The Ezra Project

I met Tobias Klein on the first day of BibleTech and learned about what he is doing when, at the end of a session, I walked out of the conference room and was waiting to talk to someone. Tobias was standing next to me, so I introduced myself to him and began to engage in chit-chat, and talked with him into the start of the next session. Tobias is temporarily living in the San Jose area, doing a church-based training program. On the side, he has recently been working on the "Ezra Project," which he described as a single function application for personal Bible study, and he offered to give me a demo.

Outline Function

What Tobias has done is make it very easy for people to create their own outline of Scripture in a web-based interface. As he explained, making your own outline is one of the key ways that people can process their own understanding of how each book of the Bible is put together. I played with the outlining function for a few minutes and was impressed with the straightforward way in which it made Scripture outlining easy. I will say that Tobias had to explain briefly how to use the interface -- a weakness that should be easy to remedy, given Tobias's excellent user-interface sensibilities.

What intrigues me the most about the Ezra Project outlining function is that it enables each user of the software to engage personally with understanding Scripture in terms of outlining. As Tobias says, making an outline is one of the key ways that people can really wrestle with how a book of the Bible fits together. So helping people to annotate Scripture in this way in a web-based tool has incredible possibilities for personal Bible study. The outlining function is already available online at the Ezra Project website, and it's a lot of fun to use. And when you're all finished, you can get an exported PDF of your outline for each book (XML or HTML would be nice, too!).

Tagging Function

Tobias also showed me, on his development notebook, a tagging function that is not yet in production (but is currently available in testing -- go to the development website for more information). The tagging function lets you create a selection of Scripture verses, then define tags that should be applied to each of those verses. The tags can either be global, across the entire Bible, or local to the specific book. Again, giving people the ability to annotate for themselves what topics they see as being covered by each verse can really help them to wrestle themselves with the meaning of Scripture.

Conclusion

Tobias's work on the Ezra Project combines an excellent, intuitive user interface, with a clear vision for helping people to do personal Bible study. Rather that pre-digesting Scripture for people like most Bible study tools, these tools help people to digest Scripture for themselves. Frankly, I haven't seen anything else like it, so I'm looking forward to seeing what else Tobias dreams up for the Ezra Project.

WordBloom

When we went down to the main BibleTech conference room on the first morning, there were only two tables for vendors. One of them was for a web application called WordBloom. Keith and I were intrigued by what looked like a visual thesaurus on screen and made a note to come back and find out more later. We ended up visiting with Doug Burrier, the owner of WordBloom. Doug is the energetic pastor of Northwest Church in Atlanta, and a warm and personable man. Doug had a vision of creating something like the visual thesaurus with Bible knowledge. and during the past year or so he brought together a team and built this application that allows you to explore the conceptual world of the Bible through a graph of connections between Scripture verse references and topics. Every time you search a topic or reference, the application displays a "word bloom," which is Doug's term for a network of connections to related terms. If you click another term in the bloom, it becomes the center of a new bloom. As you explore, at any point you can gather what you've found into studies, which can become the basis for your personal exploration of Scripture. A personal WordBloom subscription is $36/year. I'm looking forward to having more opportunity to explore this outstanding application.

BibleTech 2010 General Review

BibleTech, a conference sponsored and organized by Logos Bible Software, brings together all kinds of people interested in the intersection between the Bible and technology -- from Bible publishers, to Bible software developers, to interested users. I came to BibleTech with two goals: to meet a lot of people, and to learn about what everyone is doing around this intersection, which is the public square at the corner of Bible way and digital avenue. Both of my aims were amply satisfied by the rich content of the sessions and by the beginning of good relationships with a number of people.

Sessions, Day 1

A typical conference begins, and perhaps ends, with a keynote session, giving a vision and inspiring attenders. But BibleTech is not a typical conference: There are no keynotes. Instead, Bob Pritchard likes to open these conferences with a simple time of introductions, going around the room and hearing who is present, so that we can begin to make connections with each other.

