Jim Albright

XML Specialist, Wycliffe Bible Translators

Dramatizer

Customarily we think of reading Scripture. How can the 60% of the world who are non-readers read Scripture in their language? If the Scripture is consultant checked, and in electronic form, and has a consistent quote system; Dramatizer can help. Dramatizer can help prepare the scripts for audio dramatized Scripture with multiple voices.

Dramatizer will automatically mark who the speaker is for 95% of the parts spoken in the Bible. (My wife, Barbe, spent over a year identifying who the first level speaker is in the whole Bible—except for Psalms and Proverbs.) Then the translator (or person who knows the language) merely needs to choose amongst the possible speakers for parts that have more than one speaker per verse (or verses where new characters are introduced because of indirect to direct speech.) Dramatizer can prepare for recording the whole Bible or any portion of the Bible. Dramatizer will produce the scripts that the director, recordist, and each voice talent needs and also the master script for making an audio dramatized Bible (or Scripture portion.)

After the scripts are created, Dramatizer helps with the recording process using your recording program. Dramatizer helps organize the hundreds or thousands of wave files created. The interface can be localized. English, French, and Portuguese are currently available.

Then the audio, dramatized, multi-voice recorded Scripture can be placed onto MegaVoice, CDs, MP3 players, or played on the radio. Dramatizer is available for free.

Wes Allen

ABCNJ

Sermon Painting: Using Digital Projection to Illustrate a Sermon

Advancements in digital projection technology have opened up an incredible array of tools for sermon presentation. Using a screen to help present a sermon offers pastors opportunities to go into more depth, and gives congregations another means by which they might interact with the message.

These tools, however, have also left pastors wondering how they can best be used. Is projecting the sermon outline effective in capturing the congregation's attention? Are bullet points enough to entertain anticipation in the hearts of worshipers? Do quotations from the Bible and other sources work in engaging listeners?

Sermon painting is a new approach to using digital projection for a sermon, re-framing the questions that lead churches to use their screens in the way they traditional do. Instead of simply using a digital screen as an upgraded overhead projector, it allows the screen to reach it potential as a visual, rather than a textual, medium. Where traditional uses of a screen make use of large portions of text, sermon painting conveys the movement and ideas of a sermon through the use of images. The majority of content is left in the voice of the speaker, and the screen becomes a running visual illustration of a sermon's major points. When done well, the images become visual mnemonic devices, helping to embed the message into a congregation's hearts and minds.

• Be introduced to the concept of sermon-painting and the process of developing a presentation which effectively "images" a sermon.
• Be introduced to a number of free software tools which significantly lowers the bar of entry in using digital projection in worship.
• See examples and demonstrations of effective sermon painting.

Mike Anderson

Director of theResurgence.com – Mars Hill Church

The Science of Usability Design

Design will make or break the success of your technology and communication. This presentation is a great opportunity to jump-start your understanding of usability.

Design is often thought of as the skin that lays on top of technology to make it look good. This philosophy leads to an average-looking product that frustrates users and creates inconsistent experiences.

This presentation will cover common pitfalls, wrong assumptions, and goals to which every technology should aspire. Bloggers, developers, managers, and anyone who writes email will benefit greatly from this talk on designing for usability.

Michael Aubrey

Exploring Biblical Languages: The Use of FieldWorks Language Explorer in Biblical Studies

At BibleTech: 2008, SIL’s software development team presented some of the software they are developing for linguists and translators to use on the field. The focus of their presentation was specifically on programs that related to the task of translation. Thus the Data Notebook, Graphite, Translator’s Workplace, and the Translation Editor were the focus of their presentation. Language Explorer, while mentioned in passing, is a program developed more specifically for the linguistic work that accompanies a translation and thus was not described in depth. The program is designed for analysis of morphology, discourse analysis, dictionary making, and eventually syntax for the many languages that have not been studied, much less received a translation of the Bible.

But exactly because of the program’s FLExibility (FLEx = Field Works Language Explorer) for the description of any language, it is perfect for the analysis of Biblical languages as well. This paper seeks to show the value of FLEx for the study of Biblical languages with an eye toward lexicography and morphology. The program provides an methodologically sound environment for both studying individual words and word formation with the potential for the development of a morphological parser for Koine Greek texts.

Justin Bodeutsch

Developer, Monk Development

Content Distribution Strategies: Getting the word out online

This presentation will consist of how Monk Development is helping churches get their sermons, articles, events and any other information up on the web and the various means we use to make that data available to as wide of an audience as possible. We have three products that integrate together to accomplish this, Sermon Cloud, Cobblestone, and church websites. This presentation will address the technical issues involved in collecting and storing vast amounts of data and the methods we use to disseminate them.

