2010 Speakers List

Jim Albright

Wycliffe Bible Translators

Princess—Publishing Bibles Using Prince XML

Princess is a companion for Prince XML. In publishing a Bible, the final composition requires a graphic artist or someone trained by a graphic artist to insert and place pictures, removing rivers, adjusting for short lines, and balance columns. Princess gives you interactive control to do this.

Prince

Prince is a computer program that converts XML and HTML into PDF documents.
Prince can read many XML formats, including XHTML and SVG.
Prince formats documents according to style sheets written in CSS.

Download Prince at http://www.princexml.com
Copyright © 2002--2007 YesLogic Pty. Ltd.

Princess

Princess is a Windows(tm) GUI for Prince.

Princess adds the following functionality to Prince:

Interactive picture insertion
Interactive picture placement
Interactive picture sizing
Interactive tracking

Michael Aubrey

Trinity Western University

Greek Syntax Databases: Retrospect and Prospect

In 2006 with the release of Logos 3, huge strides were made in the field of Greek language databases with the introduction of the Opentext.org Syntactically Analyzed New Testament for the first time searching the New Testament using syntactic features was possible. Opentext.org made it possible for more precise searches for constructions that would have previously been impossible to find. Likewise, with the recent release of Logos 4 and the work of Andi Wu & Randall Tan, the Cascadia Syntax Graphs of the New Testament are positioned to change things once again with a more accurate and rigorous representation of the Grammar of Hellenistic Greek.

This discussion seeks to compare and contrast the two databases in their strengths and weaknesses with an eye toward the future of Greek syntax databases as visual representations of Greek grammar.

Jonathon Blake

The Ecology of e-Sword

1: E-Sword: A Ten Year Review
1.1: The growth of user created tools.
1.2: Import tools
1.3: Cut and paste tools
1.4: Resource Management Tools
1.5: Support
1.6: Distribution
1.7: Copyright Issues
1.8: Accessibility
1.9: Internationalization
1.A: Platform support
1.B: The rise of other products that use its resources
1.C: ISO Images
1.D: Resources

Frank Bögelsack

BibleStudy2009: A Software Tool for Bible Translation

BibleStudy2009 is a .Net 2.0 based software tool for Bible translation. Target users include students at theological seminaries as well as advanced Bible study laymen who are interested in gaining more insight into the bible. The goal is to give even the layman the chance to dig deeper into the word of God and thus (to) prevent misinterpretation of words or verses.

The software deals with e-Sword 8.x modules as well as native Zefania-XML files, which give the user maximum flexibility in using the resources of preference. Both formats are also capable of exporting translation results from BibleStudy2009.

During the presentation of BibleStudy2009 there will be a live demonstration of the software in order to have a closer look at the translation process and some of its features. The audience will get a valuable impression of how BibleStudy2009 can help in translating the Bible for personal use.

Sean Boisen

Senior Information Architect – Logos Bible Software

A Controlled Vocabulary for Biblical Studies

Dozens of books provide terminology from the field of Biblical studies, principally Bible dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other subject-oriented reference works. However, the terminology used varies between books, authors, and publishers, and doesn’t always include all the terms a user might employ to find information.

The Logos Controlled Vocabulary (LCV) organizes content from multiple Bible dictionaries to integrate information across the Logos library. As a controlled vocabulary, the LCV identifies, organizes, and systematizes a specific set of terms for indexing content, capturing inter-term relationships, and expressing term hierarchies. Like other kinds of metadata, this infrastructure then supports applications in search, discovery, and general knowledge management. The initial version of the LCV (shipping now with Logos 4) comprises some 11,100 terms, and continues to grow as more reference works are added. It also provides the backbone of http://topics.logos.com, a website for user contributions.

This talk will describe the building of the LCV, how we’re using it now, and how we plan to use and extend it in the future. This includes some interesting new capabilities for machine learning from existing prose content. For example:

what are the prototypical Bible references, names, or phrases used to discuss a topic?
can we learn anything about the importance of topics by looking at how much is written about them, how many dictionaries cover them, and other kinds of automated analysis?
what knowledge can be gleaned from the topology of terminology linkage (what links to what)?

