An anthology of interesting posts that passed through my reader this week:

• Dostoevsky’s 1984 Saved Him from Our Brave New World (from John Dyer at Don’t Eat the Fruit): reflections from education and learning author Neil Postman on Orwell and Huxley’s contrasting views on information overload.

“The amount of information we intake overshadows what little significant information we do intake.”

• Who Cares About Raw Data? (from Jesse at OpenScriptures): even though it may not be immediately apparent to end-users, data is the lifeblood of applications (a frequent Blogos theme), so it matters a lot.
• On the horizon: Google Wave (from Mark Hoffman at Biblical Studies and Technological Tools). I agree with Mark that Google Wave (which isn’t quite released yet) bears watching as a really interesting new development for collaboration and communication.

A number of bibliobloggers have been helping Oxford University Press advertise their new on-line website, Oxford Biblical Studies Online, with a free-access pass good through the end of May (I learned of it through my colleague Mike Heiser’s blog). Since i wasn’t one of them i can give an honest evaluation of the time i spent perusing their site. 

Their site offers an integrated tool for accessing

• Six different Bibles, along with concordances and the Oxford Bible Commentary
• Reference tools that span nine different sources (The Oxford Companion to the Bible, Oxford Bible Atlas, Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, etc.)
• A collection of about 1000 images and maps.

Whether this is helpful to you will be strongly determined by whether you value Oxford’s resources, of course: this is a walled (publisher) garden in that respect. But in my opinion (and those of real scholars as well) there’s a lot of very good material here. They provide an integrated search feature so you can search by keyword across all the reference works, Bible texts, and image resources. You can also limit that search by some general domains like Archaeology, Geography, Material Culture, etc.: that’s a nice way to make the search results a little more manageable in size. 

There’s also a timeline feature, with links to the reference works (like Oxford History of the Biblical World and Companion to the Bible). I found that an interesting way to navigate to relevant information: you can find an item in the timeline (”Manasseh is king of Judah”) and then follow a link to an article on Manasseh.This kind of interface, where you can get to new information without first having to know exactly what you’re looking for, is important for those who aren’t already specialists in the domain of Biblical studies. 

One very helpful feature is that dictionary-type articles have some number of terms hyperlinked: Bible references, of course, but also maps and other articles. So the article on Manasseh links to articles on Chronicles, Deuteronomic History, Ephraim (for the “other” Manasseh: the article combines both), and others. These links are also displayed in a sidebar, not just embedded in the text. This feature is limited somewhat, though, by the fact that the links are only within the current reference. What would make this feature really useful would be to link across their collection, so you could also easily get to e.g. the Bible Dictionary article on Ephraim. Of course, you can do that by going back to the search interface, but that’s some added friction. Also, it would appear that at least some of the links were automatically generated: the prose about Manasseh (son of Joseph the patriarch) links to “Joseph (Husband of Mary)”. 

I found a few things i didn’t like as well. While the “unbundled” content of the reference tools is available, in some cases (for example, the Companion to the Bible) i couldn’t figure out a way to actually read the books as books: i could only get to them as disembodied search results. I suppose that’s all right for strict reference purposes, since search is probably the normal way you’d access them. But since some other volumes (like the Illustrated History of the Bible) can be read sequentially, i don’t quite understand why this isn’t possible for all of them. Another mild annoyance: while they helpfully link Bible references to their text, they only put the chapter and verse in the hyperlink, like this:

Amos 9: 9        

In addition to looking a little weird, it also makes for a smaller (and therefore harder to hit) mouse target. I can understand doing this in a list of references where the book name isn’t repeated: but where the book is adjacent in the text, i don’t see the rationale. I also noticed that some features of the site (like Look It Up) didn’t seem to work quite right with Google Chrome.

These are pretty mild complaints, however. Overall, i’d say there’s a lot of very valuable information available here. The annual subscription price of $295 would seem to best fit serious professional users, however. I’d encourage you to take advantage of the free trial period and investigate it for yourself. 