The main focus of the talk will be Sermon Cloud and how we're using the data from client web sites and aggregating it. It will cover the SEO used, tags, references and some of the coding challenges I've encountered building these.

Frank Böegelsack

Software Tool for Bible Translation

The purpose of this presentation would be an introduction into the concept of BibleStudy2006 (that is available since mid 2007), to inform about the currently ongoing development of BibleStudy2009 (that is scheduled for mid of 2009) and to get some feedback from users, publishers and so on regarding user interface, functionality and usability.

BibleStudy2006 (short: BS2006) is a software tool for bible translation. It is e-Sword compatible in terms of the output that it generates and provides an integrated workbench with all the tools that are necessary to translate verses from greek/hebrew into the users language and to document these translations. The goal is to give even the layman the chance to dig deeper in the word of God and therewith to prevent misinterpretation of words or verses.

BS2009, that is under development right now, will enhance the usability of the software by using professional windows form controls (like ribbon bar etc.) and providing a richer set of functions around the topic of translating the bible (like Hebrew Word Analyzing).

Sean Boisen

Senior Information Architect – Logos Bible Software

Organizing the People, Places, and Things in the Bible

I’ll describe the Bible Knowledgebase (BK), a machine-readable collection of semantically-organized Bible data that is linked to Biblical texts to support search, navigation, visualization. The thousands of entities in the BK (people, places, and things, along with their names) have a variety of attributes that are appropriate to their type: people have family relationships, places have geo-coordinates, etc. Relationships between entities support discovery and exploration.

Unlike knowledge expressed in prose (like Bible dictionaries), BK data provides reusable content that can serve a variety of purposes. It also provides an important integration framework for Libronix resources, in the general spirit of Tim Berners-Lee’s Linked Data ideas.

Rick Brannan

Logos Bible Software

Stylometry and the Septuagint: Applying Anthony Kenny's Stylometric Study to the LXX

In 1986, Anthony Kenny wrote a book called "A Stylometric Study of the New Testament" which gives details for compiling and comparing book-by-book stylometric statistics for the Greek New Testament given a morphologically tagged corpus. This exploratory study proposes to apply Kenny's method to the LXX, using the Logos Bible Software LXX Morphology, to analyze style.

While Kenny's primary application of his method was in the area of authorship studies, this paper is more interested in the general style of the LXX, and not at all interested in authorship theories or assigning a 'hand' to different passages. For better or worse, this paper treats the LXX as a corpus, and has little interest in its relationship with the underlying Hebrew text.

Once the analysis has been detailed, some points of interest (known only when the analysis is complete as the nature of the study is exploratory) will be further explored. Areas in which the work could be further developed will also be reviewed.

Bob Christenson

Owner / Designer – Mustardseed Media; Co-Host – GeeksAndGod.com

The Wild World of User Submitted Content

Churches and Ministries are learning how important the social web is to building relationships and sharing life online. A crucial element of the social web is user-submitted content in the form of blog comments, forum posts, and much more. Allowing users to submit content to your website (especially without your pre-approval) is scary but an extremely important part of building community online. We'll talk about why it's important, the fears that we all battle, and the solutions for dealing with the "Wild World of User Submitted Content".

Jim Coakley / John Ferch

Moody Graduate School

A Case Study: Using Technology to Teach Exegesis in Higher Education

This presentation will focus on Moody Bible Institute’s integration of technology into the graduate school’s biblical languages curriculum. Jim Coakley, a graduate school professor, will discuss the pedagogical philosophy and the influences that technology has had in the teaching/learning process in his classroom. John Ferch, from MBI’s Education Technology Services department, will discuss the technical solutions that have been implemented in order to facilitate this unique approach. Emphasis will be on the benefits of such an approach as well as the challenges and limitations that Moody has faced, with a desire to help both educators and developers apply lessons from our experiences to their perspective fields.

Sermon Preparation in a Digital World

This presentation will demonstrate how bible software can be implemented by pastors to enhance their sermon preparation. Bible software has obvious advantage in mining details of the biblical text but techniques that aid in determining the "big picture" of a passage will also be shown. The interplay between the use of technology and spiritual formation will also be addressed.

