But i’m ready to get back to a more regular blogging schedule, and nothing gets the creative juices flowing like the prospects of another BibleTech conference! The first BibleTech (this past January) was one of the highlights of my year: here’s a list of 2008 speakers, including two presentations by me (you can find links to the slides here, and there’s an MP3 for the Zoomable Bible talk here, though be warned that it’s 150Mb and non-streaming). So i’m really looking forward to the next one, March 28-29 in Seattle.

The call for presentations has gone out, and so i face the dilemma of choosing among lots of different ideas and topics, and deciding what to propose. So many smart people attended the last conference that i’d love to just sit around and talk tech for several days straight, but i probably have to focus on just one or two topics.

So here’s your chance to give me some feedback (and for me to learn whether anybody’s still listening!). I’m planning to blog about some of my presentation ideas in subsequent posts, and i’d love to hear your comments about them. Does the topic make sense? Would you want to hear about it? Is it compelling, relevant, important, “cool”? Is it too obscure, too far out there, too geeky? What can i improve from last year (if you attended one of my talks)? It would really help me to have some feedback on these questions, especially from those who attended last year and therefore have a good feel for what the conference is all about (but i’ll take any comments i can get).

Maybe you should be presenting at BibleTech 2009 too! The call for participation is open until Nov 3, and describes what we’re looking for, so get those abstracts in. And if i happen to mention a topic that you’re interested in presenting on, let me know and then go for it! There’s no shortage of things i’d like to talk about …

• Wikipedia, where people work together to create encyclopedia-like content
• del.icio.us: i label (or ‘tag’) web page content, and others can look at my tags, or lots of people’s tags, to find things of interest.
• slashdot, digg, reddit, and similar sites that collect votes on the interest of web pages and then ranked the pages by popularity

Though more popular perhaps in the last few years, these kinds of approaches have been around for some time. Google’s dominance of web search, arguably the current “killer app” on the internet (along with email), comes from a kind of collective intelligence. Their PageRank algorithm uses the number of links to a page from other web sites to estimate how important the page is, and assign its rank in the results you get back from a web search.

The interesting question to me is how collective intelligence might be usefully applied to Biblical studies. There have been a few projects in this area, though i think it’s fair to say they haven’t yielded too much yet. I’ve written a few posts (here, and almost 2 years ago here) about applying “Web 2.0″ ideas to Bible study. YouVersion is perhaps the most promising of that bunch, but it still doesn’t collect nearly enough intelligence to really be different (meaning that the scale is too small, not that the comments are too stupid ).

Another interesting set of data come from the ESV Bible Blog, where they analyzed their web searches to identify the most popular verses in the Bible. This provides some well-grounded analysis of people’s actual behavior (which is always better than guessing what they do). But as such it’s still just data, not information or knowledge (more about that in this rather conceptual post about the difference between data, information, and knowledge). In other words, how do we apply this data to do something new and different when it comes to Bible study?

Here’s one example collective intelligence project i’ve pondered (though i haven’t yet found time to actually construct it): identifying parables in the Gospels. We have numerous sayings of Jesus throughout the Gospels that use stories, allegories, or other metaphorical language to make a point. Some of these are explicitly described in their context as parables: for example, Mark 4:2 tells us

And he was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them …

We conventionally refer to the story that follows in Mark 4:3-8 as “the Parable of the Soils” (or, perhaps less appropriately given the focus of the story, the Parable of the Sower). However, other stories with the same character aren’t explicitly called parables in the text, or are labeled as parables in one gospel but not another. In fact, the Greek word parabolē (from which our word parable is a straightforward transliteration) doesn’t occur in the Gospel of John at all, though several of the teachings recorded there have a similar style as parables from the Synoptic Gospels.

If you consult the various Bible reference works, many of which contain lists of the parables of Jesus, you find a great deal of disagreement as to which passages are and are not parables. Not surprisingly, this also reflects divergence of opinion as to what ought to be considered a parable: only those instances where the term parabolē is used? Those as well as parallel stories? Any kind of figurative language? Wilmington’s Book of Bible Lists lists 38 parables of Jesus (several of which occur in multiple Gospels): the Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible lists 40; Harper’s Bible Dictionary has only 26 (plus a few others found only in the Gospel of Thomas).

Here’s a good candidate for applying collective intelligence to a real issue in Biblical studies: what should we list as a parable? You could approach it like this:

• Identify the entire set of candidate passages that anybody anywhere has considered, or might consider, a parable (and maybe throw in a few others as a control group)
• Create a web site where people could log in and simply vote up or down on each passage: Parable or Not?
• Along with their votes, each participant should record their criteria for voting
• Participants could also log in as proxies for existing reference lists or scholarly authorities and enter (as votes) what Wilmington, Dodd or Jeremias called a parable.

