It was a pretty ambitious goal, and i had to take a few shortcuts to pull it off (like starting past the boring stuff, with Python/Django/MySQL already installed, and data ready to go). But i think i can fairly claim to have delivered what i promised. We walked through an application that’s been a side-project for the Whatcom Python Users Group, a web version of Sustainable Connection’s Food and Farm Finder brochure. It’s a nice simple learning example, well-suited to tutorial purposes. I’d say there were at least 40 or so in attendance, many the kind of beginners i was trying to focus on. And even though the time slot turned out to only be 45 minutes, I finished with several minutes to spare (in retrospect, i could have gone a little slower).

Slides are here, along with the data you need to follow them on the main page for the talk. I have audio of the talk that i’ll post in the next day or two once i’ve cleaned it up a bit: then it will be almost like being there (though without the ability to make sense of the “skeleton” joke). I was glad to have the opportunity to shine a little light on Django and repay a tiny portion of the debt of gratitude i owe its creators, since it’s been a major productivity boost in my work at Logos.

Here’s another reason why i give talks whenever i get the chance: you always learn more when you teach others. As a concrete example, i was reminded while prepping the talk that Django’s template framework, while primarily designed around HTML generation, is quite general and therefore capable of generating other data formats as well. At work, i’d built up an entire module of custom code around serializing Bible Knowledgebase data as XML for internal hand-off to our developers. Re-reading the Django book gave me the idea of using Django templates to do this instead. In fairly short order, i was able to rewrite my test example, 80 lines of custom code, with a single clean template and 20 much simpler lines instead.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

So i’m happy with the other announcement from BibleTech last week: Logos is making the Lexham English Bible available under very generous terms (details here). The LEB is in the family of “essentially literal” translations, which makes it a good choice for tasks where the precise wording matters. And the LEB is available through the API (unlike most other versions you’re likely to want, at least until we resolve some other licensing issues).

I don’t want to do a review of the entire API here (and it will probably continue to evolve). But here are a couple of things about it that excite me:

• The most obvious one is the ability to retrieve Bible text given a reference (the content service). Of the currently available Bible versions, the LEB is the one that interests me the most here (i hope we’ll have others in the future).
• Another exciting aspect for me is the tag service. You provide text which may include Bible references: the service identifies any references embedded in it, and then inserts hyperlinks for them to enrich the text. So this is like RefTagger on demand (not just embedded in your website template). You can also supply a URL and tag the text that’s retrieved from it. One caveat with this latter functionality: if you want to run this on HTML, you should plan to do some pre-processing first, rather than treating it all as one big string. Otherwise random things (like “XHTML 1.0″ in a DOCTYPE declaration) wind up getting tagged in strange ways (like ML 1.0).

I’ve just started working through the Biblia API today, but since i’m a Pythonista, developing a Python interface seemed like the way to go. This is still very much a work in progress, but you can download the code from this zip file and give it a whirl. Caveats abound:

• I’ve only implemented three of the services so far: content() (retrieves Bible content for a reference), find() (lists available Bibles and metadata), and tag() (finds references in  text and enhances it with hyperlinks). And even with these three services, i haven’t supported all the parameters (maybe i will, maybe i won’t).
• This is my first stab at creating a Python interface to an API, so there may be many stylistic shortcomings.
• Testing has also gotten very little attention, and bugs doubtless remain.

If you’re interested and want to play along, let me know: we can probably set up a Google group or something for those who want to improve this code further.

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To recap some of the features:

• Colored blocks are grouped together by pericope so the presentation is organized by the events, rather than the order of texts themselves. The size of the block indicates how many words are associated with the pericope, and the colors indicate which Gospel provided the material. This helps you immediately see things like the fact that all four Gospels provide quite a bit of detail about the triumphal entry, though only Luke includes Jesus’ sorrow over Jerusalem.
• The blocks are grouped by day, through the chronology is uncertain in several places, so this is an approximation at best.
• Clicking on the pericope title takes you to the Composite Gospel page (though apparently some of the indexes are off). Clicking on the colored block takes you to source text at bible.logos.com (and a tooltip indicates the reference). As i recall, i couldn’t figure out a way to use RefTagger to actually display the text more directly in a popup.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