Annotating Linguistic Reference in the New Testament

At last year’s BibleTech, my presentation on Organizing the People, Places and Things in the Bible described our semantic database of named entities in the Biblical text. This talk describes how we’ve extended that data to cover other types of linguistic mention in the New Testament -- descriptive phrases, pronouns, verbs with unexpressed subjects, and other referring expressions that aren’t names -- providing the first truly comprehensive semantic index to individual people, places, and things.

The presentation will:

show how the Greek NT has been semantically annotated to build the database
show how syntactic structure is used for constructing semantic representations
discuss the criteria used and the annotation process
show how this data will be used in Logos Bible Software to enrich search and discovery

Joe Burgin

Translating the Bible on a . . . Flash Drive?!

The wired world is migrating toward cloud computing and high end mobile devices, while many Bible translation projects are in areas which do not have broadband access and next generation mobile services. A Bible translator may have, however, periodic access to a personal computer with a USB port.

USB Flash Drives (UFDs) offer us a chance to inexpensively shift accessible computing resources to those who can put them to best use in completing the task of translating the Bible. UFDs are a portable, persistent, durable media which can host a virtualizable, customizable, open source computing platform.

In this scenario a Bible translator
pops a UFD into an available computer which...
loads a virtual machine's snapshot of where the translation work was paused after...
booting a customized Linux distribution...
hosting a lightweight local web server...
running scripts on a local Bible translation database...
updating Bible translation web pages in the web browser...
which the translator edits with a suite of open source applications...
producing the next part of the Bible translation...

which can be uploaded online when a connection is available...
but is always saved to the UFD with the complete custom computing environment that produced it...
and travels with the translator, not staying on the local computer he borrowed.

In our session we will:

Survey the open source options available for building a Bible translator’s UFD
Build a custom Bible translator’s UFD step-by-step (bring your laptop and a UFD to follow along)
Use our custom UFD to engage Biblical texts from manuscript images through the production of local translations
Invite audience suggestions for alternative custom Bible translator’s UFDs

Josh Cason

University of Kentucky

DATR: Linguistic Description of Greek and Other Languages with Pedagogical Applications

The DATR programming language was developed for the purpose of describing the morphology of natural languages in a computable and concise way. It incorporates default inheritance. Each lexical root inherits its various morphological forms from a hierarchical theory of classes. This allows a linguist to develop a lexicon where the majority of the entries are quite short. New entries in the lexicon are added almost effortlessly which I plan to demonstrate during the presentation. Here is an example entry:

MAN1:
<> == CLASS_2
<mor root> == α ν θ ρ ω π.

This results in the following paradigm (called its theorems):

MAN1:<sigma mor sg nom> = α ν θ ρ ω π ο ς.
MAN1:<sigma mor sg gen> = α ν θ ρ ω π ο υ.
MAN1:<sigma mor sg dat> = α ν θ ρ ω π ω.
MAN1:<sigma mor sg acc> = α ν θ ρ ω π ο ν.
MAN1:<sigma mor sg voc> = α ν θ ρ ω π ε.
MAN1:<sigma mor pl nom> = α ν θ ρ ω π ο ι.
MAN1:<sigma mor pl gen> = α ν θ ρ ω π ω ν.
MAN1:<sigma mor pl dat> = α ν θ ρ ω π ο ι ς.
MAN1:<sigma mor pl acc> = α ν θ ρ ω π ο υ ς.
MAN1:<sigma mor pl voc> = α ν θ ρ ω π ο ι.
MAN1:<gender> = masc.

The capabilities of DATR will interest many groups in the Bible tech community. Perhaps, the most relevant application will be to teachers and students of Greek. A morphological theory of Greek, extending my noun theory, could serve as part of a back end to a comprehensive drilling program for students. Furthermore, it could also serve as a basis for software to generate test questions for teachers. I can testify that my first year of Greek would have been much more pleasant if I had had this program. I will demonstrate some of these capabilities.

Linguists will also find DATR appealing for its elegance in theory development. I will demonstrate some abstract properties that were used to bind together nouns in Greek as well as the theoretical conclusions I came to in forming the theory. The shape of my theory is very different than the standard three declensions. In addition, I will mention how the mechanisms of DATR make the task of hypothesis testing and refinement much simpler for field workers modeling undocumented languages.

My work in DATR was supported by an undergraduate research grant from the University of Kentucky for the summer of 2009.

