Mark Vitalis started it on his blog, and David Lang followed suit. Now we know how to go about it with BibleWorks and Accordance, respectively.

These kinds of exercises could well become a classic after this past SBL Bible Software Shootout.

Update (March 25): And here is how to do it with Logos Bible Software.

Mark Barnes has posted an excellent review comparing OliveTree BibleReader and Logos for the iPhone/iPod Touch. This is one of the most exciting areas right now for Bible software, and I’m sure it will be even more so when the new iPad is launched. It’s definitely worth a read.

I haven’t had much time to blog lately, one of the reasons being that OakTree Software asked me to write a guest post on the recently released Biblioteca Hispana de Accordance for the Accordance Blog. Here is the blog article.

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Últimamente no he tenido mucho tiempo para escribir en el blog. Una de las razones es que OakTree Software me pidió que escribiera un artículo sobre la Biblioteca Hispana de Accordance para el Accordance Blog. Aquí está el artículo.

Logos Bible Software has a large collection of videos introducing the new features of the recently released Logos 4 software. More tutorials and videos are also available at Logos Bible Software YouTube channel.

Alongside the official screencasts, here are two more sources that I consider to be extremely helpful:

Mark Barnes, from the ephesians 4:14 blog, has posted some excellent and very informative videos which I highly recommend. They can be found on his blog, but you may prefer to check out his Vimeo page.

John Fidel, who runs the Bible Software Newsletter and Comments blog, has also contributed some great tutorials with lots of practical tips and ideas. Again, they are available on his blog or, if you like, check them out on YouTube.

The proof of the cake is in the eating, right? Right. Similarly, Bible software is certainly at its best when one can actually see its many practical applications. Here are some samples you may want to look at.

Mike Heiser explains some of the kinds of searches that can be performed with Logos’ syntactical databases. A few of the examples are geared towards scholars, while others are suited for more general uses. There are also short videos on how the searches were carried out.

David Lang points to a practical use of the INFER command in Accordance. He includes a download link to Robert Marineau’s paper presented at the past ETS meeting held in New Orleans, LA.

Rick Bennet, talks about how to use Accordance to search for nomina sacra in early papyri, and Tommy Wasserman, over at the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog, shares his own experience in conducting searches like these.

Glenn Weaver, in one of his excellent Classroom Tips, shows how to search for Hebrew weak verbs with BibleWorks. You may recall that this was one of the challenges posed at the SBL Bible software shootout session.

It seems to me that Karyn Traphagen has opened a can of worms, and I mean that in a positive sense. Her question is, Should Schools or Students Choose Bible Software?

In my view, every school and every student should be free to choose, provided the software package in question is suitable for academic purposes. Schools should teach students how to use the tools of the trade, not tell them what tool to use (when there are comparable tools available, that is). Yes, this means more work for instructors –who would necessarily have to be acquainted with more than one program–, but it would also mean that students can learn the big picture about computer-assisted study and enrich one another when actually trying to apply those general rules to their particular brand of advanced Bible software.

And in case you worry about the additional burden of requiring computer skills from your students, instead of focusing on more biblical and theological matters, keep in mind that in many European institutions you need to learn a second modern language to get a degree, and it is taken for granted that you will know that language (and pass the exam!) by the time you graduate, without actually taking any classes at that particular seminary or university. Similarly, computer skills should probably be taken for granted, at least in Western countries. Let  professors worry about their own computer skills and command of different Bible software packages. Students will do just fine.

I personally like having different choices, and therefore, in my view, the decision should be yours and only yours. But whatever decision you make, make sure it is an informed decision and don’t let others do the thinking for you!

After the successful SBL Bible Software Shootout session, there seems to be a renewed interest in demoing Bible software and comparing how different packages face real-life, daily study and research challenges. This is most welcome, and I have already tried to address a very practical test case earlier this week.

Mark L. Ward posted a pop quiz he set for users of BibleWorks. Nothing terribly difficult, just the kinds of searches many people have to use while studying the Bible. There is a little bit for everyone: English searches, Greek searches (both GNT and LXX), Strong’s searches, Lexicon lookups, graphical analysis of search results… Well, you get the idea.

Sean Boisen has taken up the challenge and showed how to answer the quiz with Logos 4. He actually works for Logos, but makes it very clear that he’s “not trying to start (or fuel) any “my software can beat your software”-type competitions, or take pot shots at other products.” There is nothing of that sort in his post, just step-by-step instructions on how he did the test and the results he got (make sure you read the comments too!).

I took a few minutes (very few, actually) to read Mark’s original quiz, fired up Accordance (since I was on my iMac) and completed the quiz in no time. I then read Sean’s explanations and compared his results with mine (not quite the same as his in some cases). All in all it was an interesting exercise, and it would be great to see how other people go about it performing these tasks with their Bible software. I did not have the opportunity to check the results with BibleWorks, but it would be good if Mark or somebody else would give us their results. I may do it myself, but not today.

As I mentioned before, Michael S. Heiser, Academic Editor for Logos Bible Software, has blogged about the past Bible Software shootout at SBL. But what I found really interesting were his thoughts around the “status quo of Bible software.”

In this post I’d like to interact briefly with the first two points he deals with: Syntax and Books.

