I thought I should mention that I will be attending the Bible Technologies Conference known as BibleTech this week (April 30–May 2). While there, I will be hob-nobbing with other folks interested in the intersection of Bibles and technology, learning new things, having fascinating conversations, and giving two papers. The first will be an overview of some new tools in Logos 6 and how we’ve gone about localizing them (primarily for the Spanish market, but other markets will follow):

• Paper Title: Localizing Bible Data
• Abstract: Innovative tools usually suffer from being bound to the particular language they are developed in. Localization of the underlying data and analysis is, many times, an afterthought. At Faithlife, we have had localization of our products (primarily Logos Bible Software) in mind since at least 1999. And this is useful, because at Faithlife, we are producing more and more tools and analyses of the Biblical text. But with each of them we have the problem of ensuring the localization of the result. This paper uses a few new features and interactives developed for Logos 6 as case studies and attempts to distill some basic principles to assist in localization of data-centric features.

The second is about a to-be-released feature, and I’m teaming up with my colleague Peter Venable to give it:

• Paper: Categorizing Bible References in Original Language Grammars
• Presenters: Rick Brannan and Peter Venable
• Abstract: Original language grammars (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.) routinely reference the Biblical text to provide examples of grammatical phenomena. When you’re actually reading the grammar, you have context for these references. But if, as happens frequently in Bible software, you’re looking at the results of a search for instances of a particular Bible reference to see if it is commented on in grammars, you have little or no context to decide if the grammar itself is worth consulting.This paper is about an update to the existing “Grammars” section in the Exegetical Guide in Logos 6.3. This update relies on an analysis and categorization of Bible reference citations within existing original language grammars and presents them in a manner similar to how Logos 6 Ancient Literature references are presented. In this way, people are presented with a reason for the link to the grammar before clicking on it; hopefully leading to more productive study and sermon preparation. We will overview the scope of the problem and volume of data, as well as examine classification methods we’ve used to help solve the problem.

I’ll post copies of the written forms of these papers after they’ve been delivered in the papers section of this web site.