• 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.

The critical factoids:

• the estimated number of human hours of thought that have gone into Wikipedia: 100 million
• the estimated number of hours spent watching television: “Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. “
• the simple math: “that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.”

Wow.

I have similar feelings. As more and more of my digital snail trail winds up “out there”, it’s less clear what should live on my own home page, and also less clear that others will want to visit it, given how much else is now “out there”. I started a personal web site seanboisen.com, because i got tired of having bits of personal identity scattered around. I wanted to have one place that i controlled where i could link to my own information (without getting trapped inside one of the many walled gardens like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). But it takes work (so it’s not complete), and i’m not completely happy with the result (but haven’t found the time to make it better). And despite my own semantic neatnik tendencies to ensure everything has a proper URI for reference, if you want to know something about me, you’re just as likely to use some variant of googling my name, and just as likely to find what you want that way.

My blog is where i share more transient thoughts: but, as noted in several comments to Zeldman’s post, blog fatigue sets in after a while, and it’s hard to keep up the pace. I still occasionally post things to SemanticBible that i hope will have lasting value, though these days that’s mostly slides from presentations. I haven’t gotten into Twitter (though Patrick keeps encouraging me) because i’m not sure i’m ready for that velocity or volume of activity. If anything, i’d like to turn down the volume and slow down the pace, not jack it up. As the Preacher said

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing. (Eccl 1:8, ESV)

Every new involvement with a social networking site raises these issues again: where does my digital identity live? (the latest for me is Twine: i have some beta invitations, email me if you want one)

I had a great time presenting at LinuxFest Northwest 2008 this past weekend. I arrived a bit early at my designated room, to find the previous presenter sitting at a table with a laptop and an audience of two huddled around: that didn’t fill me with confidence!

But as the appointed time arrived, people streamed in, and i wound up with an enthusiastic sitting-room-only audience of about 30 people (after all the chairs were filled, a few latecomers sat on the floor). Since these were mostly programmers and i only had an hour, we didn’t go too deep into Natural Language Processing. But judging from the questions and comments afterwards, i believe i attained my main goal of introducing people to the Natural Language Processing Toolkit (NLTK) (see these previous posts) and encouraging them to try it out for themselves.
The presentation slides are up on SemanticBible so you can take a look: they should be largely self-explanatory (though of course lacking the witty side-comments and my winning smile).

That was all the time i had for the first day of the conference, but i went back for more on Sunday. Attendance was quite a bit lighter, but i had a chance to talk with some others folks about the XO laptop (other previous posts). I finally got mine a couple of weeks ago, and it’s really an amazing machine. Since it’s an open platform, i’m actively considering what it might take to develop a simple Bible reader application for it.

I also picked up a couple of the latest Linux distributions, and now have Ubuntu 8.04 (”Hardy Heron“: why do they use these goofy names!) installed and running happily on an older Pentium 4 with 512Mb RAM that i recently scored. It’s really amazing how much functionality the open source community provides (though i have to repeat a snarky comment from one of my colleagues this morning: “The only sense in which Linux is free is if your time is worth nothing”). That said, it didn’t take much time at all to get things running, though of course it’s always the maintenance tail that bites you, no matter who provides your OS.

• The Web has drastically changed the economics of newspaper publication, as more and more services become available for free (Carr)
• Unbundling is a given: what parts of the newspaper industry are worth saving? (Shirkey)
• Investigative journalism is the part that the Free Internet Economy can’t necessarily replace (Shirkey)

Newspapers aside, much of this discussion is also relevant to Biblical studies, particularly the academic market for seminary-level textbooks. Like the traditional newspaper, academic publication currently bundles together a variety of services:

• Overview and orientation to a subject, which requires enough breadth and experience in the field to know which parts to select
• Selection, synthesis, and summary of existing research, which takes a broad range of previously published information and extracts the most relevant parts for students. This also involves filtering out information that’s out-of-date or biased (or perhaps contrary to the author’s tastes)
• Original research by a textbook author that can’t be found elsewhere, as well as their own opinions and perspectives
• Instructional design: the best textbooks organize their material in a way to make it easier to learn, using educational best-practices like defined learning objectives and advanced organizers

Traditional textbooks aren’t likely to go away any time soon (though the market has experienced many of the same economic pressures as the newspaper industry). Some of the services described above are moving to the web and becoming free goods: for example, Wikipedia now provides overview services for a wide variety of subjects, despite intense discouragement from much of the teaching profession.

