ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

Today is a day that I have been waiting for quite some time:

LOGOS 4

Over the past few months, Logos has been kind enough to allow me to participate in the private beta testing of their (formerly) forthcoming version of their library system.

And let me tell you, it has been exciting.

The new version changes just about everything. And it’s for the good.

• The new interface is clean and simple.
• Window management has been completely revolutionized.
• Library management is less time consuming & more feature rich.
• New language tools have been developed & old ones have been redesigned.
• New resources & new library collections have been released with new content — including several resources that make me less interested in investing in another piece of software (e.g. my own collection now has Swete’s The Old Testament in Greek According to the Septuagint including the apparatus).

Interface & Window Management:

The basic interface now consists of three basic icons & three drop down menus in the top left corner:

“Home”, “Library”, & “Search” – all of which are rather self-explanatory. And “File” consists have various syntax searches, notes, visual filters, clippings, etc. that you might create as you go along. Under “Guides” we have the ever reliable passage guide, exegetical guide, & word study guide. All of which have received a nice face lift;

Organizing Windows has improved in some incredible ways. For one, it’s now possible to simple drag windows around and they resize to a highlighted area:

But probably the most exciting thing is the fact that now windows can be separated from the central program window:

Which then results in:

This definitely makes Logos 4 much easier to work with when using multiple programs at the same time compared to Logos 3 – or using multiple monitors (which I would love to have, but don’t).

Finally, had you set up your windows in a certain way a week ago that you want to go back to? Didn’t save it? Can’t remember exactly what it was? Well, Layouts has changed all of that:

There’s a reason though. Anyway, it is now possible go back and pick out a particular layout that you had used a few days before, rename it, and save it as your own. Currently, I have four such layouts. Why two Layouts with virtually the same name? Well, it’s a long story.

The Library

With Version 4, we can now both tag and rate the books in our libraries. Note that haven’t spent too much time ranking books –- Swanson’s dictionary is gets two stars. That’s not because it’s bad, just that it’s not what I would want. It’s a great dictionary for a quick gloss, but I’m very, very rarely interested in a quick gloss. Just want to put a plug in here for the slow, detail reading of lexical entries of full-fledged lexicons like BDAG, LSJ, GELS, & L&N. It gets two stars instead of one because it’s still far superior than Strongs.

Ah, but now we come to the interesting stuff in the library: new resources. Now what follows, as I understand it minimally requires the Original Languages Library, though you will need to go look at Logos’ website to double check on that. And you may have noticed it in a screen shot above:

We finally have something to compete with (and absolutely crush!) Opentext.org’s database. These are the same trees that Andi Wu & Randall Tan discussed at International SBL this past year, as well as at BibleTech:2009 (where there’s also a PDF & mp3 available for download).

It’s doesn’t do everything. But it’s a massive leap in the right direction. For one, unlike Opentext.org, Cascadia actually recognizes that there are more than four types of constituents (Predicate, Subject, Complement, & Adjunct). Unfortunately, the treatment of discontinuous phrases is just about the same and needs work. But Cascadia brings a lot to the table:

• Actual Phrase Structure
• More Clause Types – the inclusion of “Verb Elided Clause” as a clause type is incredibly important – especially for Paul.
• Recognition that, semantically speaking, copulas (e.g. εἰμί) are not predicates.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Now I’ve only been able to search using this new database for about a month now, but I definitely like what I have seen, generally speaking. More than anything, I’ve appreciated being able to do the same search using both Cascadia and Opentext.org together and compare the search results.

For example, ditransitive clauses have had my curiosity off and on for some time now, so I constructed this search in Cascadia using the new and improved Syntax Search Dialog (It’s similar to the old one, but now you can drag and drop, which makes it easier to use and is so cool):

And essentially the same search in Opentext.org:

The results were rather interesting. Opentext received more hits:

The first two in Matthew aren’t ditransitive in Cascadia because they both use copulas. Thus, it is the initial adjective that receives the Predicate Function rather than the verb. An adjective cannot be an Object if it is the semantic predicate of the clause.

Acts 2:39 is not ditransitive in Cascadia because Opentext.org has incorrectly annotated ἂν as a Complement, which it very much is not. And Acts 25:27 has the rather semantically empty, δοκέω, and thus the semantic predicate of the clause is ἄλογον.