Let me say up front than I would answer ‘No’ to the question I’ve used as a title for this entry. My reasons for it are the following:

1. Syntax

a) Syntactical databases are just another level of tagging. They do no supersede or render obsolete the other levels (e.g., morphological databases) but rather complement it. Syntax does open new and interesting avenues for doing research, but I would be reluctant to consider it a panacea for all our problems.

b) I’m not sure who exactly is “making light of it” (i.e., syntax databases) or charging syntactical tagging with being “subjective.” The truth of the matter is that  tagging the Greek New Testament, whether it be for morphology, syntax, diagramming or even punctuation, is always a combination of objective and subjective decisions. So, I think the approach adopted by Accordance or BibleWorks at the shootout session is equally valid on this count.

c) I would not be at all surprised to see Accordance or BW (or both) come up with syntactical databases (see, for instance, this forum thread). So the key here will be –sooner rather than later– not so much who’s got the feature but rather what’s the best implementation in terms of intuitiveness and ease of use.

2. Books

a) Logos is a digital library. Accordance and BW are not. So let’s compare apples to apples.

b) At the end of the day, it is quality that matters. More doesn’t necessarily mean better. Standard resources are not that many. If you have what you need to have (the tools of the trade), you are not missing out, regardless of the program you use.

c) I’d like to know more about the “under the hood issues” that apparently make searching Logos’ many titles “superior”. I can say that I find BW’s integration and searching of its secondary resources less than ideal, but the seamless integration and extremely powerful and versatile searching capabilities of Accordance’s tools are quite impressive and, some of them, unparalleled.

3. Final Comments

It seems to me that unless we define clearly the rules of the “game” and what we mean by “cutting edge”  we will be talking at cross purposes. In my opinion, the game of Bible software is all about letting people access and interpret the primary texts. Everything else, including the program itself (and that goes both for the user interface and the secondary texts), should be subservient to that goal. In line with what I have just said, I would consider syntax searching, root searching or cross-version/cross-language searching as examples of “cutting edge” features.

Finally, let us keep in mind that the really important “wow” factor is to be found in the attainment of the original goal (see above) in a clear, unobtrusive, intuitive way. Other things may be the “icing on the cake,” but in my book they are neither cutting edge nor particularly wowing. If this is considered to be the “old way,” so be it.

Update: Check out Rick Mansfield’s post (I’m sorry. The author decided to delete it), and Danny Zacharias’ blog entry.

Last Saturday, a Bible Software Shootout session was held at the SBL Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA. Participants were (in order of appearance) Logos, SESB, BibleWorks, Accordance and Olive Tree. If you are like me, you would have loved to attend. Sadly, I couldn’t be there. Still, modern day technology does help us to get the big picture via tweets, blog posts and so on.

So, what happened? Karyn Traphagen compiled a list of tweets by people who attended the session over at Boulders 2 Bits, whereas Rick Mansfield wrote a more comprehensive post on his This Lamp blog, and, more recently, Mike Heiser gave us his take on it. We can expect to read reports by David Lang at the Accordance Blog shortly (it’s here actually), and I heard that the Olive Tree Blog will be carrying info on the session too (right here). At this point I don’t know if we will read anything from BibleWorks.

These were the five challenges each presenter had to address:

1. Give the parsing of a word and its meaning from a standard source.

2. Show all the occurrences of a word in the NT and LXX and show the Hebrew word which corresponds with the Greek in the LXX (if there is a correspondence).

3. Find all the occurrences of oi de in Matthew’s gospel followed by a finite verb within the clause.

4. I want to study a part of speech, e. g., demonstrative pronouns or interjections. How do I get all of the lemmas for that part of speech, get all the occurrences of those lemmas, and the results organized in such a way that I could write an article/monograph on that part of speech from the data?

5. I want to study the inflections of the Hebrew middle weak verb, and I want to see what the range of possible variations is for each of the conjugations (perfect, imperative, etc.) person, number, gender, and stem. This means I need to find all the middle weak verbs, find all their occurrences, and organize them in such a way that the variation of their inflections are immediately apparent. The goal of the data organization would be to allow me to write an article about the variations of the Hebrew middle weak verb.

Everybody seems to agree on the fact that all packages were able to solve the problems posed, except for Olive Tree, (but that is understandable given the current limitations of mobile devices and their OSes in certain areas). It is also acknowledged that it was stimulating to learn about the different solutions adopted by each one of the “contenders.”

And that’s the end of the agreement. If you want to know who won this shootout –where no one got hurt–, you’re out of luck. It depends on who you listen to. I’m always amazed at how sensitive this whole area of Bible software comparative reviews/presentations is. If you read the different comments and reactions to posts here and there you will soon realize that, for the most part, people tend to be rather defensive when exposed to software packages other than the one they are most familiar with, and very few dare to “think outside the box.”

If someone recorded the SBL session on video it would be great to know. Failing that, it would be nice to be able to access the content of each presentation so that everyone could draw his/her own conclusions about the pros and cons of each program. Don’t you think?

Update: Accordance handout can be downloaded from this page. Olive Tree’s presentation can also be downloaded here (PDF file).

Tony Cartledge, who attended the session, blogs on the shootout here.

Further to his previous 2008 review, Lee Eclov has posted an update over at PreachingToday.com. Check it out if you can.