Steven Cummings

Olive Tree Bible Software

Bringing the Power of Search to Mobile

The mobile technology world has made astounding progress in putting the functionality and versatility of desktop applications into hand-held devices. Even Biblical scholarship consumers are coming to expect speed and performance when away from their desks. One area in which this can be seen, is in search capabilities on mobile devices. Searches on these mobile applications tend to be slow and to lack key features found in desktop software. However, breakthroughs have been made in bridging the gap.

Olive Tree's Bible Reader demonstrates speed and power in its search capabilities. Most importantly for the Biblical scholar, it also provides morphological searching of original language texts equal to that of desktop applications— allowing the user to search by lexical or inflected form, and even to use Boolean logic to further refine their search. Come and take an in-depth look at Olive Tree Bible Software's search power.

Dony Donev

Cup & Cross Ministries International

Using Computer Technologies in the Making of the New Bulgarian Translation of the Bible

The Bulgarian Bible Translator (bgBT) is an open source software compiled on QT4 to be used for the preparation of the New Bulgarian Translation of the Bible. From its conception in 2006, the program has undergone a significant evolution, and now includes textual analyses, revision comparison and online parallel translation. The cross-platform implementation of the software accomplished through QT4 will appeal to the software programmer. The web developer will be compelled by the social network used for the final revision of the text. And the Bible translator will be fascinated by the software implementation of various translation theories: from slavishly literal to loosely paraphrastic. But among all, we hope that the simplicity of methodology and the philosophy behind the design motivates others in the field toward the grand goal of the project: the preparation of new Bible translations.

Elizabeth Drescher

Church Divinity School of the Pacific

People of the Facebook?: Biblical Conversation, Community, and Social Media

Traditionally, engagement with scripture has been characterized by sustained reflection with a body of text. While various communities have long gathered to study the Bible—from clandestine Medieval readers of vernacular Bible translations to local Bible study groups to online discussion chains to national and international scholarly and religious conferences—the modern norm has been for biblical reflection even in community to proceed from private, individual reading and reflection into community. This talk explores how the social structuring of new media like Facebook and Twitter changes the ways in which we approach and interpret sacred texts on the basis of new ways of developing and sustaining distributed, collaborative spiritual communities that are promising for both religious organizations and developers of the technologies that support them.

Trey Gourley

CircularSoft & Holy lamp

The Bible Won't Read Itself —21st Century Bible Reading

The Bible is the major focal-point for Christians. But the Bible is so large and daunting, that only an estimated 10% of confessed Christians have read the entire Bible.

There are several important aspects that are needed to be addressed to lay the foundation to successfully and meaningfully read the entire Bible. The first is a goal-oriented plan. What to read, when to read it, and what should be my progress on certain future dates. The second is a method of reading. Should I read the physical Bible, read a digital Bible (online or using an eBook reader), or listen to the Bible through an audio device (such as an iPod)? In addition, it is important to have a motivational support group that will help keep our progress on track.

Another obstacle is the on-the-go nature of today’s Christians. To sit down and read the Bible is a luxury for many Christians. There needs to be a technology to deliver the Bible to Christians and allow them to fit them into their already busy lives.

In the first quarter of 2010, a new web application, Holy Lamp Online, is being released to beta to address these obstacles and important aspects to reading the Bible. Holy Lamp is a powerful online application and social network that empowers Christians with the tools and motivation necessary to read through the Bible.

Holy Lamp places the power back into the hands of Christians to read through the Bible. With customized reading plans, a person can finish in a time comfortable to them. By giving the ability for friends and family to connect through the website, they can help motivate and encourage each other. If someone starts falling behind, the application will suggest shorter readings or modify the time before readings. They will have full access to their readings, along with note taking, scripture highlighting, and progress tracking. They can setup email schedules that will email readings directly to their inboxes. Users will also be able to sign up for multiple reading plans. This is a powerful feature for pastors and church leaders as it allows them to manage Bible studies and sermon lessons online. They can setup scripture readings and notes that will then be emailed before a meeting to any user subscribed to that plan.

Attendees will see a live demo and will have an opportunity to participate in the Holy Lamp Online beta program.

Drew Haninger

Olive Tree Bible Software

Innovations in Mobile Bible Software

The purpose of Bible Software is to help people connect with Scriptures. What new things can we invent to aid in this new mobile man-machine interface?

We will survey some current and out of the box ideas in the architecture, user interface, text presentations, types of data processing and correlations on existing texts. Also will cover sync to other platforms such as web and desktop solutions.

