November 2005 Archives

As mentioned earlier on this blog, Eli and I presented papers at the meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) describing how Logos is moving beyond the word level into syntax of the original languages.

Eli's paper (approx. 350 KB PDF) discusses our approach to issues of syntax in general, using examples from the Andersen-Forbes database to illustrate major points of implementation.

Rick's paper (approx. 1.4 MB PDF) provides information on both Greek syntax datasets that are being worked on and short examples (and screen captures) of how this information can be used.

At the recent Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Philadelphia, George A. Kiraz, president of Gorgias Press, presented a joint project with Logos Bible Software to create an interlinear to the Syriac New Testament in electronic and printed forms. The electronic interlinear will become part of Logos Bible Software and the printed version will be published by Gorgias Press. A team of international scholars have already committed to producing the interlinear in the next three years.

Gorgias Press publishes a number of Syriac Bible resources. For more information on the project, including an overview of the specialized tools Logos built for editing the interlinear, download Dr. Kiraz's PowerPoint presentation (226 KB).

I've briefly discussed searching OpenText.org material at the word level; this post discusses searching at the clause level, with word group level stuff in the mix.

There's even a groovy video of the search I describe so you can see exactly what's going on (see bottom of this article). One take, no cuts. This is done with the current beta version of Logos Bible Software (3.0 Beta 1) and an extra syntax searching component currently in development.

Our blog stats show that we get visitors from all over the world. Just for November, I see visits from Hungary, Israel, Singapore, Bahamas, Denmark, New Zealand, Brazil, Spain, and Japan, to name just a few.

Rick Brannan recently pointed me to a cool new site called Frappr ("Friend Mapper") that's a Google mash-up: it combines Google Maps with group labeling features.

I created a map for Logos Blog readers so we could meet one another. To add yourself, go to the Logos Bible Software Blog map and click "Add Yourself" in the right-hand column. You can add a photo and short message, if desired.

If you get a moment this weekend, stop by and say hello!

The ETS and SBL meetings wrapped up yesterday and the Logos team is heading home (perhaps some will make it back in time for our big Thanksgiving lunch at noon today). It sounds like the meetings were very fruitful, with a great deal of buzz around our current and future products.

For those who weren't able to attend, I thought it would be fun to show off the signage that adorned our booth at both events. Click any of the thumbnails below to pop up a larger version.

In honor of National Bible Week, which is this week, we're sponsoring an essay contest on Logos.com.

You are invited to write and submit a brief essay on Bible study. If we display the essay on the site, you'll receive a $30 book unlock credit. The sign-up form is here.

We've posted 30 essays to date, with a nice variety of themes and perspectives represented. The essays give a flavor of all the different kinds of ministry going on among Logos users. I find this to be a real encouragement amidst the day to day grind; I'll highlight below a couple of my favorite selections (you can read them all in their entirety on the Essays page)...

So, the other day, I had printed out a sentence diagram of Mark 1.16-20 and was evaluating it while making coffee (triple americano, no milk or sugar messing it up) at the Logos espresso machine.

Heidie from accounting walks by. "What's that?" she says. I reply, "Sentence diagrams." "Oh" Heidie says, "it looks sort of like playoff brackets."

I hadn't ever thought of that. But you could use the sentence diagrammer to make playoff brackets for whatever. I hear the NFL season ends in a month or so; now you'll be ready to chart your team's path to the Super Bowl!

(If you have the Sentence Diagramming Addin you can download the file for editing! Just unzip it to "\My Documents\Libronix DLS\SentenceDiagrams".)

Yesterday at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Logos bloggers and Information Architects Rick Brannan and Eli Evans presented our new syntactic databases. (Their presentation was part of a larger session which also included a presentation on how Logos Bible Software is used in the classroom at Moody Graduate School.)

This photo was taken while Eli presented the Andersen-Forbes syntactic database. We were flattered by all the interest and only wish the session had been in a larger room.

If you are with us here in Philadelphia, be sure to check out other Logos-related sessions at AAR/SBL.

Yesterday we announced a new release date for Logos Bible Software for the Mac: Spring 2006. We're confident that the product will be shipping by the time June 21 rolls around, and we know it will be worth the wait.

Work is progressing steadily with no major obstacles, and the application looks great in the current build. Our artist-in-residence (who is a Mac devotee himself) turned out some very nice visuals for the interface so that Logos Bible Software would feel right at home on the Mac.

We get a lot of questions about how to participate in beta testing the Mac product. We'll announce all public beta testing from the Logos for the Mac email list so sign up and stay tuned...

Disclaimer: Screenshots are from the prototype; the interface is subject to small or massive changes before we ship.

I was recently dispatched to Melbourne to visit Frank Andersen and Dean Forbes. One of the things I was assigned to discover — other than what kangaroo chili tastes like* — was the underlying linguistic/textual/grammatical philosophy of the Andersen-Forbes database (hereafter, A-F). Sure, they've marked the entire Hebrew Bible for syntax, but what exactly does that mean?

Thanks to one of our resident book experts (and book developer), Vincent Setterholm, we have launched a series of product guides on the Logos.com website. So far, these guides provide a basic introduction to the categories and sub-categories of books available for Logos Bible Software in the areas of Greek, Hebrew, and Other Ancient Languages. We hope to add additional categories soon.

I think Vincent does a great job of guiding the site visitor through the plethora of Logos tools and texts available for biblical language study.

For example, did you know that we now offer 9 Greek grammars and 8 Hebrew grammars that range from beginning to advanced, learning to reference? Or that we have a growing number of tools for studying Aramaic and Syriac?

These guides help fill a need I mentioned in an earlier post here on the Logos Blog: a need for "...objectively-written guides to books on Logos.com to help our users navigate the 5,000 titles now available for the system, much like a bookstore owner who offers suggestions based not on his own likes and dislikes but based on his extensive knowledge of what's available."