Finally, 2 Corinthians 9:1 is not ditransitive in Cascadia, again, because the verb of the clause is a copula.

So why did I go through all of this?

Well, for one, we finally have a second voice beside Opentext.org that provides an extremely beneficial balance & check for determining what the syntax of the text actually is. Of the five differences in this search, four of the were the result of Opentext.org’s simplicity (which, granted, at times is a good thing). But this search also revealed a tagging mistake in Opentext as well. Doing quality research is always going to be dependent upon the quality of the data we use. And now we have a significantly easier way to confirming what is the accurate syntactic annotation.

There is more to do in Greek syntax, of course, but I’ll leave that for another time. I’m planning on putting in another proposal to BibleTech:2010 on this very topic.

I’ll leave you with this: the preface from the Cascadia graphs, just to give you an idea of where they came from:

The Cascadia Syntax Graphs of the New Testament is derived from a new dynamic treebank project developed by the Asia Bible Society. The Greek Syntactic Treebank Project is built on the basis of a computer-readable Greek grammar, with the syntactic trees (graphs) directly generated by a parser. Manual checking and corrections are stored as data in a knowledge base to guide the parser. The syntax trees (graphs) are dynamically generated from the latest version of the grammar and knowledge base, which enables continual organic improvement and growth as the grammar and knowledge base are maintained and updated.

We humbly present this preliminary version of the syntax graphs to users of Logos version 4 and look forward to improving and expanding it in the future.

Randall Tan
Andi Wu
November, 2009

Andi Wu and Randall K. Tan, Cascadia Syntax Graphs of the New Testament (Logos Research Systems, Inc., 2009).

There is much, much more to say, but I hope I’ve at least given you something to whet your appetite for the time being. Logos 4 is good enough that It’ll be replacing Logos 3 for me. Most definitely.

By the way, did I mention that as of version 4, my entire library is now indexed (which times some time, but is definitely worth it) and I can search my 2000 books in mere seconds for anything?

The Mac version of Logos 4 is in Alpha testing as we speak and will be have complete parity with the Windows version. That’s right, Mac users, you haven’t been ignored.

And did I mention at all Logos 4 for iPhone & iPod Touch is part of the deal?

Be sure to head over to LOGOS 4 to get the whole scoop and learn about new notes, clippings, handouts, editable passage, exegetical, & word study guides (or you can now create your own!). There’s so much that I could have shared, but I wanted to focus on the things that matter to me. So go, check it out: LOGOS 4.

Notes:

• All screenshots are illustrative. Resources shown may not be included in Logos 4 base packages – i.e. you need at least the Original Languages Library for either Opentext.org or Cascadia.
• Upgrade discounts are available for existing customers.

Other Reviews thus far:

Ricoblog,

Reuben Gomez

Steve Runge’s got a bit too.

Joe Miller

Thomas Black

Adam Couturier

Robert Pavich

Ken Morris

Chris Roberts

This has already gone around quite a bit already, but I thought that I might as well make the anouncement too being that translation is one of the interests of this blog:

The official press release says:

The global board of Biblica today announced its intention to update the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible, the first time it has been revised since 1984. The Committee on Bible Translation (CBT), the independent body of global biblical scholars solely responsible for the translation of the world’s most popular Bible, is slated to finish its revision late next year, with publication in 2011. The announcement was made at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Ill., the site of the historic first meeting of the CBT in 1965.

Some of the places you can find more information thus far are the new NIV Bible 2011 website, which has the press release and also a box for asking questions.

And these blog posts:

This Just In: the NIV to be Updated as “NIV 2011″; TNIV to be Discontinued (Rick Mansfield’s This Lamp)

BREAKING NEWS: NIV to be updated! (Better Bibles Blog)

BREAKING NEWS: NIV to be updated! (Christianity Today’s Blog)

Exciting Announcement about the NIV Translation (Zondervan’s Blog)

USA Today

It sounds like the TNIV and the 1984 NIV will both disappear with this new revision.

