Ezra Project version 0.2

I just heard from Tobias Klein this morning that version 0.2 of the Ezra Project is now available on his production server. A couple of weeks ago I reviewed the Ezra Project, focusing on the innovative Scripture outlining tool. Now Tobias has released a tagging tool, along with a bunch of small but pleasing enhancements to the look and feel of the site. The tagging tool lets users create their own tags for each verse of the Bible -- it gives the user an interface to explore the Scriptural topics that they have found in their own reading and study. As Tobias says on his development site, his goal is to "help you to work with the Bible and end up with real study results." Unlike other Bible software packages that give you the results of other people's study, the focus is on letting each user develop their own Bible study content.

As an editor of Bible reference content, I know the value of reading Bible study materials written by others, as my own understanding of Scripture has been enriched enormously by using commentaries, Bible encyclopedias, and original language study tools of all kinds. At the same time, I know the value of creating my own annotations as I read -- it is a way for me to wrestle personally with the text of Scripture. So I am enthused to see what Tobias Klein is doing with the Ezra Project, and I wish him godspeed in his efforts.

Social Sharing and Biblical Interpretation

As our society has moved into the dialogue of interactive social media, people's use of Bible texts has become more fragmented and decontextualized, and is less and less controlled by what would be considered a "valid" interpretive process. This was the topics of the second part of Elizabeth Drescher's BibleTech 2010 session entitled "People of the Facebook." (In a previous post I reviewed the first part of this session.)

To set the context for this part of her talk, Dr. Drescher quoted Thomas Arundel, who was Archbishop of Canterbury at the beginning of the 1400s, who decreed that "no man, by his own authority, translate any text of Scripture into English or any other tongue." His concern was that theological error would creep into people's use of Scripture, and that the magisterial authority of the church would be undermined by private interpretation.

So in light of these pre-modern concerns about "private interpretation," Drescher looked at the use of Bible texts on three platforms: iPhone, Twitter, and Facebook.

On the iPhone, there are more than 400 Bible-related apps, and all different kinds of lenses are being applied to Christian Scriptures. For example, there is a Buddhist Bible, which selects Bible texts and interprets them through the lens of Buddhism. There is no central control on the interpretation of Christian Scripture -- anyone can interpret the Bible in any way they please.

On Twitter, a lot of people are tweeting the Bible text (you can find out more about this from Steven Smith's BibleTech talk, Tweeting the Bible). Elizabeth Drescher has noticed two things: (1) A lot of "private interpretation" is going on -- people are interpreting Bible texts in all kinds of ways, without regard for the textual or historical context in which the verses of the Bible were written (she gave as an example of this Jana Riess's Twitter feed, where she is summarizing each chapter of the Bible in a single tweet, from her own perspective). (2) There is not a lot of interaction of Twitter -- people are just broadcasting.

On Facebook, there is more interaction taking place. Drescher looked at three examples of Bible fan pages:

1. "The Bible" is a fan page with 2 million fans. On this page, there is thoughtful and meaningful engagement both with the text of Scripture and with others.
2. Another page called "The Bible" (which I wasn't able to find) is a fan page with 30,000 fans. Here, there is only affirmative, non-critical interaction with what is being posted.
3. A third page called "The Bible" belongs to an individual and has only a limited exchange of texts

It would be interesting to expand this study to include how people are using Bible texts in their personal Facebook status updates -- but of course, it is more difficult to study this, because status updates are (at least supposed to be) private among one's friends.

On all of these platforms, people are using Bible texts in a fragmented, de-contextualized fashion -- individual verses, interpreted apart from their textual or historical setting, and apart from the church, which functions as a community of interpretation. What can help people to interpret the Bible in a more "valid" way, according to accepted principles of hermeneutics (interpretation)?

Here Drescher introduces the "Wikipedia Effect", stating that the greater the general interest in the content, and the more textually and visually developed the content, and the more editorial access people have to the content, the greater the factual accuracy and critical quality of the content. Simply put, get more people interested, and more people involved, in developing shared understanding of Bible texts together, and the result will be higher accuracy and quality in what is being said.