Thanks for leading us around a few aisles of the bookstore, Vincent!

It's been awhile since I've posted about Greek syntax. In the interim, Eli has been regaling us with graph theory and all sorts of other chunky syntactical goodness.

Well, the drought is over.

The "Logos Pre-Pub Machine" has been in high gear for some time now...this week alone we shipped two significant, heavyweight products for biblical language study—Comfort & Barrett's The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts and The Targums—while in the past 10 days we've posted three new prepubs to take their place.

One of these new prepubs breaks new ground for us, and that is the Biblical Counseling Library, posted to the prepub page just yesterday.

What's novel about it is this: it's a thematic collection bringing together 29 books from 20 authors and 10 publishers...all on subjects related to biblical counseling. We've done lots of author collections, publisher collections, and so on...but not really a large, thematic collection like this.

Some of the titles included are breakout bestsellers (e.g., I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Finishing Strong) while others are evergreen category standards (e.g., Competent to Counsel and Inside Out). Authors include Jay E. Adams, Larry Crabb, Elizabeth George, Steve Farrar, Steve Gallagher, Jerry Bridges and Francis Schaeffer. Publishers represented include Tyndale, Navpress, Zondervan, Multnomah, and Harvest House.

This collection is discounted 61% off the list prices of the 29 books included. Any pastor or layperson who counsels others—whether professionally or in an informal way—would do well to add them to their digital library.

You heard about it here first...the NewsWire email hasn't yet been sent. More tools for ministry...let the Pre-Pub Machine roll on!

http://blog.logos.com/archives/2005/11/syntax_andersen.html Consider the simple graph to the right. A graph, you will recall, is a diagram made up of labels and lines. This particular graph has some further special characteristics: (1) This is a directed graph, because the lines are arrows that indicate which labels are “on top,” so to speak; if this were a corporate organization chart, the arrows would always point from manager to employee. (2) This graph is acyclic, which is a fancy word meaning “no cycles,” which is a fancy way of saying that if you follow the arrows in the direction they are pointing, you will never visit the same label twice. Put another way, if no matter where you start, you will eventually reach the end. (3) This particular graph is a tree, because it has exactly one topmost label (the CEO in our org chart), and each label has one and only one arrow that points to it. That is, each employee has only one boss — wouldn’t that be nice?

I think that I shall never see
a graph as lovely as a tree.

Why did we choose graphs to represent syntax instead of something else? Short answer: Because.

The long answer, however, is much more interesting: Because every method of graphically showing the syntactic form of a sentence or clause has its pros and cons. Graphs have a lot of pros, and not many cons.

Good question. For mathematicians and linguists, a graph is a diagram that consists of nodes and edges. For the rest of us, who must communicate using words that we hope others will readily understand, graphs are diagrams that consist of points and lines between them. For our purposes, any diagram that consists of points and lines is a graph.

Sometimes you hear a story that just sticks in your mind. Like the one about the pastor who preached through the entire Bible in a year, with his congregation reading along at a rate of 20+ chapters per week.

If you haven't already heard this yarn, check it out. With National Bible Week coming up later this month, it's a good time to think about what would happen if more churches followed this pastor's lead. And without spoiling the story, I should mention that Logos Bible Software plays a central role in assisting Pastor Bolender with his massive undertaking.

Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite...the full story is in the Leadership Journal archive.

In 2002, our church began an ambitious project: If the congregation would take up daily Bible reading again, I would teach scriptural surveys that covered the passages they were reading. By year's end, the congregation had read Genesis to Revelation, and I had taught 250 messages on all 66 books. I had to preach five times a week to keep up with the church (they were devouring 20-30 chapters a week), but a simple plan and some well-organized software enabled us to do it.

See also:

• Logos Case Study: Preaching Through the Bible in a Year


• Thru the Bible at Austin Bible Church (notes and audio in PDF and MP3 formats)

You may have noticed I haven't been blogging much lately. Mostly, I've been too busy working on the Andersen-Forbes Hebrew Syntax project. As part of that work, I recently went down to Melbourne, Australia to visit with Frank Andersen and Dean Forbes, the gentlemen themselves. It's rare that the two of them are ever in the same room, since Dean lives in California and Frank lives half a world away in Melbourne. When we found out that Dean would be visiting Melbourne for a month to work with Frank, we decided that I should crash the party.*

Once we told the development teams they could move in, it didn't take long.

At the front of the room is our web applications team and along the side is the application development team.

On December 20, 2004, there was a fire in the restaurant next door. It was around six hours between the time the fire started and when it finally set off the smoke alarms on our side of the building. The result was that the restaurant was completely destroyed; everything was smoked thoroughly. The partial second floor had to be demolished and even the brick walls had to be soda-blasted to remove the odor. A third of our offices were evacuated and carpets, books, and computers had to be thoroughly cleaned.

The restaurant relocated around the corner and Logos took the opportunity to create additional office space that could connect to our existing offices.

For ten months we endured the sounds (and smells!) of demolition and construction on the other side of a very thin wall. But today it is all worth it, because we are finally able to move in.

From the back, at the top of the old second floor. Skylight is above and right.

From the front, towards the back and skylight.

From the back of the new second floor at nearly the same position as the first photo.

Last week, I posted an article about "Word Groups" in the OpenText.org Syntactic Annotation. I promised some follow-up; and now it's time for that.

There are obvious uses for this level of annotation in the realm of searching, but what about in just reading the text? Or in working through a passage exegetically?

The good news is that the visualization (graph) supports most operations you're used to performing from a standard morphologically tagged Greek NT in Logos Bible Software. This article is about some of those options.