Bible Software Review Weblog

I have followed with interest the recent technical discussion presented by Stephen C. Carlson in his blog. He replies to my previous comment on the subject, particularly my question about whether this "In-line Glossary Technique" could be used for footnotes. He suggests a somewhat different approach for publishing footnotes on the Web. Here is what he says:

Some people have suggested from time to time the use of sidenotes rather than footnotes for annotating texts on web pages. To me, it makes theoretical sense because, unlike book pages, which are taller than they are wide, browsers tend to show web pages with a greater horizontal width than its vertical height. Thus, the sides, not the foot, constitute the area of the web page with potentially the most space for notes while still being in view.

He has posted two examples: an article with footnotes and the same article with sidenotes. Since his blog doesn't have a commenting system implemented (hint, hint, hint...), I'll state here that I like the sidenotes better. It seems to me that they look more elegant (though maybe some will find the page a bit too crowded, depending on the display's resolution being used), and save us from having to click and move forward and backwards all the time. By the way, when it comes to printed books, I much rather have footnotes than endnotes. One of the links he points to is particularly useful.

Although some of the specific contents are badly outdated, I would still recommend reading Harry Hahne's course notes "Using a Computer in Biblical and Theological Studies". A lot of water has gone under the bridge since 1999, particularly so in the field of computing and computer-assisted Bible study, but many of his general insights still hold true (see, for instance, the first section: "Introduction: How a computer can help in seminary and ministry", where he deals with subjects such as Computer Basics, Major types of software, Computing and the Process of Research and Writing, What a Computer Can and Cannot Do, Working Efficiently With a Computer, etc.) The comments he makes, later on in the course, on certain programs and Internet sites only apply to the current situation at the time of writing, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Harry Hahne was also the editor for the Bible Analysis website, which unfortunately hasn't been updated in a long, long, time. However, his essay "Interpretive Implications of Using Bible-Search Software for New Testament Grammatical Analysis" remains a must-read, IMO, for anyone interested in the rigorous study of the Greek New Testament with the aid of computer tools, despite the fact than most of the programs he mentions in the test cases have been vastly improved over the years.

There's no doubt that Bible software has become increasingly complex, with lots of "bells and whistles" that many users are likely to underuse, or misuse (or both!). This problem is here to stay, I'm afraid. And there is a very simple reason for it: either most people just don't read the user manuals or, even worse than that, very often there is no manual to read! And I don't mean a nice online help (that should be taken for granted), but the traditional, old-fashioned, printed manual with step-by-step instructions and lots of screenshots. When I review software package I always value very highly the availability of a printed guide. To be able to print the help files or documents yourself is not quite the same, but it's better than nothing. Anyway, let's not get sidetracked!

At the heart of any Bible program there is always a more or less sophisticated electronic Bible concordance. This concordance may look and feel better, nicer or faster, but at the end of the day it's a concordance after all! So, the point is that a concordance won't be of much use unless we have an appropriate set of databases to concord. And here is where the quality of the contents comes into play. Companies spend quite a bit of their resources developing neat graphical user interfaces and "wow" features (and rightly so, I hasten to add). But the key to usefulness and accuracy lies in what happens behind the scenes. To get a machine-readable text (MRT) is a relatively easy task. To tag a text is a very involved and time-consuming one.

John J. Hughes, in his milestone work Bits, Bytes & Biblical Studies (Zondervan, 1987, p. 496), defines tagging like this:

Tagging is the process of attaching descriptive codes to words. Those codes, or tags, may consist of any information - textual, morphological, syntactical, or semantic - that is to be associeated with a particular word or form.

Therefore, tags typically include anything from Strong's or Goodrick-Kohlenberger's numbers (in English texts), to full morphological and grammatical details (in Greek and Hebrew texts). The more information that is tagged to a given database or corpus, the better. But more coded information also means more grunt work, and a greater chance for errors to creep in. Tagging is a very costly job, but it's an essential part of developing good software packages.

Does this mean we have to underplay the functionality of a Bible program? Not at all! But features and sheer search power will be rendered meaningless unless we can rely on good, coded databases ready to be searched at different levels (as many levels as the number of descriptive codes available).

In sum, I believe we have a debt of gratitude with the people who are working so hard, often without proper financing or recognition, in order to develop those tagged texts that make our lives so much easier.

As a follow-up to my previous comments on this matter, I would like to recommend another useful online reference: Your Online Guide to Bible Reference Books & Software, by John R. Kohlenberger III. It's a more general resource, centered around Zondervan's own resources, but worth checking out nevertheless, particularly the section on Bible Study Software.

