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)?

… 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)

In our discussions, the question arose: what’s the one book you’d recommend we read to learn more about distance education? I don’t have an authoritative answer, since i haven’t kept up with the literature for several years now: probably there are better resources now that I’m not familiar with. But here’s my answer anyway, in case it’s helpful to others:

At the top of my list would be Distance Education: A Systems View by Michael Moore (not, not that Michael Moore). Chapter 5 is now made mostly irrelevant by the Internet, but otherwise it’s a good overview of the wide variety of issues that go beyond how you distribute content.

There are a few other titles, all with good content, though perhaps more academic and not as easy to read, or less broad.

• Learning and Teaching in Distance Education (Otto Peters) is by one of the pioneers in the field (and therefore not completely up to date). My recollection is it focused more on the learning and teaching sides of the process, with less about administration and larger issues
• Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media (John Daniel) focuses more on the role of technology in education, and has a good chapter on the economics involved.

Though it’s not about distance education per se, i’d also have to include Brain Rules by John Medina. This is a very approachable overview of some important findings in brain science and their practical application to every day life: why you should not talk on your cell phone while driving, how we remember and learn, the myth of multi-tasking, and so forth. It’s both engaging and good science, and i’d make it required reading for every professor/pastor/teacher.

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

Follow the link above for the details (they’re worth reading), but here’s an abbreviated outline:

1. “Find a single issue in the church today that concerns you personally.”
2. “Find a single historical crux—that is, a single document, single event, single person’s idea, etc.—from church history in which some version of that same issue emerges …”
3. “Study that historical crux (document, event, person’s idea, etc.) by reading a balanced bibliography of primary and secondary sources …”
4. Write a paper addressing the following three points:
   1. Describe your contemporary issue in detail, “… as if you were writing a brief editorial article for Christianity Today.”
   2. “… write a summary/analysis/interpretation of how that issue played out at your chosen historical crux.” (several important additional details here)
   3. Write a conclusion in “your Christianity Today editorial style”.

Does it seem crazy to suggest you write a paper if you’re not required to by some formal academic program?!? Maybe, but current research in learning theory strongly suggests you learn concepts much better when you write about them — writing for learning. So it’s not really about a grade for a course, it’s about your personal education (e.g. discipleship) in  what it means to follow Jesus today, based on knowing more about what’s happened in church history. This kind of writing is one of the reasons i blog: things simply stick better in my head when i take a little time to think them through and communicate them in writing. So you could always blog your response (if so, give it some distinctive tag like christianhistory so it’s more findable).

“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.

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).

• Technology in the Bible provides an overview, including some metaphors and domain-level groupings (medicine, agriculture, military, etc.). I found his collection on God’s use of technology particularly interesting.
• Biblical References to Technology catalogs many verses with a brief comment on the technology involved.

If you have Logos 4, you can easily play along using the Biblical Things feature (brief tutorial video), which provides a comprehensive list of references for all the physical, depictable artifacts of technology (though not more abstract things like metal refining techniques).

This kind of broad study across the whole of Scripture can provide new perspectives on things that, in their immediate context, often go right by us.

• Biblical People I (overview) and Biblical People II (people diagrams)
• Biblical Places: overview, maps, dynamic maps
• Biblical Things

Logos 4 sports an entirely new interface to make it easier than ever to find what you’re looking for and keep your study space organized and effective. There’s a wealth of new, visually oriented resources, and better controls for working through the enormous space of resources Logos makes available. There’s even an iPhone app for no extra charge!

That’s the marketing view (and i stand behind it). But this means much more to me on a very personal level. It’s been almost 3 years since i came at Logos, and this will be the first time most of my work has seen the light of day. Specifically, Logos 4 contains the work of my colleagues and me in several new areas:

• Biblical People, which organizes information about the 3300 individuals, groups of people, and deities named in the Biblical text. It includes a comprehensive list of references, their family relationships, links to dictionary articles, and links to related items. It also includes family tree and story-based diagrams. And everything is hyperlinked.
• Biblical Places includes all the same kinds of information for 1200 named places from the Bible: cities, regions, even geographic features like rivers and mountains. Along with the data, there are 60 new high-resolution maps commissioned by Logos and covering the major Biblical events, as well as a mega-map that shows all the places together.
• Biblical Things describes the physical objects of the Bible: animals, plants, body parts, clothing, food and drink, and much more, as well as specific items like Noah’s ark and Goliath’s sword and weights and measures. There are more than 1000 objects here, which also bring together thousands of images from across the library.
• There’s also a new collection of high-resolution infographics illustrating different aspects of the Biblical world (and i’m extra proud that the bulk of this work was managed by my wife Donna)
• In additional to regular word search (which is much faster than ever), under the hood is the Libronix Controlled Vocabulary (LCV), working to organize 11,000 different subjects in the Biblical studies literature and coordinating information across the library.

So if you’ve been following my posts on the Bible Knowledgebase … well, now it’s here. I can’t overstate how important i think this is: this is quite literally the first time in the centuries-old history of Biblical studies that this information has been made available in this way. The LCV isn’t quite as visible (yet), but it’s also an important organizing feature that will continue to grow in power going forward.

I hope you’re catching my sense of excitement about these new resources (and this says nothing about all the hard work of my dozens of colleagues in other areas). I hoped i’ve piqued your interest to learn more about Logos 4. It really is a watershed event in Bible software.

Obligatory disclaimer: i work for Logos and highly value what i do there. So i’m not the least bit objective about this. (more detailed disclosures)