I’d think at least 100 participants would be required to make this exercise in distributed Biblical scholarship meaningful, and some might turn their noses up at the thought of letting unwashed masses have an equal say with the scholars. But wouldn’t this be an interesting exercise? In particular, rather than “the list” of parables, it would give us the basis for a distribution of opinions: for example, 95% might agree that Mark 4:3-8 is a parable, while perhaps only 10% would label Jesus’ saying about the vine and vinedresser (John 15:1-17) that way. And the criteria might provide some interesting clusters of votes. I’d love to add this kind of data to the Composite Gospel. In fact, that’s what started the idea: i sat down to label the parables, and quickly realized this wasn’t a straightforward task.

Additional resource: The Horizon Project is one product of the New Media Consortium that “charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative expression”. In my view, seminary education as well as pastoral preaching and teaching belong among this target audience. The Horizon Project produces an annual report on what’s here now, coming soon in the mid-term, and on the far-term horizon (3-5 years). Collective intelligence is one of their far-term horizon technologies: you can read more about in the Horizon Report.

Today i listened to an interview with Dr. Jim Hendler, now at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but previously at University of Maryland and a key figure in the establishment of OWL during his tenure at DARPA. My comments here are really just a rehash of some things he said much better, and with much more authority (given his history in the field) — but blame me, not him, for what i say below.

The concept of the Semantic Web brings together two different communities , along with their respective priorities and technologies. Many of the disagreements within what looks like a single community are just two sets of people talking about different things (but using similar terminology). The “semantic” part is mostly represented by the Artificial Intelligence community, with interests in careful ontology development, deep reasoning, theoretical correctness, and academic activities. The “web” community has been out there for more than a decade, building the World Wide Web with HTML and lots and lots of data, and is now looking for ways to make it more useful, connected, and extensible.

You can represent these two concerns as two axes on a graph, and many different endeavors tend strongly toward one side or the other, depending on whether they emphasize the “intelligence” dimension, or the “data” dimension. Just a few examples on the data side (that could be multiplied many times over):

• Yahoo plans to start indexing RDFa content (i discussed this a bit in my post about Bibleref and RDFa). As one of the major web players, this adds just a little more intelligence to a lot of data (potentially: users still have to create RDFa markup)
• Freebase is harvesting data from Wikipedia and other sources, and then adding a modest amount of structured relations.
• Talis has their own set of data from a long history of library applications.

On the “intelligence” side would be big ontology development efforts, and academics working on reasoning: Hendler also called out pharmaceutical companies as tending toward this dimension. Hendler’s own bet is that progress is more likely to come from data-side approaches than the hard-core intelligence side (and i think he’s right). He sees the combination of SPARQL and persistent identifiers as two recent developments that are likely to move the field ahead: these are things i’m looking at closely as well in Bible Knowledgebase development (more on the second one to come soon).

My interest in Bibleref is only to achieve a practical goal: making it easier to distinguish and characterize citations of Biblical passages. So my pragmatic answer is, whatever approach gets us closer to that goal.

In the context of emerging Internet technologies and practices, Bibleref attempts to solve a specific, small problem that is nevertheless representative of a much wider set of challenges:

How to “upgrade” the web as it exists today (mostly display-oriented prose) to more structured and meaningful data

• without breaking things that already work
• without requiring too much effort from web page authors
• in a way that will carry us forward into whatever the future Web turns out to be

One consequence of the unbridled growth of the World Wide Web is lots of conflicting standards. There’s a constant tension between those who think carefully about requirements and want a neat and tidy approach, versus those who just want to get something practical done. Both approaches have their merits, but it’s clear the Web as it exists today would never have developed if it hadn’t been possible for excited individuals to go write their own web pages with a simple text editor.

Microformats are more toward the “pave the cowpaths” end of this continuum, focusing on re-using existing HTML constructs in slightly more semantic fashion. RDFa requires somewhat more overhead in the use of namespaces and the RDF model (not too surprising given its W3C sponsorship). But, if you think Yahoo Search’s Amit Kumar is right (i do) that search is the “killer app” for the Semantic Web, the issue of how all that data will get indexed and processed is as significant as how it will get authored in the first place. Since each microformat is a new special case, and searching for Bible references isn’t quite in the mainstream of the Internet economy, it’s easy to question whether a microformat-based Bibleref standard will ever achieve critical mass.