Mike Cochran

SIL International

Learning to grow and utilize knowledge in translation

Language teams worldwide have a hard task on their hands when it comes to translating materials into vernacular languages. A translator must consider culture, linguistics, translation principles, literacy, etc. These are varied disciplines and represent complex issues. Over time SIL has developed many resources that language teams can utilize when doing translation. For the specific instance of translating Biblical texts there are many resources that help explain the original intent of the authors. Finally, more and more language teams would prefer to use languages other than English resources to do their language project tasks. The net result of these complexities is the need to support the use of a large number of resources in such a way that the user is not lost in data.

SIL is developing innovative strategies to be as proactive as we can to make these large numbers of resources available to language teams in simple ways. In order to achieve this we are seeking to achieve two goals:

• Provide strategies to point people to relevant materials when doing their work and to make it as easy as possible to integrate the resources with the software they use to do the translation tasks.


• Provide ways to repurpose the knowledge materials across multiple platforms while utilizing “cloud sourcing” to review these materials to ensure that our automated repurposing has not corrupted the resources.

Dony K. Donev

Cup & Cross Ministries, Intl.

Using Bible Technologies in a Censured Context: The Case of Bibliata.TV in Postcommunist Bulgaria as an Example of Underground Webministry (UW)

This presentation will raise the awareness of the usage of Bible related technologies in a censured Postcommunist context and will inform of how to do Christian web ministry in countries that institute and practice a purposed censoring regime toward Christian websites. This is not a hacking course, but rather a sensitive approach toward government regulations and online representation, which enables to quickly and effectively communicate the Christian message to the very people that need it. While the times of “smuggling” Bibles may be long gone, the time of “smuggling” Bible websites is at hand.

John Dyer

Director of Web Development – Dallas Theological Seminary

Technology is Not Neutral: How Bible Technology Shapes Our Faith

God rebuked David for judging the effectiveness of his empire by a census. The technology used to conduct the census was not itself morally good or evil, yet neither was it fully neutral in its affect on David. Its very presence influenced David away from trusting God. What might have happened had the technology not been there to influence him?

Today, we are presented with new technologies at a much faster rate than David, yet we spend precious little time evaluating how they will affect our relationships with God and our fellow human beings. This talk will give a brief history of the sweeping effects of technology over the ages, specifically focusing on how Bible technologies have influenced the church, and suggest some questions we can ask when adopting, implementing, or developing new technologies.

Lance Ford

Co-founder – Shapevine.com & WebChurchMedia

Creating Dynamic Peer Learning Communities

More than ever, the web helps us to network, engage and expand our reach in myriad ways. Training is best achieved as we help learners move from isolated rooms, talking heads, and the mere act of handing out reading assignments and study guides, to live interactive spaces. The synergy that happens as groups engage in dialogue learning, mixed with action-reflection assignments and activities, takes education at all levels from teaching to genuine training. This session will focus on the philosophy and dynamics involved in implementing training and professional tutorial programs by launching your own Web-based eLearning programs and peer based learning communities. The concepts emphasize non-linear, personalized learning at a personalized pace – all available 24/7 as a just in time learning platform. These eLearning platforms that can include live video web casts, pre-produced video lessons, PDF archives, forums, whiteboard and even group discussions centered around a “social network” type of structure. Think iTunes crossed with eLearning courses or eSeminar series and social networks such as My Space or Facebook.

Ellen Frankel

CEO and Editor-in-Chief – The Jewish Publication Society

How the Ancient Rabbis Invented Web 2.0 Before Its Time

Over 2000 years ago, Jewish sages in Israel invented a new format for interactions with written texts, a kind of proto-hypertext with many similarities to tagging, wikipedia, and the emerging semantic web. Their experiments led to the Talmud, a collaborative 600 year conversation around content; the Jewish commentary tradition, with threads and links; and the notion of a four-tiered content architecture based on scripture. The Jewish Publication Society, the oldest non-profit Jewish publisher in North America, is now developing the Tagged Tanakh, a collaborative learning platform centered around the Hebrew Bible, which will use new digital technologies to update the ancient Rabbis' dream of "the seventy faces of Torah." This talk will introduce the audience to this Jewish textual tradition of commentary (biblical hypertext) and how it is being adapted to the social and semantic web by JPS's new digital initiative.

Drew Haninger

President, CEO – Olive Tree Bible Software, Inc

The Study Bible Challenge for Mobile Devices

With so many different Mobile devices with a variety of screen sizes, different UI controls how can one do a Study Bible on all these devices.

Then consider: finger touch, small keyboards, larger keyboards, and more. We will show samples from iPhone, Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile to accent the challenge.