[Ed.] The link is no longer available. Sorry about that.

One of the books I end up recommending again and again is D. A. Carson's Exegetical Fallacies (Baker, 1996 - 2nd. ed.) We can hardly deny the need for careful exegesis these days, when so much wishy-washy preaching and teaching seems to be in vogue. And I say this because Bible software is a great thing, but it needs to be handled with care. Cars are great tools, but I just saw one bumping into another on my way home today... So, watch out!

A few years ago, Terry Taylor wrote a short article on Computers in Bible Teaching: Bible Study Software, where he warned against a number of traps to be avoided by people using Bible software. More recently, David Lang has written another interesting piece along the same lines: The Dangers of Bible Software. It may be old hat to many, but it is something worth reminding ourselves.

I can think of a few of these pitfalls to avoid off the top of my head. They relate to the use of Bible programs, but are in no way limited to it. Maybe we could build a more comprehensive list another day.

1. A very frequent thing that can happen to us when we use Bible software is that we reach a point where we can't see the forest for the trees. Terry Taylor calls it the "tunnel-vision trap". The need to stay in context, as David Lang also alerts us, is something we have to have clearly before us all the time. In this age of increasing specialization we must never lose sight of the larger picture.

2. We must also carefully avoid the cut-and-paste syndrome. This reminds me of the preacher who had jotted down the following remark in his sermon notes: "Weak point. Shout louder!". The equivalent to that would be the urge felt by some people to back up some particular point with tons of references taken from the myriads of electronic tools available nowadays (including Internet resources, of course). Terry Taylor's "laziness trap" and "verse dumping trap" would fall under this category. An off-shoot of this syndrome is the pitfall of plagiarism. Let's try to think things through for ourselves, and if we want to quote some interesting or witty sentence or paragraph, let's give credit where credit is due!

3. We have all heard that "a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing". Well, it surely can in the field of Biblical languages. There was a thread on B-Greek a while back where members discussed at great length the danger of knowing just a little Greek. Bible software grants us access to the underlying original text of any given passage like never before, but getting to know how to perform word studies and other similar exercises will not turn us into Greek or Hebrew scholars overnight! As David Lang puts it, we must avoid the danger of becoming "gnostics" (or falling into the "Greek geek trap", in Terry Taylor's words).

4. Last, but not least, there's the danger of suffering from an information indigestion. This happens when we cannot process the huge amount of information we have at our disposal, and simply pile it up. Computers can retrieve information at great speeds, but it is up to us to analyze and reflect on it. Maybe one of our main problems is that we need time. After all, exegesis will never be an instant, ready-made, computer-generated product...

There was a quote I once read (not sure where it came from) that said: "With computers we can now misinterpret Scripture at speeds never before possible". Well, I think whoever said it got the point across pretty nicely. I'm not a pessimist, and I firmly believe in the advantages of using new technology, but we would do well to keep our eyes wide open in order to avoid, to the best of our ability, some of these traps in the course of our study. BTW, If you want to share more dangers and pitfalls, by all means do!

I've recently learned of the problems Silver Mountain Software has been going through as a result of Microsoft's pressure, er... I mean concerns. You can read all about it here. John Baima has just announced that the new Bible Windows update is now known as Bibloi 8.0. Apart from other improvements, the main new feature is the ability to import texts into the program. Users will now be able to import texts in a number of formats, including "Online Bible translations, Beta Code texts, plain text files, and texts from the Unbound Bible Project".

I thought you might enjoy this quote from John J. Hughes' Bits, Bytes & Biblical Studies (Zondervan, 1987, p. 5):

A computer can do nothing unless its task is explicitly defined not only in a logical fashion but in a way that turns every step of the task into a logical operation that the machine can perform by using its logic circuits. Computers do everything "by the book." They never operate intuitively. They do not know how to take shortcuts. They are not creative. You cannot delegate a task to them and expect them to figure out how to do it, unless that ability has been designed into the program the computer is running. Computers are tireless, perfectly obedient, incredibly fast, and never bored, but they are stupid. They cannot even tell you the time of day unless you have given them a program that instructs them in a step-by-step way how to do that. Computers have prodigious memories and powerful brains, but they have no minds."

Hughes' work has been out of print for a long time, but this little paragraph is certainly as applicable today as it was when it was first penned. I would add one thing: Computers never make mistakes, but programmers and users do! After all, making mistakes is an inherently human trait.

