Jim Albright

Wycliffe Bible Translators

Publish Bibles/Dictionaries Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

This session will be a lot of practical how to….

• Use CSS for formatting.
• Choose selectors and properties.
• Create dictionary guidewords. Guide words are found at the top of the page and tell you the first and last entry on that page.
• Create Scripture headings similar to dictionary guide words telling the first and last book-chapter-verse entry on that page.
• Create a different paragraph style for the first paragraph following a section head without creating a special tag for it.
• Hang a dictionary entry into the margin.
• Create different punctuation before and after the first, middle, and last elements.
• Create hyperlinked locator for dictionary showing letters of alphabet with reverse video effect for current letter. One expert said it couldn’t be done.
• Insert picture with caption in scripture/dictionary and format it.

Sample Scripture.XHTML and Dictionary.XHTML files will be made available along with matching CSS to produce high quality output.

Rick Brannan

Logos Bible Software

Why Another Greek New Testament?

In November 2010, the Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software published "The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition" (SBLGNT, also known as the SBL Greek New Testament), edited by Michael W. Holmes. It was released not only for Logos Bible Software users, but multiple formats are also available under a free license at http://sblgnt.com. The SBL and Logos have also published a high quality print edition.

But where did this new edition of the Greek New Testament come from? Why was it done? And more importantly for the BibleTech audience, how was it done? This talk walks through how Logos and the SBL understood the need for a new, critically edited yet freely available Greek New Testament. Then it gives an overview of the processes (formal and informal) that led to the production of this new edition of the Greek New Testament.

Sean Boisen

Logos Bible Software

Using the Bible Knowledgebase for Information Integration

In 2009 I reported on the Bible Knowledgebase (BK), a machine-readable collection of semantically-organized data about people, places, and things in the Bible. This talk will describe how the BK now functions as an essential information resource for Logos, tying together information across the software. In addition, I’ll discuss the continued work on the data over the last two years, including:

• building a database of Biblical Events
• adding unnamed entities to the database
• coordinating information about these entities with the Logos Controlled Vocabulary

I’ll also present prototypes for visualizing BK data to enhance discovery and exploration in the Biblical text.

Kenneth Brown

The Computer Workshop

Use Microsoft OneNote to Organize Your Life and Work

Microsoft OneNote is a great program for keeping track of all the details of your personal life, your work, your various projects, your travel plans, your Bible Study, and any other information that you want to organize and track. The notebook system in OneNote is a fabulous way of keeping everything you are involved with in front of you at all times.

It is also a great way to conduct research from your Logos Library. It is far better than using Microsoft Word because of the way that OneNote organizes everything you cut and paste from Logos into an individual note card.

Joshua Cason

University of Kentucky

Logic, Computation, and the Bible: Formal Methods for Theology

What does logic have to do with theology? After the exegesis is over, after we have considered the textual and historical contexts, after we have parsed the sentences, we conclude with a judgment on the passage's meaning. Logic allows us to carry our studies further. Just as a software engineer may verify the correctness of his or her code, logic lets the exegete verify his interpretation against previous exegetical results for consistency. Logic also allows us to deduce new information by drawing out inferences packed in the text. We will attempt to motivate the adoption of logic as a method in computational theology with practical issues like those above and also with philosophical and theological considerations about the nature of revelation. We will then wrap up with an introduction to computational semantics and automated reasoning technologies.

Tiffany Chase

Project Ebenezer

Bridging the Gap

Project Ebenezer is a web-based ministry which seeks to bridge the gap between academia and the Church by offering the theologian an avenue to serve the Church, thereby giving the Church better access to its own teachers. This talk will explore the unique opportunity that the internet creates for the Church and present the ways Project Ebenezer is addressing it.

Matthew C. Clarke

Just Doing My Own Thing

What Does the Bible Say about Technology?

The influence of technological progress in our world is indisputable. But what does that "progress" look like under the light of Scripture? While there is no definitive Biblical position on the nature and purpose of technology, there are nevertheless many references to technology in the Bible that can guide our thinking about the value of technology and the moral qualities of technologists.