I’m rambling a bit: here’s a more coherent summary of where i see things today, slightly less than a year after my first Bibleref proposal:

• the “semantic HTML” form of the current Bibleref proposal makes sense, and would be easy enough for bloggers and other content publishers to use at web scale.
• Logos’ RefTagger makes it even easier, by identifying the most typical kinds of references. However, its results are dynamic, not persistent in the actual markup of the web page, so there’s currently no way for search engines to benefit from this processing. I’m hoping that we’ll eventually be able to provide a tool that actually generates Bibleref-style markup in pages.
• Using RDFa would also be a workable way to get more Bibleref markup onto the web (for those who understand it and are motivated enough). Though there may be practical reasons to promote one approach over another, from a technical standpoint they have the same result (identify and normalizing references), and so one doesn’t have to exclude the other.
• until there’s a way to actually search for Bibleref, none of this will make much difference, because content producers won’t have the payoff to motivate them to take the extra trouble. For that reason, i’m more inclined to bet on Yahoo, and if RDFa is how they plan to index and expose this content, that might make more sense (though i’d like to understand better how this will all work).

(You’ll find some more thoughts in my BibleTech 2008 talk on Bibleref.)

1. animated visualizations are just plain cool, but even more importantly,
2. visualizations (like zoomable user interfaces) provide a different view of the text than our linear print legacy has previously encouraged.

However, the real test of a visualization isn’t its coolness, but rather whether it helps you understand things that are otherwise difficult to grasp. I had a good example of that this morning, and walking through it might help others see the value of this tool.

I wrote a year ago about IBM’s Many Eyes site, which provides a host of easy-to-use visualization tools: you upload your data set, choose a visualization technique, and voila, you’ve got a sharable visualization! I’ve posted a few data sets and visualizations previously, like:

• Top 50 Bible Women by frequency and dispersion (scatterplot)
• the Composite Gospel Index (treemap)

(the entire collection of my data and visualizations is here), and lots of others have posted interesting visualizations of Bible data as well. Of course, if you want fine control over the visualization, you’re probably not going to get it from these pre-packaged techniques. But it’s pretty impressive how much you can do with what’s there, and this is an easy way to learn about and sample different visualization techniques: if you’re a data-oriented person, i’d strongly encourage you to check it out.

One of their text oriented visualization techniques is the word tree, which provides a kind of visual concordance for free text. This example of the KJV text of Genesis is a good illustration: type a word in the search box at the top and hit return, and you can see all the phrases that start with that word. You can also turn it around and find phrases ending with a word, and sort by frequency. James Tauber has also used the word tree technique for visualizing NT Greek nominal suffixes.

I found a new use for word trees today, in reviewing titles for the Composite Gospel Index (CGI). One motivation for creating the CGI a few years back was to make it easier to get an overview of the combined content of the four Gospels. Pericope titles are meant to help with this by effectively summarizing the content of a single story, and i deliberately tried to regularize their content. In particular, i wanted as many as made sense to start like “Jesus …”, to try to show the commonality: “Jesus teaches about …”, “Jesus heals …”, “Jesus tells the parable of …”, etc.

Word trees are a perfect tool for data like this, because they make it easy to find phrases that start the same. Conversely, they tend to visually isolate phrases that start the same but then end differently. I’ve created a word tree for titles from CGI pericopes (unfortunately, i haven’t figured out how to embed the visualization live here in my blog: WordPress keeps eating the script element). The input data to word trees are normally free text, but in my case each title is a complete unit: so i just appended special tokens +start+ and +end+ to each one, making the input data look like this (except that, as viewed raw on the site, it’s all wrapped and hence not so readable).

+START+ Jesus is the Word +END+
+START+ God became a human being +END+
+START+ Jesus’ ancestry back to Adam +END+
+START+ Jesus’ ancestry from Abraham +END+
+START+ Luke’s purpose in writing +END+
+START+ The angel Gabriel promises the birth of John to Zechariah +END+

etc., for all 355 pericopes.

So if you enter “+start+ jesus” in the search box (or just click on Jesus in the default view), you’ll see the various titles that start with the word Jesus (255 of 355, or 72%: punctuation becomes a separate token, so a few starting with “Jesus’ …” aren’t included). This works even better sorted by frequency: here you can clearly see the most frequent pericope title is “Jesus teaches …”, and clicking on “teaches” narrows the view further (which you pretty much have to do to see the details: results over 30 or 40 aren’t really visible). One advantage of this representation is that it gives you some help in knowing what to explore (in user interface terminology, an affordance). Though i can’t see all the details without zooming in, i can see a significant cluster of titles starting with “Jesus warns”, and if that’s interesting, i can click on “warns” to zoom in and see those 18 titles.