Bob Pritchett, President/CEO of Logos Research Systems, blogs about whether Bible software should be considered just like any other business or there is something more to it. Interesting discussion, coming from someone who's directly involved in the Bible software industry. Is competition a good thing? Well, I think so. Should Bible software companies make profit? Certainly! So what's special about it? It seems to me that the unique feature lies in the fact that this industry should be both a business and a ministry (in the strictest sense of the Greek term DIAKONIA). If we lose the vocational nature of Bible software, I think we'll end up with just another (legitimate) way of making a living. I'd like to think that selling potatoes or cloths is not quite the same as selling Bible software (or teaching theology, or being involved in another full-time ministry, for that matter). Some people choose to make their products available as freeware or shareware, while others commit themselves to developing commercial Bible software. It is their choice, and I don't see anything ethically or Biblically wrong about either approach. And once the commercial alternative is pursued, it is taken for granted that there will be some measure of competition (which is also present, BTW, among freeware/shareware applications). Having said that, from the viewpoint of Bible software users it is important to note that no single product will satisfy everyone's needs. It is true that many of the features in most Bible software packages overlap to some degree. But it is equally true that there is some complementarity as well. Not all users have the same needs, and so it shouldn't be too difficult to find the software that best suits our personal interests and needs, whatever they might be. And this brings me to my last point: I think the price of Bible software should be reasonable enough so that people could actually afford to use more than one package. This may not be necessary for those using the software for personal study and general teaching, but it is a must for users involved in an academic study of the Scriptures.

Ideally, then, Bible software companies should strike a balance between business and ministry. Yeah, I know. It's easy to say, but very hard to do. However, just because something is hard doesn't mean we must give up, right?

I have posted a review* of a previous version of Accordance Bible Software. A full review of the latest version will be forthcoming. I am making this review available for the following reasons:

1. To whet your appetite ;-)
2. To allow you to compare it with the newer review (coming soon...)
3. To test the sidenotes as recently discussed by Stephen C. Carlson of Hypotyposeis.

Let me know what you think about this annotation technique.

* [Ed.] This link pointed to the previous version available at BSR. The new link, of course, uses a completely different system for displaying notes.

I have heard back from a few of the people whom I emailed the survey. Some of them will be sending theirs in at a later date. Some others I haven't heard from yet. Whatever the case, it is impossible to hear from everybody. So I've decided to share some links that may be of interest to those who like to put "faces to names", even though sometimes there might not be any photos available! Here goes the first one:

You can find out more about Roy Brown, President of OakTree Software, by reading an online interview by Terri Lackey here, or by dowloading the PDF version (article found on pages 10-11).

It came as a nice surprise to me that Kåre Fuglseth, co-blogger of Philo of Alexandria blog had undertaken the job to compare all the Greek words in Philo and the NT in one of his books. I was intrigued about the approach/method he had taken, since he explicitly mentioned "personal computers", so I left him a comment. Yesterday he kindly sent me a short note in which he says: "I have used HyperCard for Macintosh. At the time it was the only program that could sort 430,000 cards (the Philonic corpus) in a Greek alphabetic order (or any order, autodefined)." So here's a good example of how computer tools can enhance our research.

Torrey Seland expresses his hope that either me or somebody else will get round to reviewing the latest version of Bibloi (formerly known as Bible Windows) from Silver Mountain Software. I will gladly take up the challenge if/when my upgrade arrives. If my mind serves me right, Bible Windows was the first program of its kind to offer Internet links to different sites of interest for Bible scholars and classicists from inside the application itself. This feature is now becoming available in other software packages. A step in the right direction, as I see it.

[Ed.] The review is now available.

Thanks to Haloscan, my blog now has a trackback system. According to Wikipedia, trackback is:

... a system implemented by Movable Type that alerts and allows a blogger to see who has blogged about posts on his or her blog. The system works by sending a ping between the blogs, and therefore providing the alert.

In other words, a whole network of related links can be built up in the twinkling of an eye by using this feature. It works this way: If you have a blog and write an entry relating to something I have written here, "ping" my trackback. I will do the same if you have this system implemented, and every reader will be able to see at a glance who links to who and what refers to what. Make sense? Please try it! It will allow this blog to be even more interactive and (hopefully!) useful. Also, don't be shy and use the Comment feature to your heart's content. Thanks!

[Ed.] With the recent move to Movable Type, this feature is now fully integrated in the blog itself, and therefore I have stopped using Haloscan.