To recap some of the features:

• Colored blocks are grouped together by pericope so the presentation is organized by the events, rather than the order of texts themselves. The size of the block indicates how many words are associated with the pericope, and the colors indicate which Gospel provided the material. This helps you immediately see things like the fact that all four Gospels provide quite a bit of detail about the triumphal entry, though only Luke includes Jesus’ sorrow over Jerusalem.
• The blocks are grouped by day, through the chronology is uncertain in several places, so this is an approximation at best.
• Clicking on the pericope title takes you to the Composite Gospel page (though apparently some of the indexes are off). Clicking on the colored block takes you to source text at bible.logos.com (and a tooltip indicates the reference). As i recall, i couldn’t figure out a way to use RefTagger to actually display the text more directly in a popup.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Some of the talks i liked best this year:

• I was already interested in Pinax before hearing James Tauber’s talk on Using Django and Pinax for Collaborative Linguistics: now i’m itching to get started!
• Stephen Smith had a nice analysis of the most frequently tweeted Bible passages (though the evidence of vast swaths of Scripture that get very little attention was perhaps a bit depressing).
• Neil Rees showed Concordance Builder, a program that lets you use a Swahili concordance to bootstrap one for Welsh (or any other pair of languages) with no linguistic knowledge. Building on the Paratext tool, it leverages the verse indexes along with approximate string matching and statistical glossing (technical paper by J D Riding) to produce results that are about 90-95% correct out of the book. This can reduce concordance development to a matter of weeks rather than years.
• There were several talks related to semantics in addition to mine: Randall Tan talked about more automated methods and fleshed them out relative to the higher-level structure of Galatians, and Andi Wu gave what looked like a really interesting presentation on semantic search based on syntax and cross-language correspondence (alas, i missed it).
• Weston Ruter talked about APIs they’re developing at OpenScriptures.org (and brought in the Linked Data idea). Logos also unveiled their new API for Biblia.

I felt my talks went well and i got some good feedback. My slides are now posted (if you wrote down URLs at the conference, i didn’t get them quite right but here they’re correct):

• Annotating Linguistic Reference in the New Testament (http://www.semanticbible.com/other/talks/2010/BibleTech-NTReferents/BibleTech-NTReferents.html)
• A Controlled Vocabulary for Biblical Studies (http://www.semanticbible.com/other/talks/2010/BibleTech-LCV/BibleTech-LCV.html) — this is what we internally call the Logos Controlled Vocabulary (LCV).

(As with some previous talks, i did my presentation with Slidy (previous post): i feel like it’s going a little more smoothly each time.)

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Donna and i do this all the time: we don’t have web-connected phones, so if i’m driving and lost, i call her. She’s very likely to be either sitting at or within 50 feet of an Internet-connected computer, so she can relay the information back to me. Maybe not quite as cool as having my own pocket Internet , but very workable, a whole cheaper (no data plan), and it reinforces our relationship at the same time.

Technology Review: Info on the go for travelers without smart phones.

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… show 40 visualizations of the Holy Bible. Most of the visualizations will be self-made, but sometimes I will cover the work from other people.

Looks like there’s also some narration of the process, which may be useful if you’re thinking about how to do some visualizations yourself.

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What do you think a state-of-the-art electronic journal in biblical studies would look like?

This question lives right where so many interesting discussions are currently taking place around topics like

• the future of publishing and the book
• how collaboration, user contribution, and social media change the nature of publication
• open access journals and publishing (see for example this list of 63 open access journals in the broad area of religion from the Directory of Open Access Journals)
• how vendors and publishers might facilitate this new world: Microsoft is definitely thinking about it, and Dave Weinberger has some rough notes here from a talk. Science publisher Elsevier is working toward the (research journal) article of the future.
  

