba, his subsequent murder of Uriah, and Nathan’s confrontation of him (2 Sam 11:1-12:26). This highly dramatic story could be unfolded in (compressed) real time, both to give a sense of the time scales involved, but also to bring home more clearly the tensions, uncertainty, and emotional impact of the narrative. For example, a sequence like this (with suitable delays):

1. introduce the scene from the Biblical text (2 Sam 11:1-4a), perhaps in a Sunday sermon, and invite people to follow along
2. twitter 2 Sam 11:5
3. release a video retelling of Uriah’s visit to David (2 Sam 11:6-13)
4. email 2 Sam 11:14-16, David’s letter to Joab
5. email Joab’s news flash (and the context)

and so forth.

I’d love to hear about any examples of this kind of interactive, media-engaged Biblical storytelling.

Some related activities:

• The Network of Biblical Storytellers (my wife is a member, and we attended the 2008 festival gathering) is one group seeking to bring the text more dramatically to life, primarily through oral re-telling that stays close to the Biblical text.
• The American Bible Society has several initiatives to expand Bible reading and interest in the younger generation, some focused on contemporary music and personalities. This isn’t quite transmedia, though it does combine several media channels in a contemporary fashion.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Sean Boisen

Somebody who knows where i work wrote to ask if there was a way to get a list of all the numerals used in the Old Testament (two, twice, etc.). The answer’s yes, and it’s not hard: but since my first response was overly complicated, i wanted to try again and put the results out for others.

The background: i’m using Logos 4, Syntax Search, with the Andersen-Forbes Phrase Marker Analysis (henceforth AF). If this is new territory for you, you’ll want to start by getting some background from Mike Heiser’s tutorial videos here: the syntax videos are currently down near the bottom.

So here are the steps:

• Open the Search panel, and select Syntax
• Set the search to All Passages in Hebrew Bible: Andersen-Forbes Phrase Marker Analysis
• Click on Query to create a New Syntax Search
• In the new panel, click on Add Search Terms here and select Segment. You’ll also want to check Show Details at the top of the panel.
• On the right side of the Panel, open up the Parts of Speech section, and in the Morph Specification type “@N?[NO]” (or select  the corresponding items from the pop-up: part of speech = Noun, Noun Family = numeral and ordinal). You can then click on Search to run this (i got 7128 results), and click through the results
• You might want to refine this search in several ways:
  • Limiting the scope to a particular book
  • If you have a deeper understanding of syntax, you may want to elaborate the search specification to only include particular contexts
  • Adding Semantics=Quantity removes two results, which was a little surprising, but i didn’t take the time to figure out which ones

This post originally appeared on Blogos

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