A fresh review of iLumina Gold has been made availabe by David Lang, Content Editor of CMUG (Christian Macintosh Users Group). iLumina is a very innovative product available for both Windows and Macintosh users. Enjoy!

Mark Goodacre of NT Gateway Weblog talks about how happy he is to have found Bloglines.

I have to agree with him. I subscribed to this fine web-based service a few days ago (isn't Internet such a small world after all?), and can now keep track of all the blogs I read daily. It is a very convenient and intuitive way to manage your favorite blogs, although I'm afraid I am still not taking advantage of all the available features. And you know what? It's free!

Andreas Köstenberger and Raymond Bouchoc are the authors of the fairly recent The Book Study Concordance of the Greek New Testament (Broadman & Holman, 2003). This is what the blurb of the book says:

A New Bible Study Tool and a New Venue of Academic Research. Aided by breakthroughs in computer technology, The Book Study Concordance of the Greek New Testament has compiled data in a format that has never before been available to Bible students. The result is a collection of twenty-seven concordances listing every word used in the Greek New Testament in alphabetical order book by book. Also provided are word totals, most-frequently-used words, and words set in relation to the New Testament as a whole. This is an absolutely invaluable new tool for all serious Bible students and for the scholarly community.

This mammoth work (viii/1528 pages) is based on the electronic version of NA27 developed by the Gramcord Institute. In the Preface, the authors state:

The Book Study Concordance of the Greek New Testament for the first time assembles concordances of each of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. The concordance is a fresh effort, though of course standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. The textual base of the present concordance is the electronic version of the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. The roots of the words were matched with their forms based on data developed and provided by the GRAMCORD Institute. In this regard we would like to acknowledge the foundational debt we owe to the previous work of the GRAMCORD Institute. The concordances themselves were generated by our own programs written to generate the concordance listings from the raw GRAMCORD data.

Since Raymond Bouchoc is research scholar for the GRAMCORD Institute, they no doubt had access to the latest version of the tagged database, but I wonder what kind of program is "our own programs", and why did they not use any of the Bible software packages currently available. Could it be that none of them had the kind of statistical features and flexibility they needed? Here is what H. Van Dyke Parunak had to say about the issue of statistical analysis in his recent review Windows Software for Bible Study (pp. 481-482):

At first glance, it seems natural to plot frequency statistics per chapter, but this approach has several weaknesses. Chapters do not necessarily correspond to the natural discourse units of the text, either in extent (a natural unit may be wider or narrower than a chapter) or in their limits (which may not correspond with those of natural units). The same can be said of fixed width windows that are sometimes used in plots of this sort (for example, plotting occurrences in windows ten verses wide). This mismatch results in a profile that distorts the actual structure of the text. A much better approach is to let the window width change dynamically with the distribution, an algorithm that could be easily implemented by any of these packages. With this refinement, plots such as these become powerful tools for visualizing the structure of texts (...) but these features are not visible with plots at the chapter level. It would be even more useful if software packages provided an option to generate a file containing, not verse references, but the index number of each hit in a search, together with the number of words per verse and per chapter, so that users could directly manipulate distributional information in a package such as Excel or Mathematica. A further refinement would be to let the user define and annotate a number of fields with each hit to capture contextual features (e.g. direct vs. indirect or human vs. divine speech, putative literary source), and provide a simple flat-file database function (sorting and searching) to help the user perform supplementary studies.

Well, if such an algorithm "could be easily implemented by any of these packages", I wonder why not a single one of them has already done so! Moreover, when I checked some of the stats given in the book against Accordance (which happens to include that particular database and has a pretty good statistical analysis feature) I soon came across a few discrepancies in the numbers. So, I would definitely like to know a little bit more about the tools and methodology followed by Köstenberger and Bouchoc. Their book is a welcome addition to the field of Greek reference tools, but I think some more information is in order if peer-review is to be pursued consistently.

This was posted by Christopher V. Kimball to the B-Hebrew list:

A transcription of the Michigan-Claremont electronic text of the BHS Tanach (from the Oxford Text Archive) to XML with Unicode characters is now available It's viewable by any modern browser, i.e. Netscape 7.1, Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla FireFox 0.8, or Internet Explorer 6.0. A choice of SBL Hebrew or Ezra SIL fonts is available. Font sizes from 100% to 400% of normal are selectable. The texts are in XML format with XMLSchema validation. They may be downloaded for off-line viewing or for machine processing through a ZIP file, of less than 2 Megabytes. It's free and can be distributed freely for any non-commercial purpose. Suggestions and corrections are encouraged.