A variety of Bloggers have also picked up on it. These are the ones I’ve seen so far (at least that I can find again):

NIV Update Slated for 2011 (David Stark)

New NIV Update set for 2011 (Brian Fulthorp)

It Figures… (Nick Norelli)

Zondervan will discontinue putting out new products with the TNIV

They’re Going to Revise the NIV? (Jim West)

TNIV Going Off the Market, New Version of the NIV Coming in 2011 (Justin Taylor)

Finally, I think all of this is hilarious in light of Mark’s post just a little bit ago:

What I Dislike Most About the TNIV…

Some already knew, but I was gone for my brother’s wedding this weekend, flew a total of 2400 miles and drove another 1500.

It was great though. I had the awesome opportunity to stand beside him.

I’m back though, as of 7:30 tonight.

And after going through too many posts in my RSS reader than I would have liked, I came across this exciting bit of info from Helma Dik:

http://cybergreek.uchicago.edu/index.html/?q=node/18

We are very close to an official launch of morphological searching in Greek and Latin texts in our local load of the Perseus corpus. Richard Whaling and I presented the project for the American Library Association yesterday. Slides are here.

Dirk Jongkind was kind enough to come back and leave a comment letting me know that Tyndale House has now made available Tregelles Greek New Testament under a Creative Commons license.

The website has a lot of great information about the text and the Dirk has already posted at the Evangelical Textual Criticism Blog about the announcement.

Two different texts have been made available. The first “TNT” is the original Tregelles text with no corrections all of its printing errors still intact. The second, “TNT2″ is a text where they have worked to remove all the obvious printing errors in the text. Both texts are available for download.

I’ll be putting the text in to FLEx later this week.

Enjoy!

This post is a sort of response to a discussion I had with a friend. I don’t know if he’ll even see it, but its worth the attempt.

Am I naive for thinking that there are better ways than simply fighting and killing terrorists?

I think not.

Tragically, just war is often necessary, but does it have to be necessary? Are there better ways, ways that do not involve so much human death?

In remote Afghan valley, a rare peace sprouts with insurgents

Here in Alasay Valley, a restive district a two-hour trip north of Kabul, government-backed mediation efforts had floundered for months. The presence of insurgent group Hizb-i-Islami and the Taliban had grown tremendously here, in Kapisa Province, over the past couple of years. By last year, most of the Alasay Valley was under militant control.

But in a series of offensives this year Western forces were able to dislodge the guerrillas and reassert control in parts of the valley. Normally, when this happens, the insurgents regroup and attempt to reclaim territory,

In this case, however, tribal elders offered an olive branch to the besieged fighters. Muhammad Ismail, a tribe leader and former insurgent during the Soviet days, approached a local guerrilla commander, Ghafor Khan. “I told him that we will create job opportunities and bring education. I told him I spent time in prison for fighting jihad, so I know his feelings.”

At first, the commander was hesitant, but Mr. Ismail persisted. “I told him that none of us want the Americans here,” he continued, “but fighting isn’t a solution, because the war will just go on forever.”

The meeting, with 18 tribesmen from the government side, continued for some time. Finally, another elder pointed his finger at the commander and said, “If you keep fighting, the Americans will keep attacking our village and our civilians will suffer. We will hold you responsible.”

The combination of intense military pressure from the international forces, the prospect of a job, and the discontent of his tribal peers finally pushed commander Ghafor to defect, his men say. He brought nearly 60 fighters over to the government side.

There aren’t too many librarians in the biblioblogosphere. But there are a few.

I know of at least James Darlack over at Old in the New.

But the issue I’m linking to here is serious enough that it actually should concern any professor or anyone who uses a library.

The OCLC End Game

…

But this concern was soon overtaken as OCLC brought forth it’s Revised Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat® Records. The Policy, which turned a de facto data monopoly into a legally enforceable one, became a focus of intense debate in the library world. On the one side just about every library blogger with a keyboard, and eventually a review board at the ACRL/ARL, raised questions about the idea of anyone “owning” records meant for sharing and most frequently produced by government entities. On the other side, OCLC’s defenders (in truth, mostly employees), talked of OCLC’s “curation” of community content, of “protecting members’ investment,” of the “best interest of libraries,” “OCLC’s public purposes” and of WorldCat.com’s role as an essential “switching mechanism” to local catalog

…

The move casts new light on its Policy defenses. OCLC isn’t “curating” library records; it’s leveraging them to enter a new market. It wasn’t “protecting members’ investment,” it was investing members’ money, intended to support OCLC’s core mission, to build a new service. WorldCat isn’t a “switching mechanism” to local catalogs. It will replace them.