Christopher Heard

Pepperdine University

Digitizing the Introductory Hebrew Bible Classroom

For the 2009-2010 academic year, supported by a Faculty Innovation in Technology and Learning grant from Pepperdine University's Instructional Technology Division, I set out to transform my course "Religion 101: The History and Religion of [Ancient] Israel." Pedagogically, the project sought to increase (inter)active learning in the Religion 101 classroom. Logistically, the project sought to realize the pedagogical goal through migrating to a purely digital workflow, transforming static text resources to audio and video, and expanding the classroom by inviting asynchronous guest appearances from prominent and promising scholars. In this presentation, I will report on the results (through March 2010) of the project, and share lessons learned through this experience.

Steven Johnson

Olive Tree Software

Designing Exceptional User Experiences for Bible Study on Mobile Devices

Mobile devices are replacing more and more activities traditionally done on a desktop or laptop computer. How can we give users the Bible study experience that they have come to expect on their desktop in mobile applications? We want to give the user access lots of rich information without clutter and confusion. The key is to ask the right questions. Focusing on the features of a desktop application will make you create a desktop application not a mobile one. You need to focus on benefits and end goals. What is the user trying to accomplish? Not what is the feature they are using to accomplish that goal.

Today mobile applications must be fun and exciting to use. Just getting the job done is no longer sufficient; an application must be exciting and engaging. Fun and exciting applications enrich Bible study through engaging the user in the data they are looking into. This talk will dive into the new Bible study user experiences that Olive Tree is working on for mobile devices.

David Lang

Macsimum Sermon Impact

Your ministry demands your time, energy, creativity, passion and commitment. But you've got a Mac, so you have a tool that can save you time and energy, spark your creativity, and enable you to keep your commitments without losing your passion. This presentation will show how you can use your Mac to maximize the impact of a sermon or lesson. It will cover how to use Mac Bible software to prepare a message, and then outline an integrated multimedia approach to promoting, presenting, and publishing that message.

We'll begin with a specific passage of Scripture—the story of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11—and show how to use software tools to exegete the passage and develop a series of sermons from it. Next we'll show how you can create simple promotional videos to help build anticipation for this new series. We'll then develop a weekly curriculum to get people studying the passage ahead of time. Naturally, we'll use a Keynote presentation to enhance the actual delivery of the sermon. Once the sermon is delivered, we'll then publish it via podcast.

Repeatedly exposing your congregation to the content of your message will improve their retention and encourage them to begin studying the Bible for themselves. But will it mean a lot of extra work for ministers who are already stretched too thin? It doesn't have to. We'll discuss how integrating multimedia development into your existing sermon preparation can actually help make your sermon prep more effective without significantly increasing the time required. We'll also discuss strategies for getting other people involved in the process.

Combined with a little creativity and thoughtful planning, your Mac can help you achieve Macsimum sermon impact.

Aaron Linne

Broadman & Holman Publishing Group/Lifeway

Bible Navigator X: A Postmortem on Developing for the XBOX 360

We will discuss the full process of development on the XBOX 360, including the steps to get it approved, the development cycles, media/press and future plans.

Paul Mikos

Broadman & Holman Publishing Group

The Hulu Effect: A Call to Bible Publishers for Collaboration in Innovation

How will Bible publishers continue to exist when the core product is “free?” Examine some trends in print Bible and book publishing and the digital publishing explosion. Discuss examples from inside and outside the industry and consider some new ideas and approaches to Bible and reference publishing.

Jonathan Morgan

BPBible

Improving User Annotations in Bible Software

For generations topical verse lists, notes, highlighting and other annotations have been a key part of the Bible student's toolbox. Adding notes and highlighting to the text helps the user to engage with the biblical text and make it truly relevant to them, while topical verse lists also allow users to discover and present what scripture says on a topic and to see how any particular passage relates to the whole scriptural message. While Bible software has made a wide range of relevant resources more accessible to users, these resources cannot replace the need for people to draw their own conclusions, to record them easily, and to refer back to them. Bible software has the potential to integrate these user annotations and make them more useful to the user (and most software has to some extent), but for various reasons many people still prefer to use pen and paper or their word processor.