Great resource. Check it out!

Good news for all those who have requested more compatibility with lower screen resolutions! I have changed the html code so that the tables are now "liquid" (see Carlson's comment). This means that the website should now be viewable by almost anyone (although it still looks better at 1024 x 768 or above). I have only uploaded the home page so far. Other pages will follow soon. However, I am still experimenting and will gladly receive your feedback on the new look. I learned HTML the old-fashioned way, and I am now trying to decide whether to stick to it (albeit with more flexibility) or step right into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

After a major rewrite of the html code for my Bible Software Review website, I think I can finally say that everything in it should be easily accesible to almost anybody from now on - no matter what screen resolution is used. I could be wrong, of course, since I cannot possibly test it on every single browser, but hey you can always leave a comment if something doesn't work quite right for you! ;-) So here's to you viewing pleasure... I appreciate the helpful insights and encouragement received. And in case you wonder, the site uses "liquid" tables rather than "tableless" CSS. I know CSS is the way to go, but I simply cannot afford to spend more time on that. If any of you web-geeks out there want to help with the design, that's okay. Meanwhile, I'll stick to the content...

...But this time it's not about others, it's about us!

David Lang has just posted an article/interview about Bible Software Review. You have all the details here: Christian Mac User Launches Bible Software Review Site. Funny thing is that I haven't even been able to put up the About Us section for the website yet. Now I guess I'll have to ask CMUG permission to use their article here ;-)) No, seriously, it includes quite a bit of information (even personal info) that you might find interesting. Hope you like it.

Today is John Baima, owner of Silver Mountain Software, who kindly answers our questions about Bible Software. Remember that the flagship of this company is now known as Bibloi.

One week ago I added a free counter and statistics tracker from Site Meter. It is now set up so that visitors cannot access any of the site reports and charts, but I can assure you that it offers some interesting data. Let me say, right from the start, that I am very pleased by the number of people who drop by. We are not too far from 500 visits in just one week! And that's not counting the first few days after the web was launched, when I received lots of emails but the counter had not been implemented yet. Besides, I have only placed the tracker in two of the pages so far (home page and weblog). So I'm pretty sure that that figure is in fact a rather conservative estimate. Needless to say how thankful I am to all of you for making this possible. It only comes to show that there really was a need for this kind of endeavor.

Looking at the OS chart I found the following (presumably from today's traffic):

As you can see, most operating systems are represented. However, I am a bit intrigued by the "Unknown 1%". What system could that be? Would you please stand up? (just kidding, of course).

Well, I want to thank my fellow bloggers (bless them) for kindly placing a few links that point to this weblog and its associated website, and also Google, for the fact that you can type "Bible software review" and the very first hits you will get are, guess what, our website and weblog!

I have received a number of emails to the effect that the main menu at the top of the home page doesn't seem to work properly. Let me make clear that it IS working as expected, and that there is nothing wrong with your browser if you happen to click on a menu item and nothing happens. Some items are not "clickable" yet. They are just placeholders, and will become active hyperlinks once the page or section they point to becomes available. It is not "vapor-web"; what you see there - more or less - is going to be posted at some point in time, God willing. I hope it will be sooner than later, but people are busy (and that includes me ;-)) and it will take some time for things to settle a bit. Thanks again for your patience and interest.

[Ed.] Naturally, you won't see any placeholders now, since the site has been completely revamped.

The RC (release candidate) version of the new Libronix Digital Library System 2.1 is available for downloading. Full details of what's new can be found here. General performance improvements and bug fixes aside, there is a new power tool called "Fuzzy Search", which means you can type a string of words and the search engine will attempt to predict which terms are relevant (quite handy when you can't remember the exact phrase, or when you are unsure about the spelling), even though the exact terms searched for may not appear at all in the text. Worthy of mention is also the Compare Pericopes report, which allows you to compare sets of pericopes from different Bible versions.

Users of PC Study Bible from BibleSoft will surely welcome two new additions to the growing library of available works: the 3-Volume New Testament Dictionary Collection, which includes some of IVP's best selling and most renowned dictionaries (Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, and Dictionary of the Later New Testament & Its Developments), and Kittel's landmark reference work Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (unabridged 10 volume set). A lighter, abridged version of TDNT (known as "Little Kittel") is also available. Note that these add-ons only work with version 4.