I admit, I like keynotes, and I was disappointed not to have one to kick off the conference. I like being inspired and challenged, I like having the vision for the conference laid out at the beginning, setting the direction for the rest of the experience. But I will also admit that, for this particular conference, I really appreciated having the opportunity to find out who else is present. By the end of the session, I knew which other Bible publishers were present (Zondervan, Crossway, B&H, and Tyndale), and some people that I would really be interested in talking further with. My primary purpose at this conference was to connect with people and to find out what they're interested in and doing. The introductions session gave me a very good jump on doing that, so I'm grateful.

I did end up receiving an inspiring message the first day of the conference, but it came at the end of the day during the demo session, when Aaron Linne was talking about BibleNavigatorX on the Xbox360. More on that later.

Here are the sessions I attended on Day 1 -- more about each of them later:

• Automatic Concordancing for Scripture in Any Language, Neil Rees
• Using Computer Technologies in the Making of the New Bulgarian Translation of the Bible, Dony Donev
• People of the Facebook?: Biblical Conversation, Community, and Social Media, Elizabeth Drescher
• The Hulu Effect: A Call to Bible Publishers for Collaboration in Innovation, Paul Mikos
• Innovations in Mobile Bible Software, Drew Haninger
• DATR: Linguistic Description of Greek and Other Languages with Pedagogical Applications, Josh Cason
• Open Scriptures API: Unified Web Service for Scriptural Linked Data, Weston Ruter
• Demo night

Sessions, Day 2

Day 2 of BibleTech was, for me, quite a bit more focused and technical than Day 1. I didn't spend as much time meeting and talking with people, and it was a shorter day, since we had to leave the conference at 2:45 (2 hours before the end) in order to return our rental car on time to National Car Rental (whose service I recommend -- our inexpensive-to-rent Toyota Yaris was a great little car, a lot of fun to drive, effortless at, ahem, 90 mph, and very efficient with fuel).

Here are the sessions I attended on Day 2:

• Annotating Linguistic Reference in the New Testament, Sean Boisen
• Going Between Two Horns of the Dilemma: A Systematic, Incremental Approach to Fleshing Out Higher Discourse Connections in the Greek New Testament, Randall Tan
• Greek Syntax Databases: Retrospect and Prospect, Michael Aubrey
• Using Pinax and Django For Collaborative Corpus Linguistics, James Tauber

I will be posting about each of these sessions over the coming days -- stay tuned for more!

General Reflections

BibleTech 2010 was a well-organized and well-run conference. Jayson Bradley of Logos organized it, and he did a great job of lining up interesting speakers and of dealing with last-minute cancellations. He also did a nice job of providing excellent meals and good coffee, and of being an all-around great guy.

Most of what I learned this year was focused around specific people and their projects. In addition to the sessions that I attended, which resulted in a non-personal connection with each of the presenters and their projects, I made personal connections with quite a number of other people and the things that they're doing. Those connections are, I believe, even more valuable than the sessions I attended. They say that conferences are better for the connections you make than for the sessions you attend. For me, BibleTech 2010 was definitely that way. As I am able, and with the permission of those with whom I spoke, I hope to write about many of these people over the coming days.

I began writing this post while sitting at San Francisco airport on Saturday, Mar. 27 after two full days of conferencing and enjoying the California sunshine. Now it's Monday afternoon, Mar. 29, inside my office in the Chicago area. As the experience of BibleTech begins to meld into memories, I am hopeful that the relationships that were born there, and the experiences that I had, will benefit both my employer and many others. So I am grateful to Logos for hosting this conference, and I'm looking forward to next year.

How about you? Were you at BibleTech? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments and in links to your own blogs.

BibleTech 2010

I am currently at BibleTech in San Jose, hearing from a variety of speakers about what they're doing with technology and the Bible, and connecting with as many people as possible. Over the next few days, I will be posting reviews of the sessions and reflections on what I am learning.