[This seems like as good an opportunity as any to point out that i followed the good example of my colleague Rick Brannan and created a Disclosures page, to avoid any potential confusion about my financial relationship to the things i write about. In this context, full disclosure: i work for a company that is partially in competition with Oxford's site. ]

I’m not in the habit of posting YouTube videos here, but this one seemed like a great illustration of an important lesson. Have a look first before reading on below, or the rest won’t make sense.

Susan Boyle

If i’m honest,  i’d have to admit my first reactions to seeing this rather plain, unemployed middle-aged woman who lives alone in a small village in England were no different than many in the audience (of course, the producers of the show played up this angle a bit). I couldn’t help thinking of 1 Sam 16:7 and how many people i walk by each day who look like nothing on the outside but have a tremendous gift inside, if only i could perceive it.

Our brains are wired to work this way: we make thousands of quick judgments throughout the day based on what we see, and we’d have a hard time coping with the complexity of life without this ability. But precisely because of this tendency, we need to constantly guard against persisting in these perceptions, when instead we should take the time to listen.

[hat tip to my sister-in-law Doreen for passing this along to us: thanks a lot for making us cry first thing in the day!]

FutureS with an ’s’: we don’t know what will happen, but we can imagine a range of possibilities within the cone of plausibility. The farther out you go, the broader the range of possibilities. Kevin Kelly (Wired magazine): the problem with Christianity is that every generation has expected Jesus to return, so they don’t look beyond their generation to think about what Christianity will look like in 1000 years (see http://qideas.org/shorts/)

Method: The S-Curve – early adoption, followed by loss of interest, then mass adoption.

Method: Framing – set scope and focus, adjust attitudes, set objectives.

Method: Scanning. Map the system.

Method: Forecasting. Look at drivers and uncertainties. Generate and prioritize ideas.

Method: STEEP. Look at what’s happening in Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political arenas.

Method: Visioning. What are the implications of our forecasts? Challenge assumptions. Think big.

Method: Planning. Think strategically about what future you want, and develop options for it.

Method: Acting. Communicate results, create an action agenda, and develop strategic thinking.

Some possible future scenarios:

• the Digitally Illuminated Bible. A convergence of factors: Kindle/iPhone, BibleTech conference, Green Movement. What if paper is outlawed: what happens to Bible publication?
• the Bible as Service Oriented Architecture. Can we make our meta-aids and interpretations so good that the text itself effectively disappears?
• the Bible as a Digitally Sacred Cow. What if the Great Firewall of China makes the Bible unavailable online?

Some baseline scenarios for building our own scenarios:

• in 2040: Human population will hit 8B, and then decline for the first time ever. Average age will be 50/60 years old. 80% of humans will live in cities. China will overtake the US economy. 90% of humanity connected via the internet. True AI will be achieved. Seat of Christianity is NOT the US (today, half of S. Korea is Christian). Read Jesus in Beijing.

Other resources:

• Thinking about the Future (Peter Bishop and Andy Hines)
• Foundations of Futures Studies (Wendell Bell)

Our heritage as Christians includes visual elements: stained glass, liturgical colors, the sacraments as visible signs, church architecture, sermon illustrations. Many of these were about contextualization.

Sermon Painting 101: replace every place where you’d have a bullet point with an image. Communion is a great example of a five-sense experience. Sermon painting is not for everyone: it takes more time to prepare, and it’s harder to preach this way.

Some good resources for images: stock.xchng, Wikimedia Commons, Google Images. iStockPhoto is a good source if you have to pay. There are also personal resources: your friends might have images, or be able to track things down for you. Join the “Sermon Painting” group on Facebook. You can use open source tools for the image editing.

Applying Anthony Kenny’s method from Stylometric Study of the New Testament to the Greek Septuagint. Basic approach: identify some number of (boolean) features, and count them. Kenny used 99 features from the Friberg morphology. The subset of interest here: part of speech, aggregated case, number, gender counts, and verb tense/voice/mood.

First problem: comparing by chapters doesn’t provide consistently-sized segments of text. Kenny breaks text into 50-word chunks. [numerous graphs and charts follow] Conclusion: there are some definite concentrations of future tense verbs that don’t obey the expected statistical properties of a binomial distribution.