Based on a comprehensive study across the whole Bible, this presentation will examine verses about God's use of technology, the role of craftsmen, musical instruments, metal refining, design and construction, communication technology, medicine, agriculture, weapons and measurement. We'll consider the relationship between technology and redemption, and discuss Biblical comments on our responsibility to use technology appropriately. There are also revealing passages on idolatry that highlight the risk that technology can make people believe they no longer need God.

This presentation draws insight directly from the Bible to guide our attitudes as Christian technologists.

Steven Cummings

Olive Tree Bible Software

BibleReader 5: Reinventing Bible Study for Mobile

Mobile devices are taking over. Smart phones and tablet devices are the new focal point in the technology market. They are replacing a desktop computer for an increasing number of functions. With this understanding, Olive Tree, a pioneer in mobile Bible software, has released BibleReader 5 - Bible software with all the richness of a desktop Bible software package, designed for the device on-the-go. We will look at the innovative steps taken to bring a robust Bible study experience to the mobile world.

Eli Evans

Logos Bible Software

A Life in the Clouds: Designing for Today's Distributed Computing Lifestyle

Time was, you wrote a program that was installed and executed on a single user's computer. If you were adventurous, you might target two (or three!) desktop operating systems, and if you were really adventurous, you might pull down some data from the Internet.

Life was simpler then.

Nowadays the "one user, one installation" world seems oddly quaint, what with all the "smart" phones, the teeny-tiny laptops, the iThises and iThats that we carry around -- never mind "the Internet", which in spite of everything grew into a full-fledged applications platform. Suddenly, the user interface is disintegrated: "Software" isn't so much a program you install on a computer as it is a bundle of apps and services distributed across a complex and ever-shifting landscape of platforms and devices, each with its own unique capabilities and form factor. Users expect to coordinate activities on multiple devices in order to accomplish a single task, and what's worse, they think that's a completely natural and sensible way to go about it. Worse yet, they're right. If you don't have "an app for that" yet -- get cracking!

How do we design and build software for such a crazy mixed-up world? We'll look at how a few companies are answering that question.

David Gagne

International House of Prayer

The Convergence of Technology and Prayer

I serve in the IT/Media departments for the International House of Prayer in Kansas City. We have a 24/7 live prayer and worship room that is streamed live on the internet worldwide, with thousands of concurrent viewers. We are leading people in a life of prayer and teaching them to pray for their churches and communities and to meditate on His Word. Personally I serve 36 hours per week behind the scenes as a technology engineer both for our video content and our local ministry, and spend 12 hours per week in corporate prayer.

I will discuss how the prayer movement globally is being strengthened through use of technology and the benefits and challenges of maintaining a life of prayer while working long hours on technology.

Drew Haninger

Olive Tree Bible Software

Laughing at Radical Changes in Electronic Publishing Especially as it Relates to Bible Software

Rob Jex

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Visualizations of the New Testament

Imagine you’re trying to help a group of children, youth, or adults better understand and visualize the stories of the Bible. What visual resources are freely available to help? Where can you find such quality visual resources?

To help individuals better learn, live, and share the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is creating and making available scores of new videos on stories from the New Testament.

This presentation will:

• Show how scores of high-quality videos are being produced in the Utah desert with an authentic looking cast and life-size sets depicting the Holy Land.
• Highlight a new series of 64 videos for children created using the parallax technology to better capture the interest of young viewers and help them gain a familiarity and love for Bible stories.
• Provide the opportunity for discussion on how these and other Church Bible resources might be helpful to you in your ministries and be made available for broad use and sharing.

Aaron Linne

B&H Publishing Group

The Road to MyStudyBible.com: Prioritizing Feature Sets

In September of 2010, LifeWay and B&H Publishing Group launched the beta site for MyStudyBible.com, an integrated content site designed specifically for studying the Bible. In this retrospective, Aaron Linne - Digital Marketing Manager for B&H Publishing Group - does a post-mortem on the launch features and subsequent updates to MyStudyBible.com, describing how features were chosen, prioritized, and released.