It’s still too early to know the answers, but here are a few areas of interest to me:

1. The value of search, hyperlinked information, and other digital conveniences seems indisputable.
2. There’s a lot of momentum from openness so far. Wikipedia has clearly won the day against the Encyclopedia Britannica, through its combination of free access, timely update of content, and tremendous scope – and despite criticisms of its lack of authoritativeness and editorial control (a caution to those who want peer review to be a control gate). But clearly part of Wikipedia’s real success is its ability to motivate and manage an enormous community of volunteers: it remains to be seen how easily others can replicate that feat. Hobbins rightly questions how this will all work with databases that are behind pay walls.
3. In the five years of Web 2.0, we’ve all learned the value of having a community that can tag, rate, and comment on content. But the network effects here require a certain critical mass to pay off: how would that be accomplished in a field like Biblical studies? How will authors feel having others leave comments directly on their articles (including those of a contrary nature)?
4. Can such a thing really work out on the open web, or does it need a rich community of resources like Logos to really thrive?

The technical issues aren’t likely to prove stumbling blocks: there are plenty of solutions there. I expect the tough problems will have a lot more to do with community building, rethinking scholarship and publication, clarifying the value propositions and business issues, and gaining traction.

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Some time back, Tim O’Reilly (The Architecture of Participation) echoed and applied some observations from Dan Bricklin (the Cornucopia of the Commons) about the architecture of Napster and  other significant web-based systems. The individual details are well worth reading, but here’s the summary form. There are several common models for how to build large datasets that are valuable to people:

1. Pay people to build it (Bricklin calls this “Organized Manual”). Examples include the original Yahoo! directory of the web, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. There’s an variant that represents smart algorithms rather than just human effort (Bricklin: “Organized Mechanical”): this is how Google has built its indexes. But it still represents a significant monetary investment by somebody who probably expects something in return.
2. Get volunteers (Bricklin’s “Volunteer Manual”): Wikipedia is the preeminent example here, along with Linux, the Open Directory Project, and a great many open source projects. People do this work because they value the end result, and the project coordinates and magnifies those efforts.
3. Architect in such a way that individual self-interest creates collective value.

Napster (the original peer-to-peer version) was proposed by Bricklin as a prime example of the third model: simply by listening to your music (within the Napster ecosystem), the default settings meant you were also sharing that music with everybody else. Quoting Bricklin:

What we see here is that increasing the value of the database by adding more information is a natural by-product of using the tool for your own benefit. No altruistic sharing motives need be present, especially since sharing is the default.

This is Bricklin’s Cornucopia of the Commons (an allusion to Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons): a system designed in such a way that use brings overflowing abundance.

(You might think blogging and twittering are like this, but they’re not. Nobody tweets because it has direct, inherent value to them: instead, it’s an outgrowth of a narcissistic, self-centered open, generous belief that what i say might have value to others. Few of us would do it if nobody else was listening. )

Models for Data Creation In Biblical Studies

All that (and Napster!) is now history, and i don’t want to get distracted by the peer-to-peer model that made Napster so powerful (Bricklin argues that’s not the reason it succeeded), or the legal issues that led to its demise. Instead, i want to reflect here on how these principles apply to Biblical studies and software.

With Logos 4, we’ve launched a major expansion of our Biblical Knowledge, by expanding Biblical People, adding Places and Things, and building around the large set of concepts we call the Logos Controlled Vocabulary. This was accomplished through the Organized Manual method: we paid a bunch of people (me included) to architect and populate this data, in a major development effort that stretched over several years. You could view the vast network of links that make Logos more than just a collection of texts as an extension of the same principle (through the resulting software program doesn’t look so much like a database). It represents literally hundreds of thousands of hours of effort in book markup and design, along with lots of “Organized Mechanical” algorithmic work.

There are also lots of examples of Volunteer Manual projects related to the Bible. The Sword Project is like Linux for Bible software. e-Sword has a smaller group of developers, but the same framework of a volunteer effort which is given away. Open Scriptures is building a platform and API for others to use in building Bible-based applications. Web 2.0 efforts like YouVersion let people tie their reflections directly to the Biblical text, and numerous projects have sprung from the Wikipedia mold like Theopedia. My own SemanticBible projects are much more limited, but in a similar spirit.