Stephen Johnson

Senior Software Engineer – Olive Tree Bible Software

Rolling with the Revolution: Developing Mobile Bible Software

Mobile devices are rapidly changing. New mobile platforms continue to come out. Just this last year we saw the iPhone open up to third party developers, Android go on sale, and the release of ALP. Existing platforms are constantly changing. During 2008 we also saw BlackBerry and Symbian s60 come out with there first touch sensitive devices and the announcement of Windows Mobile 7. How can software companies keep up without hiring a lot of people to tackle each platform? Given todays economic environment this isn't feasible for most companies. Yet mobile software users constantly change mobile platforms and they don't want to invest in software that can't move with them. How can Bible software developers support todays mobile platforms (Windows Mobile Pocket PC, Windows Mobile Standard, iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm OS, Android, Symbian series 60, Symbian UIQ, J2ME, and ALP) and be ready for the mobile platforms of the future? The answer is to work smarter, not harder. I will talk about how Olive Tree is working smarter to tackle these issues. I will also show the results of a revolutionary new technology developed at Olive Tree which will allow us to support numerous mobile platforms with fewer engineers.

Aaron Linne

Digital Media Producer, LifeWay Christian Resources

The Near-Future of the Bible: Scenarios, Methods and Structures of Futures Studies

In any form of communication, it helps to a have common language and pool of ideas to pull from. In talking about the future of the Bible we can explore the standard methodologies and structures of Futures Studies to begin to see the possible scenarios for what the Bible might look like in the near - and distant - futures.

Our present culture has been largely defined by the publish-on-paper manuscript (or "book") made possible by the Gutenberg Press, led by the proliferation of the Bible as resource for individuals to be able to read and study. As we transition away from a publish-on-paper model and move into a digital world, the outside and future trends in technology and the digital medium will continue to have effects on the Bible and our interaction with it.

In this workshop, we will not only explore possible scenarios for a technology-infused near-future of the Bible, but also the basic guidelines for futures studies work.

This workshop will seek to build upon these techniques to build our own Futures scenario for discussion from the expertise of the attendees.

• The Digitally Illuminated Bible - moving the Bible to be a central repository for assets


• The Bible as a Service-Oriented Architecture


• The Bible as a Sacred Cow

Thomas Naef

University of Lausanne

The Background of the new BiBIL Interface and a Free Converter Tool for the Legacy Fonts

• After presenting a prototype of the new www.bibil.net - database interface at the SBL Annual Meeting in Boston 2008, I will talk to the audience of programmers about the technical decisions and the architecture of the application.


• I programmed at the beginning of 2008 a beta version of a Legacy-to-Unicode-Converter for RTF texts. As the functionality is rather restricted in this beta version and the users/testers are keen to use an enlarged version, I will continue to develop it during winter 2008-2009. The result will be presented and discussed.

Craig Rairdin

President – Laridian, Inc.

SMS Texting for Churches

Churches are rapidly adopting text messaging as a way to keep in touch with their youngest and most active members, and Laridian is at the center of this phenomena through a new group texting service at www.ChurchTextingManager.com. Craig will demonstrate group texting, live voting, micro-blogging and other elements of this system, then peel back the covers to talk about implementation details and challenges. This presentation should be of interest to church leaders and IT directors as well as programmers and other technical professionals.

Steven Runge

Scholar-in-Residence – Logos Bible Software

Formal Equivalence versus Dynamic Equivalence: How digital texts can break the conundrum

This talk outlines the basic problem these two extremes have posed to translators, and then offers some practical strategies that allow translators to have the best of both. The Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament project will be used to illustrate how the two extremes can brought together in a single project that honors both the formal precision of the original while accurately communicating dynamic discourse features.

Weston Ruter

Sr. Web Application Developer – Shepherd Interactive

Open Scriptures: Picking Up the Mantle of the Re:Greek – Open Source Initiative

Open Scriptures seeks to be a comprehensive open-source Web repository for integrated scriptural data and a general application framework for building internationalized social applications of scripture. An abundance of scriptural resources are now available online–manuscripts, translations, and annotations are all being made available by students and scholars alike at an ever-increasing rate. These diverse scriptural resources, however, are isolated from each other and fragmented across the Internet. Thus mashing up the available data into new scriptural applications is not currently possible for the community at large because the resources' interrelationships are not systematically documented. Open Scriptures aims to establish a scriptural database for interlinked textual resources such as merged manuscripts, the differences among them, and the links between their semantic units and the semantic units of their translations. With such a foundation in place, derived scriptural data like cross-references may be stored in a translation-neutral and internationalized manner so as to be accessible to the community no matter what language they speak or version they prefer.