Scott Magdalein

YouVersion & ChurchOnline.org

Volunteerism in Bible Technology

YouVersion maintains a healthy pace of innovation, growth, and expansion because of the work of volunteers. Currently, as of the beginning of February, YouVersion has reached almost 15 million people with 10 full time staff (and a few hybrids) and over 150 actively engaged volunteers.

• Existing volunteer roles
• Future volunteer roles
• How we enlist volunteers
• How we manage volunteers in each capacity (tech vols are managed differently from support vols)
• Where we can improve and who we’re learning from

We, as Bible technologists, need to remove ourselves from the tech world and realize the opportunity that exists to make use of the generosity of Bible-lovers to increase innovation around and the reach of the Bible.

Aaron Marshall

Founder of Potluck & CHURCHSMO

User Adoption Strategy: The Art of Getting People to Use What You Make

If you build anything, inevitably you'll experience the pain that comes from discovering people are not using it as much as you had hoped. Sometimes it means what you built sucks, but often you’ve simply neglected to have a User Adoption Strategy.

Here is what this talk will cover:

• The pitfalls of introducing people to something new.
• Simple steps for planning a successful roll out.
• Targeting late adopters. Win them. Win the war.
• Designing simple & sophisticated.
• The art of creating quick & effective How To’s.
• Ensuring you have the key ingredients: persuasion, empathy & analytics.

Aaron Marshall has helped many leaders, ministries and businesses successfully adopt new technologies and services. Learn practical techniques and wisdom to make sure your latest creations get adopted.

Judah Musick

MarketplaceTraining.tv

Using Technology to Connect, Educate and Engage People Around Your Cause

We are in the pre-launch stage of a community based website called marketplacetraining.tv. It is designed to Connect, Educate and Engage Christians around the globe so they may live out their calling to its fullest potential. We are at an intersection in history where Christians everywhere are waking up to the fact that the place that they spend 90% of their time awake (work) is an extraordinary mission field. They are realizing "Their Business is Their Mission".

We believe that technology can bridge the gap of Networking, Content Distribution, Training and Project Management in a way never before possible, and as a result reap 100X returns for the Kingdom.

Our goal is to create the world’s largest, and most accurate, database of Marketplace Ministries, Marketplace Teachers, Speakers, Authors and Coaches and then use technology to connect them to the millions of believers who are just waiting to be unlocked for Kingdom Impact.

Watch this short video clip to get a better understanding of what I am talking about.

Andrew Potter

APC Consulting

Introduction to the Orthotomeo Project

The orthotomeo project is the culmination of several years of contemplation about theological hermeneutics and theology in general. I believe the orthotomeo project can revolutionize the way that theology is practiced. I envision a website that will facilitate dialog among all facets, levels, and types of theological argumentation in a way which has never been possible before.

It will not only focus on the biblical texts themselves, but also the theological systems which are based on them. I believe it is not enough to provide resources for investigating the Bible. The Bible must also be interpreted. Even a casual observer will notice that several interpretations, understandings, and practices stem from the same book, the Bible. The reason for this is not the biblical text but variations and difficulties in interpreting the Bible. The orthotomeo project is an attempt to bring more attention to the aspect of biblical and theological interpretation. I believe this something that is missing in the current landscape of bible software.

A theological system is a set of relationships between statements (e.g. Bible texts) and interpretations of statements, which lead to further statements. Combinations of this basic triad (statement - interpretation - statement) ultimately build a network of theological assertions which form a system. The orthotomeo project endeavors to store these statements, interpretations, and relationships in such a way as to provide various means of viewing and querying the data.

The orthotomeo project is currently in the early stages of development. I hope to have a working proof of concept for BibleTech 2011.

Neil Rees

British & Foreign Bible Society

The Challenge of Sign Languages

Christians who were born deaf, cannot hear and often use a Sign Language as their preferred means of communication. Improving computer technology in video production, avatars and animation is opening up new possibilities for using Sign Language in computer applications and online. The challenge is to harness this technology to expand technology to the Deaf.