This last case also points out a benefit i hadn’t previously considered, which is consistency checking (finally getting to the main topic of this post). Looking at the frequency-sorted suffixes for “+start+ Jesus warns”, i see a large group under “against”, and a number under “about”, but also a single instance, “Jesus warns of coming judgment”. Because the third word is “of” rather than “about”, it stands apart from the other instances which really share the same concept. This could just as easily be re-worded “Jesus warns about coming judgement”, and made more consistent with other similar pericopes. Given my goal of consistency (in order to enable just these kinds of visualizations!), it’s really useful to identify cases like this, where a minor revision retains the meaning but also makes the data more consistent. The word tree visualization made it easy to enter “+start+ John” and find the one case where, instead of “John the Baptist “, i just put “John baptizes Jesus.”

What would be really great would be to turn this from a visualization into a navigation system, so once i’ve drilled down to “Jesus warns against …”, then i could select a title and actually view the pericope text. That’s beyond the scope of Many Eye’s toolkit, but something i expect to be working on in the future.

I’ve finally got the slides up from my talks.

• The Zoomable Bible. Abstract: Information visualization is an established computer technique for providing rich, typically interactive, visual presentations of complex multivariate data. While increased computing power has made information visualization more common, our interfaces for navigating and browsing the Bible are still largely linear adaptations of traditional print forms. New interface paradigms (like Apple’s iPhone and Microsoft’s SeaDragon technology) can present large amounts of information on a traditionally-sized computer display though the use of Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs). This presentation will overview existing tools, applications, and principles for ZUIs and other visualizations, and explore some novel interfaces that give higher-level views of Biblical content.
• Bibleref: a Microformat for Bible References. Abstract: Microformats are “a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards” (see http://microformats.org) that capture small but important bits of information on web pages. Bibleref is a proposed microformat for identifying Bible references that are embedded in blog posts and other web content. Broad use of bibleref would enable search engines, content aggregators, and other automated tools to correctly label the references so they’re more easily searchable. This presentation will explain why bibleref is needed, explore the technical specifics, and discuss how to promote broader adoption.

They’re not fully linked into the navigation structure of SemanticBible yet, but the direct URLs linked above (which i gave in the talk) work fine. I’ll probably also tweak the content a bit (i really need some screenshots for the Zoomable Bible talk), but i wanted to get the official version out without more delay. There are lots of links embedded in the presentations, especially the resources at the end of the Zoomable Bible talk, so look for blue text.

If you’re curious, i’ve created these with Dave Raggett’s Slidy program (see this previous post). Editing (X)HTML content for these by hand is still a little clunky (though i’ve gotten better at it), and it would be nice to have a WYSIWYG interface (i did lots of edit -> save -> switch to browser -> reload -> view cycles: it’s quick, but still painful). But the big payoff for me is that the result (unlike PowerPoint) is really a first-class citizen of the web. For example, all the content gets indexed by the search engines, you can link into the presentations (each page has an ID), and not only can i talk about web markup, i can illustrate the point in the body of the presentation itself (view the source of the Bibleref talk for examples). Yes, you can publish PowerPoint on the web, but that’s it’s own special challenge, which is why nobody does it: they just post .ppt files, which are largely opaque to web tools. The newer version of Slidy also improves browser compatibility: these presentations mostly work fine under IE (though you don’t get the footer).

• programming in C# (i’ve been spoiled by Python)
• Using Visual Studio as an IDE, including integration with MySQL databases
• Basics of 2D graphics
• Layout algorithms for treemaps (major kudos to the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab for not only pioneering this area, but even providing open source implementations for people like me to learn from)
• Using the excellent (but rich and hence challenging) Piccolo 2D toolkit for building zoomable user interfaces (also from the UMd HCIL group)
• loading up a variety of Bible data (since visualization requires something to visualize!)

I also have a separate presentation about Bibleref: a Microformat for Bible References, and some related recent developments at Logos that will help make the world of on-line information about the Bible more searchable and usable than ever before. You’ll learn more at the conference about some of our plans in this area.

There will also be time Friday night for “birds of a feather” sessions to informally gather people around topics of common interest. I’m hoping to bring together people to talk about developing common naming conventions for people and places in the Bible. If you’ve been following my posts on the Bible Knowledgebase, you know an essential part of this work is simply identifying and disambiguating named people and places: which Judah, or Zechariah, or Gaius, or Jabneel, is which? I think some simple agreement on identifiers, and principles for constructing them, would make sharing such data much easier, and Logos is prepared to start by sharing our own sets of identifiers. So be sure to find me there if you’d like to talk more about how to make this happen. (By the way, i was tickled to see that my post on the most important person in the Bible was #7 in Logos’s list of the Top Ten Blog Posts for 2007 (most viewed)).

