{"id":554,"date":"2007-01-13T13:33:35","date_gmt":"2007-01-13T17:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/2007\/01\/13\/bible-mapping-sites\/"},"modified":"2007-01-13T13:56:27","modified_gmt":"2007-01-13T17:56:27","slug":"bible-mapping-sites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/2007\/01\/13\/bible-mapping-sites\/","title":{"rendered":"Bible Mapping Sites"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a title=\"ESV Blog: Google Maps is the New Bible Atlas\" href=\"http:\/\/www.esv.org\/blog\/2007\/01\/biblemap.org\">ESV Blog<\/a> had a post last week about <a title=\"BibleMap.org\" href=\"http:\/\/www.biblemap.org\/\">BibleMap.org<\/a>, a new interactive mapping application that combines the ESV Bible text, a Google Maps display, and articles from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (ISBE). So you can find a passage, click on the hyperlinks for place names, and see a satellite picture of e.g. where Nazareth is actually located (unfortunately, Google can&#8217;t show you what it looked like 2000 years ago!).<br \/>\nOf course, it&#8217;s wonderful that people are making these kinds of applications available: thinking about the place names in the Bible is an essential part of really understanding the context, though i suspect most Bible readers tend to simply gloss over them. This kind of tight integration can help bring the world of the Bible alive to modern readers.<br \/>\nNevertheless, without faulting the creators of this site, i can&#8217;t help but wish for more:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This is a classic example of a <a title=\"Wikipedia: Stovepipe systems\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Stovepipe_system\">stovepipe application<\/a>: while it&#8217;s got a lot of useful data (linking verses to place names, place names to lat-longs, and place names to ISBE articles), all of that data is embedded in the application (the website) itself. That&#8217;s fine if all you want is to use it, but not if you want to <em>re-<\/em>use it. If instead there were a web service behind this, there could be multiple versions of this same basic capability, without having to re-engineer the basic data. I&#8217;ve ridden the hobby horse of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.semanticbible.com\/blogos\/2004\/04\/24.html#a306\">data<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.semanticbible.com\/blogos\/2005\/09\/01.html#a412\">before<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.semanticbible.com\/blogos\/stories\/semanticBible\/semantUseCases.html\">applications<\/a> before, and this is a basic tenet of <a title=\"O'Reilly: What is Web 2.0?\" href=\"http:\/\/www.oreillynet.com\/pub\/a\/oreilly\/tim\/news\/2005\/09\/30\/what-is-web-20.html\">Web 2.0 thinking<\/a>. The most recent version of New Testament Names has <a href=\"http:\/\/bbs.keyhole.com\/ubb\/showthreaded.php\/Cat\/0\/Number\/517264\">some Google Earth data<\/a> (which i used for <a title=\"Google Map of Miletus\" href=\"http:\/\/www.semanticbible.com\/other\/presentations\/2006-sbl\/Weaving.xhtml#(10)\">this map<\/a> in my SBL presentation) for just this reason, though (like BibleMap.org) it&#8217;s not complete.<\/li>\n<li>I can easily guess why they chose the ISBE: it&#8217;s the most comprehensive Bible reference work in the public domain. But it&#8217;s not the most up-to-date (if it were, it probably wouldn&#8217;t be in the public domain!), and the depth of information sometimes goes well beyond what casual readers want. Which raises the fundamental question: what&#8217;s the right level of information for a reference like this? Most readers won&#8217;t care about proximity to modern archaeological sites, and would instead rather have basic information like best guesses as to how large a town was, prominent physical features, etc. Much of this information doesn&#8217;t exist in ISBE (or other resources, for that matter).<\/li>\n<li>Once you start down the road of information integration (using hyperlinks or other mechanisms), you hate to stop. Wouldn&#8217;t it be great if the ISBE text itself was also hyperlinked with place names? The first part of the ISBE article on Nazareth reads<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;A town in Galilee, the home of Joseph. and the Virgin Mary, and for about 30 years the scene of the Saviour&#8217;s life (Matthew 2:23; Mark 1:9; Luke 2:39,51; 4:16, etc.). He was therefore called Jesus of Nazareth, although His birthplace was Bethlehem; &#8230;&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Unsurprisingly, definitions for place names typically use <em>other<\/em> place names to put things in context. Without the hyperlinks here, the text becomes a bit of a dead-end.<\/li>\n<li>Their display for <a title=\"ESV: John 1:28\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gnpcb.org\/esv\/search\/?q=John+1%3A28\">John 1:28<\/a> shows a classic example of why simple string matching gets you most, but not quite all, of the way: Bethany isn&#8217;t the same as &#8220;Bethany beyond the Jordan&#8221;. Happily, there are few enough of these cases  in the Bible texts that they can generally be fixed by hand: but having fixed them, that disambiguation becomes another critical piece of data that shouldn&#8217;t be stovepiped.<\/li>\n<li>Viewing a little of the geographic context mostly leaves me wanting more. Back to my example of Nazareth: i&#8217;d like to see additional overlays of other towns (and of course, that&#8217;s specific to the context of a given passage) as well as other features like travel routes and named bodies of water, since showing that town alone doesn&#8217;t tell you much. There&#8217;s also the subtle issue of what&#8217;s the right zoom level: for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gnpcb.org\/esv\/search\/?q=Matthew+4%3A13\">Matt.4.13<\/a>, you&#8217;d want the map to show both Nazareth and Capernaum, rather than being closely focused in on Nazareth alone.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s always easier to critique than to create, i know. My point is simply this: while these early integrations of open tools like Google Maps with Bible study applications are exciting, much more is still possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The ESV Blog had a post last week about BibleMap.org, a new interactive mapping application that combines the ESV Bible text, a Google Maps display, and articles from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (ISBE). So you can find a passage, click on the hyperlinks for place names, and see a satellite picture of e.g. where &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/2007\/01\/13\/bible-mapping-sites\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Bible Mapping Sites<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semanticbible.com\/blogos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}