I'm pleased (and a little surprised!) that the Open Scriptural Information Standard (OSIS) folks put a description of the Hyper-concordance on their front page. This is by far the most popular entry point to my site: i guess that means some people find it useful. But it's always nice to get a wave from people you respect. The OSIS folks are working hard to create a solid standard for XML markup of the Bible and related literature: in a few years, we'll probably wonder how we ever got along without it.  The Hyper-concordance project would have been a lot harder if i'd had to first figure out how to parse some unstructured version of the New Testament text. Having the RSV available in OSIS format made it the proverbial SMOP.

If you're visiting from the OSIS site, welcome! And if you have a serious interest in advancing the digital use of Scripture, take a look at the SemANT idea. This is really the core vision behind semanticbible.com. I'm still in the early definition stages, but it's a big vision that will take enormous effort, so i'll be looking for help once the plan is a little clearer.

By the way, if you use the Hyper-concordance via a bookmark, please make sure you've bookmarked the new version at semanticbible.com (or skip the prose and go straight to the index). The older one at http://radio.weblogs.com/0122862/ will be going away someday.

I've been looking for some images to improve the cosmetics of SemanticBible.com. The conceptual space is enormous. Illuminated manuscripts show the idea of "opening" the text to new understanding, and nicely tie in the textual aspects. There are of course a multitude of Biblical metaphors, and illustrations of these passages abound as well.

Two current favorites: William Holman Hunt's "The Light of the World" (here's a closeup of the lantern) is a classic from the 19th century. Ewangely Buoch's "the Sower" is somewhat odd in its juxtaposition of Jesus and a European agricultural setting around the 16th century, but i like its simple depiction of the profound truth of "the seed is the Word". Feel free to suggest others.

I found a nice collection of art links, indexed according to Biblical themes and characters, at textweek.com.