Weston Ruter

Open Scriptures

Open Scriptures API: Distributed Model for Interlinked Text Development

In the continuing efforts at Open Scriptures to produce an open platform for the development of scriptural data and its applications, work continues on the most fundamental layer: the representation of the scriptural text. This talk will look at a normalized way to store text in a relational database as tokens and structures, and also how such a text can be versioned as it undergoes continuous improvements (e.g. making a translation or creating a critical text); as the text can exist in multiple revisions/editions, it can also be branched so as to introduce variant or alternate readings; it can also be forked to introduce a new derivative work linked back to the original. (Much of this will be applying lessons from the Git distributed version control system.) In addition to links between text editions, the representation of links between different texts (interlinearization) will be examined at the level a single scripture server and also in the context of a distributed network of scripture servers which all have texts that are potentially undergoing development and how the interconnections between the texts can be maintained to enable scriptural linked data.

Brian Seagraves

Biblical Studies Foundation

Techniques for Search in the Biblical Domain

With more and more content being created every day, and old content continually being digitized, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to locate the best content on a topic or scripture verse/passage. The answer to this problem is: search. More than ever before, when people have a question, they "Google" it. In the same way, when people want to find information in the Bible, they search for it, but most of the search functions on today's Bible sites are tied to a specific translation. So, if a user has memorized a different translation, their query fails. And, when searching content that is biblical in nature, most search engines do not understand the verse reference, and, as such, they parse it like it is just another collection of words and symbols. This also causes poor results to be returned to the user.

This talk will cover techniques for searching the Bible, Biblical content, and the Web by describing and demonstrating a search engine that: understands the verse reference, uses synonyms and multiple translations from which to build its index, and uses the wealth of extra-biblical resources to enhance the process of locating the best matches to a user’s query.

Jonathan Smith

Knox Theological Seminary

Educating the 21st Century Pastor: The Intersection of Theology and Technology

What does theological education look like in the 21st century? Perhaps you haven’t thought about that question before, but many people in the field of theological education are beginning to take this question very seriously.

How do we train people who can’t relocate to a traditional seminary yet desire theological education? Only a few years ago, arriving at an answer would have been costly and difficult. Now, because of advances in digital media, web-based communication technology enables people to be virtually connected from all over the world. Theological education is no longer geographically restricted.

What does this mean for the church? In short, it means that we can now train people where they live (truly a return to the first century model) rather than having them leave the context God has placed them in to go to seminary for five or six years. We call this “contextualized training.” This means that potential seminary students can start to make a difference in their local communities.

This talk will focus on the intersection between emerging technologies and theological application and will discuss the over impact on theological education.

Stephen Smith

Zondervan

Making Bible Search Results Relevant

We expect Google searches to return instantly and to display the best results first. Why do we accept less in Bible software? As an industry, we tune our search engines to handle specialized queries while ignoring common obstacles that people face when searching the Bible. Our goal should be to interpret the intent of everyone—from the scholar to the casual user of a mobile Bible app—and connect them with the biblical text they’re seeking.

This talk explores how people search and navigate the Bible on BibleGateway.com and discusses technology we’ve developed to provide high-quality, relevant search results to our visitors. We’ll look at the data sets we analyzed, the largely open-source technology and algorithms we used, the results we achieved, and possible future directions.

Matthew Talbert

Xiphos

Architecture of a Bible Study Software

How often do you get to take a peak insde someone else's Bible software? This talk will discuss the high-level architecture of Xiphos, an open source Bible study program built with The SWORD Project. Along with a brief history, the talk will focus on our current needs which have led to a mild re-writing and rethinking of our architecture. Specifically, these include alternate versification capability (non-KJV), internationalization issues, cross platform needs, and our desire to have contributions from a wider range of people.

A specific focus will be on opening up development to a wider range of skills and people, by creating integration points for plugins developed in a variety of languages, or by switching output filtering to easily editable CSS.