Spoke last year about creating trees: focus this year on how to use the trees. Doing tree alignment to provide a tool to support translation: just released the print version of a new Chinese NT. Once you’ve done tree alignment, you can use that as a metric of how dynamic a translation is: the higher the links, the less word-for-word. This linked data supports other applications.

Translation memory is typically word-based: with aligned trees, it can be chunk-based (word, phrase, or clause) or relation-based (pairs of words in head-modifier relations).  This translation memory gives translators access to how particular phrases have previously been translated, and concordances for how they’re used in their context.

Probabilistic Hebrew synonym finder: existing synonym dictionaries are incomplete, and the whole notion of synonym is continuous, not discrete. Two words are synonymous when their semantic space overlaps. The aligned trees define an equivalency space: all the words that are used to translate a word are semanticly similar. Degree of synonymy is basically the intersection of the sets divided by the union of the sets, scored using joint probability.

You can also look for similar verses: those containing clauses which aren’t identical but have more or less the same meaning. Clause-level similarity is the most useful view.

Currently there’s a huge confusion in the church between “on-line” and “in-person”. But 2Cor 12.9 makes more sense in community. Technology often tends to dimish community and true interaction. Books:

• God-ol-o-gy (Christian George)
• Don’t Waste Your Life (John Piper)
• The Fine Line (Kary Oberbrunner)

1Pet 4.10: using our gifts to serve. In the holistic worldview, the use of technology is a spiritual practice: what we believe is defined by what i do. “a-musement” = no thinking?! We should find ways to glorify God through our use of technology and enjoy Him in the process.

The background of this talk: Zack Hubert’s talk from the last BibleTech. Zack developed a very useful web site which ultimately failed because he couldn’t maintain it, and couldn’t get other developers to pitch in and help.

The vision: an open web repository for integrated scriptural data and a platform for building applications of scripture (OpenScriptures.org). What kinds of data? Manuscripts, translations, versification systems, morphosyntactic parsings, user tags/annotations/cross-references. But it takes a lot of effort to get started with all this data, each of which is typically in its own format, and unlinked to other data.

Linked data principles (from timbl):

• use URIs as names for things
• use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names
• provide useful information behind the URIs
• and links to other URIs so they can discover more things

“… the more things you have to connect together, the more powerful it is.” Can we connect things together through a unified manuscript that links together semantic units (words, phrases, clauses)?

Manuscript unification: normalize a manuscript (lowercase and remove diacritics: no spelling normalization yet), insert and save links to the unified manuscript. Then for additional manuscripts, normalize, merge links, and save them. Now you’ve got all the attested readings linked together. This unified manuscript now has an automated critical apparatus. [demo here of the manuscript comparator]

Potential applications include:

• translation comparator (can also help with the versification problem)
• comprehensive concordance
• translation-independent cross-references (e.g. NT quotations of the OT)
• interlinear/bilingual editions

You can automatically link manuscripts in the same language, but not different languages. Use collective intelligence to capture semantic linking between languages. Use the “games with a purpose” (GWAP) approach to gather links.

Copyright is a major challenge: you can’t link texts together if you can’t access them, and you can’t share them if they’re not open. Recently MorphGNT texts have been taken down from several sites because they’re not freely sharable. If the key benefit is connections between data, then data (including texts) should be more valuable if they’re sharable and connected. One solution: an Open Scriptures Platform that connects content owners, developers, and end-users. Passionate developers could build applications based on content licensed to Open Scriptures (as a proxy), and Open Scriptures makes sure than end-users provide revenue to content owners.

Good design requires knowing your audience and thinking hard. Designing a remarkable product means you’ve solved most of your marketing problem: people want to know about remarkable things.

How much do people actually read? A scatterplot at useit.com shows duration of visit compared to words on the page: the more words, the lower the percentage of words that actually get read. So keep your copy short, simple, and scannable. Check out typography for lawyers for some very useful data: also i love typography.

Question: how do you decide when to innovate in UI design rather than following a standard?

[he had an interesting iphone app for controlling the presentation!]