Stephen Smith

Zondervan

The Need for a Universal Bible Annotation Format

With the move of Bible applications to the web and increasingly cloud-enabled forms of Bible study, issues of data portability have become more important. Now that personal notes are no longer relegated to the family Bible or PC, how can we make sure that (1) different applications can reliably read and exchange users’ biblical annotations; (2) these annotations are available for the foreseeable future–even for generations (in human, not technological terms); and (3) we can glean not-before-possible insights from these aggregated annotations while still respecting privacy?

This talk will explore the need for an annotation interchange format and describe how Bible Gateway is attempting to prevent data lock-in and promote standards that allow Bible applications to focus on innovative features and interfaces rather than data munging.

Mark Stephenson

Director of Web-Empowered Church – Christian Technology Ministries Intl.

Web-Empower Your Church

The Internet is the most powerful communication technology man has ever created. In all aspects of our lives -- business, leisure, education, etc. -- the Internet is impacting the way we do much of what we do. In addition, the Internet has connected the world together like no other technology. Unfortunately, the Church has been slower to capitalize on the power of Internet technology. The Web-Empowered Church (WEC) is developing powerful web-based ministry-enhancing tools (daily devotions and journaling, sermons, online community, etc.) that you can freely use on your church website to empower your ministries.

The Web-Empowered Church ministry is worldwide ministry and community of believers working together to help churches and ministries take the next step in internet ministry. All the software, online documentation, training, and support is free to all Christian churches and ministries and is already used by hundreds of organizations around the world.

Gabe Taviano

Owner / Designer – Taviano Design; Co-Host – GodsMac.com

Becoming a Digital Disciple

Fame and popularity are constant temptations, even in the arena of Christian ministry. As we implement more cool technology and gain more followers, it's easy to lose focus and forget why we're in ministry in the first place--to glorify God and bring others to Him. In this session, designer/podcaster Gabe Taviano brings us back to the basics and answers the following questions: How do we know when our love of technology has turned into idolatry? How can we use technology to improve our personal walks with Christ? How can we reach others on a global level without sacrificing the opportunities to reach those in our own little corner of the world? How can we unselfishly share our knowledge of technology with others in hopes of eventually leading them to Christ? What does it mean to become a digital disciple, and how can we make it happen?

Antoine RJ Wright

Mobile Technology Evangelist – Mobile Ministry Magazine

Mobile Technology and Connecting Communities

The next technological paradigm to challenge and change how people relate to one another has been exposed by mobile devices and services. From location-based services such as Google Maps, to social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, the ability to connect with one another has moved from large screen and time-dependent media to the more personal and time and location independent arena of mobile devices. Forwarding this change has been smartphones, iPods, and Wi-Fi. Modern culture has demonstrated various ways to connect with this mobile technology, though the Body has been slow to assume the position of a change-agent for using this technology to connect communities. When we understand this ability for mobile technology to enable us to be change agents, we can better adjust our focus of ministry towards more than just those stationary moments. This presentation will therefore cover the impending impacts of mobile devices and services on local and global communities, and how we can be led by Christ towards connecting to all.

Andi Wu / Randall Tan

Computational Linguist – Asia Bible Society

Tree-based Approaches to Biblical Texts

The projects described in this talk are based on the treebanks of Biblical texts presented in BibleTech 2008. A number of applications have been developed using the trees. Included in this talk are:

1. Tree alignment. The Hebrew and Greek trees are linked to the trees of their translation texts. The aligned trees are being used in our Bible translation project to check the accuracy of the translation and to create linked data for other applications.


2. Tree-based translation memory. With the aligned trees, we are able to create translation memories that contain not just words, but linguistic units larger than single words (chunks), such as phrases and clauses. We can also extract collocations – pairs of words that are in certain grammatical relations but not necessarily adjacent to each other. This provides a good knowledge source for the translators.


3. Tree-based concordance. The translation memory is used to create concordances where we can view each chunk or pair in context. This is a good tool for checking the consistency of translation throughout the whole Bible.


4. Automatic Hebrew synonym finder. With the linked data produced by tree alignment, we are able to build a statistical model for computing the semantic distance between words and create a database of Hebrew synonyms. In this model, the various Chinese and English translations of each Hebrew word are used to define the semantic space of the word, and the distance between two words are computed from the degree of overlap between the semantic spaces of each pair of words.


5. Automatic Similar Verse Finder. Treating the collection of all the head-modifier pairs in the tree of a verse as the semantic space of that verse, we are able to compute the degree of similarity between any pair of verses. This enabled us to build an automatic similar verse finder where we can find for a given verse all the related verses in descending degree of similarity.