Thursday, September 04, 2003

A picture named JeremiahVisualization.jpg The Bible Resource Center is a ministry of the American Bible Society. It has a research section with some interesting perspectives on contemporary use of the Bible. For example, in the Research Prototypes area there are guidelines for creating animations (cartoons) of Scripture, with illustrations like this from Jeremiah 1:7.

There are also results in the Translation Research section of a random phone survey of 1000 people and their preferences for Bible reading interesting: 67% prefer to do their Bible reading alone, while less than one in ten people prefer informal small groups (7%) or Bible study groups (6%) for reading the Bible.


11:07:40 PM #  Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.  comment []  trackback []

An acquaintance from church introduced me to someone from one of the Bible Societies who's active in the OSIS Initiative and Bible Technologies Group. It was exciting for me to talk to someone who's actually working in areas i've only been dreaming about for SemanticBible.com. We'll likely talk further, so stay tuned for more developments. But he also asked me what seemed in retrospect like an obvious question: "what are you interested in doing?" The fact that i didn't have a ready answer showed i needed to think more about my goals for SemanticBible.com: so here's the results of that thinking.

My overall objective: to explore new applications of markup and computational linguistic technology to the study of Scripture, with an emphasis on practical tools that encourage understanding and personal transformation.

Some specific shorter-term goals:

  • develop an algorithm for high-quality automatic alignment of Greek lexical resources (like Strong's, Thayers, or Louw-Nida) with an English translation. This would enable me to create hyperlinked search tools so that someone who doesn't know Greek could still access more detailed lexical information (the tools at crosswalk.com are the best on-line ones i know of right now)
  • develop semantic annotations representations for selected portions of Scripture using RDFS and DAML-OWL, and explore how these might be useful for sharing Bible content. The first example may be a categorized collection of Jesus' commands (if i ever get it done!).
  • explore the conversion and development of on-line lexical resources for Scripture study, especially those that are conceptual
  • publish selected studies of Scripture that are focused on practical, everyday Christian discipleship.

I intend to put this list up on the site to keep these goals in clear focus.


10:21:20 PM #  Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.  comment []  trackback []