…

According to the Policy, you can’t build the sort of truly “web scale” database that would make such a project economically viable. Anything that replicates the “function, purpose and/or size” of WorldCat is not “Reasonable Use.” Any library participating in such a venture would lose its right to OCLC-derived records, something that would literally shutter most public and all academic libraries in the country. When it comes to large-scale online catalogs, there can be no competing with OCLC.

OCLC & WorldCat are taking over. And its going to get ugly.

There’s a whole lot more information over at Thingology – one of the LibraryThing.com blogs. Its worth reading through if you care about the open sharing of information – which is, ironically, what libraries are supposed to be about.

There have been a few exicing developments for Greek students in the past few days; developments that a few of us have been rebuked for not mentioning. But I wouldn’t have known about them had it not been for Michael Hanel over at the Bibleworks Blog anyway.

Bascially, Perseus has made some significant changes, particularly in adding some very important texts to their collection – though presently only in English translation:

March 16, 2009:

• New job announcement: Perseus is seeking a Greek Treebank Editor to supervise the creation of a syntactic database for classical Greece with 1,000,000 words – one of the most promising instruments ever produced for the study of Greek linguistics, literary style, and lexicography. We encourage graduate students who could build their dissertation work on this project, as well as classicists with PhD in hand, to consider applying.
• Updates to Perseus Digital Library:
  • Many improvements to the Art & Archaeology data and interface. You can now search the A&A data and image captions.
  • Euclid’s Elements have been added, as well as a large number of Plutarch texts, edited by Bernadotte Perrin. Links to these texts can be found on the Greek and Roman collection page.

The addition of Plutarch is very exciting for those of us who study the Hellenistic & Greco-Roman periods since he live during the first century. Hopefully they’ll add some more Greek editions soon – and I’m rather confident they will. Even still, in English, this is an important addition and its not all English. There is a good amount of Greek there too.

I have to admit that their newly opened position looks rather tempting to me, but based on the description, I highly doubt that I would be even remotely qualified, particularly since I have not computer programing skills whatsoever and the actual description suggest that such skills would be needed. Either way, such a database is definitely what Greek studies needs. It would provide an amazing base for future work and study of Greek syntax beyond simple category labels and hopefully when complete (even partially)  it will be available freely like the rest of Perseus.

The other great event is the expansion what offerings available to non-subscribes to the TLG (HT: Old in the New), though I continue to hope for the day when they make their database available freely (yeah right). They’ve given their website a much needed makeover. Anyway, there’s a whole lot of Chrysostom available now and its beautiful.

I just found that all of the University of Edinburgh’s dissertations for their divinity school are available online:

http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/133

This is a tremendous resource!

Here’s your Greek grammar reading for the next couple months class:

“A Relevance Theoretic approach to the particle ‘hina’ in Koine Greek”

This dissertation is an important one for this particular particle. Its well worth reading – even if you only read its conclusions.

I could barely finish this article, it made me so angry.

Its just completely sick!

Ottawa university boots cystic fibrosis from charity drive

‘I think they see this, in their own twisted way, as a win for diversity’

For those of you who don’t know, CF is a genetic disease that prevents the pancreas from working properly. The result is that those who have it cannot digest food without oral enzymes and the mucus in their lungs is so incredibly thick that they regularly develop lung infections. Over time, it would be possible for a patient to drown in their own mucus – and back in the 50’s that happened pretty regularly.

HT: Kruse Kronicle

This was interesting article to read.

Statistics include:

• 30 percent of U.S. high school students have stolen from a store
• 23 percent said they stole something from a parent or other relative
• 64 percent have cheated on a test
• 36 percent said they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment,
• 42 percent said they sometimes lie to save money

Those are pretty crazy to think about.

But what caught me off guard was this statement:

“Despite such responses, 93 percent of the students said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character, and 77 percent affirmed that “when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.”

Now, 77% is a majority and a majority includes most people.

That means that most people think they they are better than most people.

Doesn’t make sense, does it?