I haven't quite figured out how to make good use of the comments on Blogos. I don't myself often look at the posted pages, and so i often don't notice for a while when somebody comments on something, which i suppose makes it less useful, and works against the community spirit and all that. Bear with me (email often gets a better response).

So anyway ... Ken Walker posted this comment a little while back (i've selected portions).

... have you considered using Strong's numbers as the basis of your manipulation of the Scripture texts? ... since the Strong's numbers already point more accurately to specific Greek words, why not use them the same way you used the RSV English words? That way you wouldn't have the problem when a word may have one or more meanings in English.

I have indeed thought about it, including this post.

1. Strong's numbers are only freely available for the KJV text (though a commercial version of NASB seems to be available), and i just can't bring myself to use that version anymore.
2. The Strong's numbers refer to Greek "dictionary forms", but they do not disambiguate meanings, any more than the English words do. The Greek term 'logos' (Strong's #3056) is ambiguous is the same way the English term 'word' is: it can mean a literal word, teaching, communication, and of course is used by John to refer to Christ Himself.
3. However, if you have a two parallel translations (Greek and English), aligned at the word level (that's the hard part), the pairings go a long way toward disambiguating both: 'logos'/'saying' as opposed to 'logos'/'word'. Philip Resnick at the University of Maryland has an entire research program built around learning from parallel Bible texts because they're available in so many different languages.
4. Careful and intelligent disambiguation of the meanings of the 5500 terms in the Greek New Testament is the focus of Louw and Nida's Lexicon, which i recently discovered. They wind up with about 25000 distinct meanings, or an average of 5 per term (though of course they're not evenly distributed)

But i have some ideas for how to automatically attach Strong's numbers to other texts than the KJV, and also how to extend the hyper-concordance to allow navigation by either English terms or Strong's numbers. Stay tuned for further developments ...

The author of Strong's Exhaustive Concordance was serious about data long before anybody had conceived of Information Technology as an occupation. My print version of Strong's has 1390 pages of small font, three-column excerpts from Bible verses, indexed by each and every single word in the King James Version. Even function words like "the" are included, though they're presented in a compressed format that just references the verse (10 pages for "the" in an 18-column format!).

In contrast, the preface is a single page: apparently Strong felt the data spoke for themselves. One additional page provides directions and explanations (I wonder what Tufte would say about the presentation). Everything else in the main concordance is just data.

I've been working on converting Strong's Greek Lexicon of the New Testament to an XML format, starting from the text that's incorporated in Crosswire's excellent Sword Project. I'm not quite there yet, but i've been impressed at Strong's intuitive grasp of the value of structured data, even though in a pre-computer era he could only express it via typography.

[read the rest, which didn't quite turn out the way i had hoped]