If you learned about this site at BibleTech, welcome! 

This morning, during the initial introductions, I also introduced the BibleTech crowd to the Digital Bible Forum, laying before them the goal of collecting information and generating discussion around digital Bible technologies. 

So tell me, what you are doing in relation to the Bible and digital technologies, and what you are interested in?

The Age of Engagement

One of the greatest changes that the internet enables is for people in different places to have a relationship with one another through the online, digital world. People can now find others who are interested in just about any specific topic, including a particular book or author, and form communities online around that interest. This is old news -- discussion groups are, with email, among the oldest uses of the internet (see, e.g., Google Groups, which incarnates Usenet).

What is a more recent development, though, is the use of online social services -- most notably Facebook -- to maintain one's online social life.

This climate means every author, every book, and every type of Bible, can be the focus for an online community. Sadly, publishers have been a bit slow on the uptake -- they have not recognized the opportunity or participated in helping to make this a reality.

Even though I'm not particularly a fan of the Huffington Post, I did appreciate and agree with some of the comments along these lines that Arianna Huffington made at Tools of Change in February, in her keynote address (insight in digital publishing knows no political boundaries). Here are the relevant graphs:

"Books don't end with the printed page. Books are conversation starters. That's really what we can do online better than anywhere else."

"The more we resist the change, the more we try to go back to some golden age that does not exist, the more we are missing the golden age that does exist right now, and that's the golden age of engagement. For the first time, news consumers and book readers don't just want to read, they want to engage with what they are reading. They want to talk back. They want to continue the conversation with friends on Facebook or let others know on Twitter what they're reading."

"Self-expression is the new entertainment.... People want to express themselves, to be part of the times we are living in -- whether it's politics or culture or entertainment, people want to heard, and now they can be heard.... And we need to celebrate that moment."

How can we "celebrate that moment" of opportunity for self-expression and social engagement online? Here are a few ideas of how we can help people express themselves and engage with others online while using digital Bibles:

• Personal Note-Taking. People ought to be able to take notes on what they are reading, and they ought to be able to share these notes with others as they see fit.
• Discussion Groups, both public and private. There ought to be a variety of discussion groups available, and people should be able to form their own private discussion groups and invite their friends.
• Integration with popular social-sharing sites (Facebook and others) -- sharing links and content, posting thoughts and reflections.
• Content feeds and widgets that people can use to post their own notes or content to other sites.

What do you think? How else can digital Bibles help people to express themselves and engage in relationships with others? Are there pitfalls that we have not discussed?

The Experience Era

One of the speakers at Tools of Change commented that we are coming into the "experience era." First we had the industrial era, then we have had the information era, now we're moving beyond that to an era in which people value experiences most highly.

I've been thinking about this idea and asking, What does a digital Bible for the experience era look like?

A digital Bible for the information era is information-oriented: It emphasizes access to information in and about the Bible. So search is a key function, as are passage lookup and topic guides.

What about an experience-oriented digital Bible? What are the elements of that? Here some things that come to mind:

An outstanding experience of reading the Bible text. Not only does the Bible text have to be present, but it has to be beautifully formatted, with an excellent design on screen, and fully accessible to people with disabilities. It has to look and feel good on all kinds of devices. [Difficulty: Moderate]

A thoughtful, uncluttered space for Bible journaling. Access to the journaling function needs to be very natural and easy from within the Bible text, and it needs to be given a clean, uncluttered interface. When people are journaling, they don't want to be looking at all kinds of gizmos and doodads in the interface. Instead, there needs to be an open space in which their thoughts and spirits can soar and roam. [Difficulty: Easy (techically), Hard (for business people to do)]