As i told one of the speakers in an email earlier today, i’m feeling a little giddy about what a great conference this promises to be. BibleTech, and the interesting and diverse group of people who are coming, really encompasses all the things that brought me to Logos in the first place, and that define my current professional endeavors as well as my personal interests.

It’s not too late! Come join us this Friday and Saturday at the SeaTac Hilton in Seattle (registration details).

They’ve just released their December edition, which includes my article on Building the Semantic Bible.

Hard-core semantic geeks will be interested to know that:

• they’re annotating their articles with semantic meta-data, which you can view here in what looks like a Simile-derived viewer. Each article also gets linked to RDF data. However …
• in what may be a telling point about the whole Semantic Web enterprise, their meta-data production seems to lag a bit. So there isn’t any for my article yet :-/

I use this all the time for my blog posts: as in this recent example, rather than digressing to explain terms like Python and XPath, i just link these terms to their associated Wikipedia articles. Those who know what those terms mean don’t need to follow the links: those who don’t can go find out, if they choose to, or just plow ahead if they don’t want to bother. This hypertext writing style has become much more common in the last decade (thanks in part to the popularity of blogs), and has even spawned new approaches to written communication, like wikis and hypertext fiction.

Once you’ve begun writing (and reading!) hypertext like this, you don’t want to go back: it’s so much more useful to readers to have the additional resources integrated directly into the text. This leads naturally to hyperlinking other kinds of text: for example, i don’t ever write a Bible reference like Luke 11:2-4 without a hyperlink to the verse itself, usually in the English Standard Version (and if you write Bible references like this, you should go look at the bibleref page to see the right way to create these links!).

That’s all background to a realization i had this morning. I was chatting with Dr. Peter Flint, who directs the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute at Trinity Western University, about my work on the Bible Knowledgebase. Dr. Flint gave an excellent talk in the Logos Lecture series last night about his work on the scrolls, and he visited the office today to talk about other things we’re doing. He was reflecting on how, as a professor, he often provides Wikipedia links for his students as additional on-line resources, and wondered whether the Bible Knowledgebase might someday function that way.

In fact, you can use Libronix that way now, with a little knowledge about keylinks and resources. Here are some sample links (which naturally require that you have Libronix installed locally):

• Biblical People data for Simon Peter (as opposed to Simon from Luke 2:25). Since these Biblical People pages are disambiguated, and include links to Bible passages and related family members, they’re useful “hubs” for starting a study on an individual.
• Link targets as text: libronixdls://report|name=ReportBiblicalPeople|page=ID%3APeter-1 and libronixdls://report|name=ReportBiblicalPeople|page=ID%3ASimeon2-1
• Look up the English term “grace” in your default English dictionary (check your settings under Tools > Options > Keylink, for Data Type = English: by default, it’s probably the Merriam-Webster dictionary).
• Link text: libronixdls://keylink|ref=[en]English:Grace
• Look up the English term “grace” in the New Bible Dictionary.
• Link text: libronixdls://keylink|ref=[en]English:Grace|res=LLS:NBD
• and of course you can link to Bible passages, like this Libronix link to Luke 2:25 in the NIV.
• Link text: libronixdls://keylink|ref=[en]bible:Luke.2.25|res=LLS:NIV

If you’re publishing your own content (like a blog, web page, or wiki) and your readers might be Libronix users, this can make it very easy for them to get to the data you have in mind, enriching the value of your content, and making your readers happier at the same time! You can put Libronix links in MS Word documents as well. See this page on the Logos blog for more information about hyperlinks to Libronix, and about using a double-link style to combine web links with Libronix links. (note: I use “libronixdls://” instead of simply “libronixdls:” because otherwise WordPress mangles the reference: your mileage may vary, but in general either should work.)

(Disclaimer: there’s significant controversy in the academic community about the appropriate role of secondary sources like Wikipedia. While i’m not trying to open that worm-filled can, there’s no question that, as background resources, Wikipedia and other on-line content has changed the nature of information and education.)

• “So, Brothers”: Pauline Use of the Vocative (with Steve Runge)
• Integrating Greek and English Digital Resources

Both talks were well-received, and i especially enjoyed the opportunity to work and present with Steve, and to hang out with some of my Logos colleagues that i don’t see around the office much.