In this talk, I plan to discuss the goals and benefits of supporting user annotations, as well as what users expect from these annotations. I will present some of the problems faced by users of current Bible software and suggest solutions for these problems, as well as presenting ideas for how Bible software can be used to make user annotations more useful to Bible students. The ideas presented in the talk will be illustrated by examples from the current implementation in BPBible and from work in development.

Neil Rees

British & Foreign Bible Society

Towards Canon-Neutral Bible Computer Applications

There are many different canonical traditions within Christianity and Judaism. The same books of the Bible are ordered differently in different traditions. Yet most of the software and websites seem to assume that the world follows the English-language Protestant book order system. Sometimes a lot of work is done on a publication or program, only for the order to be perceived as "wrong" in another country. Yet a canon-neutral approach is not very difficult.

Automatic Concordancing for Scripture in Any Language

The task of translating, publishing and distributing scripture is core to the Bible Societies’ mission. Much of this effort is focused upon vernacular languages in the developing world. It can take between 15-25 years to complete a translation of the Bible in this context. Whilst the translation task is primary, there is a growing recognition that new translations also need aids for the reader to enable them to engage fully with the text. The UBS Paratext translation editor now ships with a concordance creation module. The Concordance Builder (CB) is a language independent system capable of building a concordance to a Bible automatically. Based upon the statistical glossing technology developed by the British & Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) it requires no tables or lexica. The system has shortened the time needed to create a back of the Bible concordance from months/years to days/weeks. CB automatically identifies key head words, selects references and reference text and creates PDF output of the finished concordance ready for the press.

The paper/presentation will discuss the methodology employed by CB and explain the underlying technologies. Example concordances created with CB will be shown and the benefits and limitations of the system discussed.

Weston Ruter

Open Scriptures

Open Scriptures API: Unified Web Service for Scriptural Linked Data

The OSIS XML standard provides for a lot of free variation in the way it represents scriptural constructs (such as verse boundaries). Because of this, different OSIS documents encoding the same work may have vastly different DOM trees, which make automated traversal of arbitrary OSIS documents very difficult. Aside from this fact, the DOM is not a very programmer-friendly way to query for scriptural data to begin with. In this era of web services and mashups, having a standard, unified way to access scriptural data is a prerequisite for scriptural applications to take off in the same way that applications based on other common datasets have (such as maps). Furthermore, these scriptural datasets should be all explicitly interconnected as Linked Data of the Semantic Web, so that any metadata attached to a word in one translation would also be available to any other translation or manuscript by means of their interconnections. So while OSIS XML is “a common format for many visions”, this talk will explore “a common API for many datasets”; this will be a continuation of BibleTech:2009's talk: “Open Scriptures: Picking Up the Mantle of the Re:Greek – Open Source Initiative”.

Stephen Smith

Zondervan Publishing House

Tweeting the Bible

What can Twitter teach us about how people interact with the Bible? This talk presents the results of a study of two million tweets (almost every tweet that has mentioned a Bible verse since April 2009), showing how people use social media to share Bible-related content online.

We'll explore how people Twitter about the Bible, who and where they are, what they say, and what the data tells us about the future of Bible study on the Internet. We’ll especially look at how the trend toward the realtime web resets people's expectations for online interaction and how Bible translators, publishers, and software developers should respond to this trend.

Randall Tan

Asia Bible Society

Going Between Two Horns of the Dilemma: A Systematic, Incremental Approach to Fleshing Out Higher Discourse Connections in the Greek New Testament

While most would agree that much of the meaning of the Bible resides in the levels of discourse above individual clauses, it is a notoriously difficult to come to an agreement on how to analyze these higher levels of discourse. The twin horns of the dilemma are, on the one hand, that a complete analysis cannot be conducted without a comprehensive understanding of how these higher levels of discourse work, and, on the other hand, that a comprehensive understanding of how these higher levels of discourse work cannot be achieved without a complete analysis.

In the preliminary version of the Greek syntax trees of the Asia Bible Society that were released through Logos as the Cascadia Syntax Graphs of the New Testament, “clear groupings of clauses had been connected together into sentences, especially when subordination or ellipsis are involved.” However, the identification of sentences had not undergone vigorous testing. This discussion presents an idea on how to go between the two horns of the dilemma and begin to flesh out higher discourse connections in the Greek New Testament using a systematic, incremental approach.