Personally-relevant additional content related to what I am reading. It's not terribly hard to gather together piles of content and link it all to the Bible text in various ways. What is much harder, but much more necessary, is to provide people, from that limitless pile, a selection of additional content that will be personally relevant and meaningful to them in light of their own experiences and context in life. Online shopping sites like Amazon have been doing something like this with books - when you put a book in your Amazon shopping cart, the site suggests some other things that you might be interested in. We need something similar in digital Bibles, but with content. Providing this for people will be technically very challenging. [Difficulty: Very Hard]

An enjoyable experience interacting with others. Not only should it be possible to interact with people in various ways, but there should be mechanisms to help ensure that the experience is beneficial. For example, I don't like the public notes feature in YouVersion, because it's cluttered with all kinds of unhelpful stuff. More helpful would be an ability to share notes with my Bible study group, and let us have conversations around each passage right in the digital Bible interface. [Difficulty: Moderately Hard]

An experience-oriented digital Bible cannot neglect the more information-oriented functionality, but gone are the days when information is enough. People are looking for a better experience than sifting through too many search results, seeing piles of irrelevant content in the interface, and having to look at a cluttered, ugly Bible interface. Doing this is not easy.

In other words, it's going to be much harder to provide people a pleasing experience in using digital Bibles, and the winners will be those, not who provide the most information, but those who provide the best experience.

Do you agree? Are there other things that are very important for an excellent experience? Would a better experience win you over the most information? What do you think?

iPad without Reader is an Opportunity

The Reading Edge editor Len Edgerly recently interviewed Seth Godin about the ebook industry, who said that Apple's shipping the iPad without a reader installed is an opportunity for publishers to provide their own reader, but that many publishers will miss the opportunity.

That may be true, but I know that the guys at Olive Tree have created an excellent app for the iPhone, and they have indicated that the app works beautifully under the iPad SDK. So the publishers who have published Bibles through OliveTree are already positioned well for the iPad. This is true for Tyndale, which has published Holy Bible Mosaic and the NLT Study Bible with OliveTree. For example, when Tyndale's Holy Bible Mosaic is viewed under the iPad SDK, all the beautiful art can fill the screen -- the app includes the full resolution images, so the experience on the iPad will be that much richer. I imagine the same will be true for the ESV Study Bible app, and everything else that OliveTree has published for the iPhone.

Tools of Change 2010 Reviews

There are quite a number of good reviews of Tools of Change out. Here are a couple:

• http://booksquare.com/tools-change/
• http://www.forewordreviews.com/new-paths-publishers-were-display-tools-change-conference 
• http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2010/02/28/tools-of-change-thoughts-from-a-readers-perspective/
• http://www.publishingtrends.com/2010/02/lessons-from-oreilly-tools-of-change-for-publishing/
• http://blog.smashwords.com/2010/02/tools-of-change-conference-notes.html

With regard to digital Bibles specifically, Bob Pritchett from Logos was present, demonstrating Logos 4 and speaking on the theme that network effects support premium pricing. Although that specific presentation was not recorded, Bob had a short keynote on a similar theme that was, which you can watch here. (It's a 5-minute ignite talk. If you're not familiar with the ignite format, you can learn about it here.)

About the Digital Bible Blog

Recently, when people ask me what I’m working on for Tyndale House Publisher, I have been telling them, “I’m trying to figure out the answer to the question, How can we make a profitable business out of digital Bible publishing?”

I've spent quite a lot of time over the past few months researching and thinking about this question, and we've even tried a couple of things (like the NLT interlinear site). I recently attended O'Reilly's Tools of Change in order to help answer this question, and I am scheduled to be at BibleTech later this month (March 2010).

So it seems like the time has come to broaden the conversation to a wider community. What do people want in digital Bibles? What do you want? What can we learn from the digital publishing business in general that will help us understand digital Bible publishing? What good examples are there of digital Bibles and Bible study tools? How can we cultivate community around the Bible in online contexts?

These are some of the topics that I hope we can discuss together.

What topics would you like us to discuss here?