Logos has been active with the Volunteer Manual approach as well. The Logos Topics website combines our Organized Manual data and architecture of topics with user-contributed extensions of additional terminology, links within Logos, and even links to other websites. This lets us do some neat things like extending the desktop application content through user contributions on the web. Like Wikipedia, these are altruistic contributions from people who want to share their knowledge with others.

Sermons.logos.com works in a similar fashion: if you’re a pastor who writes down your sermon, and you’re willing to upload and share it, lots of others (both on the web and in Logos software) can benefit from what you’ve created. This is closer to the Cornucopia of the Commons model, but it’s still a voluntary and indirect process: my sermon doesn’t get shared as a natural by-product of my preparation activity.

The Cornucopia and Bible Study

The interesting question to me is how to achieve the third model, where my own use of a tool provides a direct benefit to others through a network, not because i’m behaving altruistically but simply because the system is architected to work that way. This is closely related to the whole Web2.0 meme (can it really have been five years already?!?) of “software that gets better the more it gets used.”

One thought: lots of web sites use RefTagger to provide a nice pop-up of Bible text for their readers, a benefit that enriches the experience of visitors to their site. Twitter users can similarly use ref.ly to shorten Bible references, which, like RefTagger links,  in turn resolve to references on Bible.Logos.com.   Could those links be converted into data indicating, for example, the relative popularity of different verses, and then displayed back to users?

Aggregating users’ operation of Logos software (in a suitably anonymized fashion, of course) could also provide data on the most popular resources, searches, and topics, which could then be turned around into recommendations (”Looking for a Bible dictionary article on ‘marriage’? Here are the ones our users have found most useful ….”).

But none of these seem to me to accomplish the full promise of the Cornucopia of the Commons. There has to be more here than simply harnessing popularity (though sites like Digg and del.icio.us have shown how useful that can be). I’m still trying to imagine what data sets could be created by people who are already committed to Bible study, as a normal outgrowth of what they do anyway. Any thoughts? Please share a comment.

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It’s been quiet for a week or so … Bob, my boss is out of town, i don’t know where … i’m doing a lot of strategic planning, blue sky thinking, exploring new ideas. Yesterday, a colleague sends me a link about a talk on eBooks (i troll through a lot of information in a typical week), The future of digital textbooks. It’s interesting, though brief and sketchy in the way conference talk reports often are … online books lower the price point, student choice isn’t always aligned with faculty choice, students “want learning that’s more efficient, more portable and more affordable”, yada yada yada.

I put it aside, get on with my work, and finally come back to it later in the day, actually read it, and recognize it’s a talk from the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) conference. Oh yeah, that’s going on right now in New York! And last week i had planned to look at last year’s talks and (big surprise) got distracted and forgot.

So i look up the TOC website, intending to follow up on the old talks, which indeed confirms that the conference is going on now, and it has an intriguing link: Watch Keynotes Live Online. Hmm, that’s almost like being there! In fact, i had thought about asking Bob if i could go, but decided it was a little too far afield for me to justify the expense and travel time.

So i click on the link, do the brief registration thing, and sure enough, i’m watching and listening to the conference live, in real-time, as it’s happening. How cool! It really is like being there (except you can’t ask questions). We’re in the part of the program for “Ignite talks”, a rapid pace sequence of 5 minute talks with no more than 20 slides that switch automatically after 15 seconds. Some guy’s giving a talk, i forget who because i’m also reading email and distracted with some other stuff, but it’s vaguely interesting.

His five minutes are up, he walks off the stage, i’m only half-paying attention, and then … Bob walks on the stage, as in, Bob, my boss. He’s at this conference (i guess that’s one reason he’s been gone all week), all the way on the other side of the country, giving one of these Ignite talks, and through this chain of chance digital connections, somehow i managed to tune in 10 minutes before his talk. He gives a great brief overview of Logos 4 from a publishing angle, highlights a few points i hadn’t thought about before (”Logos is like a Bible study answer machine”, and “data sets are like glue”). The physical space between us is collapsed, we’re meeting by the accident of being interested in the same things … all serendipity.

Talk about your Digital Age “Wow” experiences.

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