The premise is that coordination and subordination, continuity and discontinuity between Greek clauses can be better understood using adaptive, multivariate testing. Neither a comprehensive understanding nor a complete analysis is necessary at the outset of the investigation. To enable this kind of testing preliminary connections have already been made between clauses, with dependency relations tentatively indicated by one clause always being the head when two clauses are connected together. Other variables that enter into this evaluation include (1) conjunctions used (coordination or subordination, type of logical connection) or lack thereof; (2) the semantics of connected clauses (the presence or lack thereof of words/phrases that are similar in meaning or that develop continuity in action/event progression); and (3) referential relations (the presence or lack thereof of participants as referred by pronouns, implied in verbs, etc.). Automated analysis and human judgment can go hand in hand in making systematic, incremental progress towards a better understanding of the higher levels of discourse of the Greek New Testament.

James Tauber

A New Kind of Graded Reader

We will discuss a new approach to language learning based on texts, with a special focus on learning Greek from the New Testament.

We will be covering how various linguistic analyses of a text such as the Greek New Testament can help determine the order in which vocabulary and grammar is introduced and how each new word or grammatical concept can be shown in the context of the text.

Lastly, we will also discuss various algorithms that have been implemented as well as open source Python code for producing this new kind of graded reader.

Using Pinax and Django For Collaborative Corpus Linguistics

Django is a popular, Python-based Web framework. Pinax is a platform for rapidly building sites on top of Django, particular sites with a strong collaborative focus.

After introducing Django and Pinax, we will discuss Pinax-based tools the speaker is developing to help with web-based collaboration on corpus annotation with applications from lexicography to morphology to syntax to discourse analysis.

Gabe Taviano

Digital Disciples

Digital Disciples is a growing network of free local tech /creative gatherings. Individuals participate to have their skills refined and to sharpen their faith through Bible study and prayer.

I was uncertain what God was going to do through Digital Disciples when I presented at BibleTech: 2009. One year later, I now see that God is igniting a revival through Christ-following creatives and tech-enthusiasts.

David Trotz

Olive Tree Bible Software

Rethinking Daily Reading

Biblical daily reading plans traditionally tend to lack flexibility and innovation. Typically they are charts set in stone and when a day is missed the dilemma of what to do next pops up. Does a user continue from where they missed and try to remember their day offset every time they reference the chart or do they skip the missed day or days of reading to stay on schedule. With the power that computers and handhelds provide us its only natural that we should use them to help us solve this problem and further enhance what it means to have a daily reading plan. Join us for a discussion on Olive Tree's innovative approach to this problem, and where we think its heading in light of the social media revolution.

Antoine RJ Wright

Mobile Ministry Magazine

Mobile's Christ-Led Encounters

Mobile has now taken place within the regular consciousness of most mainstream thought. From sociology to psychology, transportation to entertainment, Facebook to the Good Book, mobile is now at the tip of every tongue in being that next great area. Mobile though suffers from the same growing pains that every other media suffers from when it’s new—specifically, what's its relevance. Within the Body, we see many examples of mobile taking root as an engagement, evangelistic, and opportunistic medium. Within this topic, we will look at some of these areas that mobile has taken root in, as well as exploring some areas that have not yet been explored.

This presentation will also engage the audience to utilize their mobile devices in order to see first hand how a simple handshake can open the door for an engaging Christ-encounter.

Andi Wu

Asia Bible Society

From Identical Strings to Similar Strings—Intelligent Search of Biblical Texts Based on Syntax and Semantics

Automatic text search is important for the study of the Bible. Traditional search techniques are able to find texts that are identical to the query term, but not texts that are different in form but identical or similar in meaning. In this talk, I will present an approach where this limitation no longer exists. The new search methods deploy the latest research in computational linguistics and can go beyond identical string to find texts that “mean the same thing”. The search is based on a complete syntactic treebank of the Bible and the alignment data between the manuscript trees and a number of translations of the Bible. These new databases have enabled us to represent the “meaning” of linguistic units and compute the semantic distances between different chunks of texts. Part of this research was presented in BibleTech: 2009. Since then we have generalized the search from similar verses to similar texts of any size. By linking the Septuagint to the Hebrew trees, we are now also able to go across the language boundaries between Old Testament and New Testament, with the whole Bible as the domain of search.

2009 Speakers List

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.

In this session participants will:

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 not skin

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.

What the presentation will cover

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 Bögelsack

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.

Possible future scenarios to discuss:

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

Two topics will be treated:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

2008 Speakers List