James Tauber

MorphGNT: The Next Generation

MorphGNT is a freely available, morphologically tagged and lemmatized Greek New Testament that I've maintained for the last 17 years. For most of that time, the only changes made were corrections. In the last few years, however, I've embarked on a number of significant changes to almost every aspect of the database: from normalized forms to a lattice of lemmas and from a new morphological tag set to a change from the UBS text to that of the SBLGNT. This talk will cover both the changes already made and the work in progress as well as the Python tools developed to assist in producing this next generation MorphGNT.

Peter Venable

Logos Bible Software

Building a Semantic Clause Database of the Greek New Testament

In previous BibleTech talks, Sean Boisen described a database of People, Places, and Things mentioned in the Biblical text, and described how the entire text of the Greek New Testament was annotated to create a comprehensive semantic index. This talk will describe how we combined these word-level semantic annotations with syntax graphs to create a database of semantically-annotated clauses, and show how the new database enables some novel ways of exploring the text.

Keith Williams

Tyndale House Publishers

Social Scripture: The Bible on Facebook

Facebook is a central player in the web, with fully one third of the US population visiting the site in November 2010, and the Bible is making its mark on the platform.
In this presentation, we’ll look closely at the presence of the Bible on Facebook, especially through Pages. We'll look at the opportunities, limitations, and challenges posed by engaging people with the Scriptures in this medium. I'll explore some of the more popular Bible-centered pages on Facebook and discuss the different ways that they are engaging the text and mention patterns that emerge.

I manage the page for the New Living Translation, and I will be sharing some specific, detailed data from that page. I will share trends, statistical analysis, and anecdotal observations from the different ways people respond to different kinds of Scriptural and Bible-related content. I will also offer some reflections on the theology behind the phenomenon of sharing the Bible on Facebook—both the theological implications of using the Bible in this medium, and the theological approach that is often exhibited in actual posts and interactions. How can we ensure that the Bible is influencing people through Facebook, rather than allowing Facebook to influence how we are interacting with the Bible?

Antoine RJ Wright

Mobile Ministry Magazine

Mobile Ministry: Definition, Contexts, and State of the Body

My talk will be a high-level, yet contextual explanation regarding mobile ministry; starting first with its observed definition, the contexts which have led to this definition, and the overall state of spiritual and technological achievements that have occurred in this space. This presentation is designed as an overview to the entirety of mobile ministry applications, yet contains technical, business, and statistical information for several types of listeners.

Andi Wu / Randall Tan

Asia Bible Society

A Data-Driven Approach to Word Sense Differentiation

Current search in Biblical texts are mostly word-based with no differentiation between the different senses of words. To move beyond this limitation and attain higher accuracy in computer search, we used data-mining methods to distinguish different senses of words by leveraging our data on the syntactic analysis of the Hebrew OT and the alignments between the Hebrew text and various translations.

Our approach is built on two basic assumptions: (1) Words used in different senses tend to occur in different linguistic contexts (playing different grammatical roles and having different lexical collocations); and (2) Words used in different senses tend to be translated to different words in another language. Using the linguistic context supplied by our syntactic treebank and the sense distinction data from translations that are word-linked to the Hebrew text, we implemented the following procedures: (1) Collect linguistic contexts of all content words; (2) Collect English and Chinese translations of the words in 8 different versions; (3) Build a feature set of contexts and translations for each occurrence of the words in the Bible; (4) Use clustering methods to group word occurrences into different sense groups; and (5) Manually clean up the data. In light of the ongoing manual checking process, additional measures are being implemented. These include tracking of manual changes in comparison with automatically generated data to inform improvement in parameters used for clustering and to provide additional information on the features consistently found to differentiate distinct senses.

The end results are: (1) the number of senses for each content word in the Hebrew Bible is identified; and (2) each occurrence of the word in the text is linked to a particular sense. The data is being used to build a sense-based concordance and eventually a sense dictionary that lists all senses and the specific instances of each sense. The initial data is created quickly and efficiently from existing data and is comprehensive, reusable, and easily updated and revised. It represents one promising avenue for speeding up and facilitating future lexicographical work.

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

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.