At the same time, the distance education field has long stressed that specialization of roles provides many of the same benefits for the educational industry as for manufacturing and other activities. In particular, the scholar who is expert in a field and producing original research may not be the best choice for instructional design.

If you take as a given that academic publishing must change to meet the new realities of the Internet economy (i do), which parts will become essentially free goods, and which parts will continue to require a high level of professional competence. Even more importantly, assuming some of these services can’t be easily replaced, what are the new economic models that will provide the required compensation for them?

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).

Some of the main points discussed include:

• How advances in technology have brought production within the reach of a much larger group of people than ever before
• “Ideagoras”, about corporate outsourcing of R&D to bring a much larger pool of ideas to bear on challenging problems
• “Prosumers”: how customers want to hack, not just passively consume, products
• How sharing scientific knowledge accelerates progress
• Open, participative platforms that enable those outside an enterprise to build on its products
• Wikis in the workplace

While the success of applications like Wikipedia may prove hard to reproduce, it’s clear that they represent some fundamental changes to how knowledge is developed and shared.

Do churches have a user interface? Well, not exactly, but a recent survey conducted by Lifeway Research found that unchurched people preferred church buildings that resemble a medieval cathedral over more contemporary styles, by a ratio of 2-to-1. The study was sponsored by a group of firms that develop church facilities, and found the preference was especially strong among those ages 25-34.

Here’s one conjecture about their finding: systems and devices that have familiar features also tend to be more usable. There are lots of ways you might imagine to control the direction or transmission of a car: but most people have learned to use steering wheels and console-based shifters, and consequently you can get into most any car with no confusion about how to operate it. (in UI design, these features are called affordances) I suspect many people prefer Gothic-style buildings, not because they work better, but simply because they present a more familiar user interface that matches their expectations of how the outside of a church “works”. Lifeway’s Ed Stetzer points out in the article that, just because unchurched people say they prefer a particular architectural style, that doesn’t mean they’re any more likely to actually attend such a church.

(Hat tip: DJ Chuang at Leadership Network)

Yours truly will be presenting Saturday from 11-12:30 in Haskell 204 on Natural Language Processing in Python using NLTK. Basically, i’ll be explaining and showing how some really great (and sophisticated) tools for processing language that used to be the exclusive province of PhDs in Computational Linguistics are now within reach of ordinary mortals (as long as those mortals know some Python: otherwise you’ll mostly be hearing about why you should learn Python!). I’m hoping it will also be a good introduction to what natural language processing is all about, and why programmers might care.

If NLP isn’t your thing, don’t tell me and burst my bubble, but there are still dozens of other really interesting sounding talks (including a couple in my timeslot that i’d go to if i were otherwise occupied!). I’m really looking forward to the weekend: come find me if you’re there! Al Castle also has a LFNW post on his blog (with a bit more background).

(i expect to post slides from my talk on the web afterwards, so even if you can’t come you can get some of the information.)

Just a few of the factors that make this so hard:

• Computers and the web have become sales channels.
• I bought a relatively inexpensive HP from Circuit City, a fine machine for his requirements. But it comes loaded with startup links that attempt to sell you more software.
• He uses Yahoo Mail to read email through a browser: but the browser window is cluttered with branding and advertisements that make it challenging to visually parse the page and differentiate his content from what they’re trying to sell him.
• Constant change. The browser came preloaded with the Yahoo Toolbar, and almost as soon as he started using it, they wanted to push an update to him. This generates more dialog boxes he’s never seen before, more questions he doesn’t know the answer to (and doesn’t even care about), all for some feature he’s never even used! I uninstalled the toolbar right away.
• Layer upon layer of complexity and foreign concepts: the desktop and folder metaphor, overlapping windows, menus, toolbars, system trays, special function keys, the list goes on and on.
• Overcrowding: the economics of the mainstream computer market favors more, newer features. That means cramming more keys on the keyboard (with smaller labels that are hard for seniors to read), more icons on the desktop so functionality is “at your fingertips” (whether you need it or not), and cluttered interfaces.

Certainly those of us with professions in IT, or even doing office work, need newer technology that’s extensible. But there’s an enormous number of folks who really just need simple access to the web and email, without all the complexities of managing their technology refresh, and that’s about it. These aren’t the people that computer or software makers target (they’re not good candidates for upgrade sales, for one thing), but there’s a real opportunity there.