I am interested in the development of an online platform for the co-creation of Bible-related content. But I have some questions:

1. What kind of platform can support the creation of shared Bible-related content? Something like Wikipedia with Bible references?
2. Can we really suppose that having more people interact with the Bible text and edit the Bible-related content will result in higher accuracy and critical quality? I have my doubts, but perhaps the answer is to find a set of "rules," such as Wikipedia has (e.g., everything must be backed up by published citations), which will provide some kind of control on content without preventing all kinds of people from editing.
3. How can get people from a variety of traditions to work together and to come together in a shared interpretive space? Or will people divide up into different "communities of interpretation" online? I see such divisions as highly likely if an open & shared Bible-related content system is developed.

The Social Logic of Communication

Most of the sessions that I attended at BibleTech 2010 were focused on technical matters, but one of them was focused on humanity. Elizabeth Drescher's session, "People of the Facebook," addressed sociological issues around the use of digital technologies, and how this use impacts the interpretation of biblical texts. These are important issues that we need to think about and discuss as we dive more and more deeply into the use of digital technology, because as Dr. Drescher said, we are currently going through a digital reformation. Drescher is a professor and Director for the Center for Anglical Learning & Leadership at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, one of the official seminaries of the Episcopal Church of America.

She tackled this issue from an historical angle, explaining the development of "the social logic of communication," showing the relationship between communications technologies and the types of social interactions that these technologies have promoted.

• In the pre-modern era (before 1400), communication was rhetorical -- culture was oral, biblical texts were read aloud in community, and authority was in what is said.
• With the advent of print (1400s to present), communication became grammatical, dependent on reading texts privately; authority was in what is written. Drescher pointed out that this is the era in which the language of "personal relationship with God" became dominant -- which was only possible as people were able to have a private experience of the text, which they then took into their communities.
• Then, in the high-modern era (1920s to present), public broadcast became a central element of culture, so authority moved to what is presented. This is the era that we have all grown up in, gathering around the radio and then the t.v. to learn the news and to find out what is interesting in the world.
• But now, we have entered the postmodern digital era (1990s to present), in which communication is dialectical -- the digital culture is interactive, and authority is in what we create together.
  

The changing nature of communication culture brings us to an era in which more and more people are using interactive digital media in order to communicate with one another. One of the important aspects of this shift is that people no longer look to the printed text or the broadcast for authoritative communication. Instead, they really do look to "what we create together" -- think about Wikipedia, which is the first Google result for many, many subjects on account of the many inbound links to most Wikipedia pages -- and the first place many people go to find out more about many subjects. Wikipedia is something that we have all created together, and yet many people consider it more authoritative than an old-school edited encyclopedia like Britannica.

One thing that Drescher didn't address is the fact that we now have print, broadcast, and digital communication cultures all overlapping, co-mingling, and interacting -- with no sign that any of these communication media and cultures is on the wane. The doomsayers say that print publishing is dying, but I expect that we will print more, not fewer, books in the future. I also expect both radio and t.v. to continue and thrive for a good long time. What I am interested in discussing is, what is the social logic of communication in a culture that contains all three of these approaches? Drescher also talked about how different types of communication have traditionally been associated both with people of different developmental ages, and with different social classes. She aligned these with the classical trivium of the liberal arts, as follows:

1. Grammar: structure and rules == children, women, slaves
2. Dialectic: reasoning and argument == adolescents, boys, peasants/laymen
3. Rhetoric: presentation and persuasion == adults, men, lords/clergy, the learnèd

These labels are the ones that Drescher used (above) to describe the different eras of communication. What I would like to know is, how do we get to a culture in which all people are empowered to participate in communication in all of these levels? We need a mastery of structure and rules, and we need people to master the responsible interpretation of texts. We also need dialogue and argumentation, and we need people to create texts together. Finally, we need persuasive presentation of ideas by all who are capable of learning to do so (not just by lords, clerics, and men). And we need forums in which all of these things can take place.

How does all of this affect what we do in digital Bibles? Some reflections:

We need to enable a greater level of dialogue and interaction around Bible texts and Bible-related texts in digital contexts. In the first 20+ years of Bible software, all digital interactions with the Bible have taken place offline in "desktop Bible software." In the first 10+ years of the web, there have been Bible texts online, but very little means of interaction -- most of this has been broadcast-only. Now, with the rise of social media, more and more people are sharing Bible texts with each other online and discussing them. There are problems with this -- problems that Drescher discussed in the second half of her talk, which I plan to review next time.

We need a way for people to have coherent dialogue in a coherent textual context -- so that their dialogue and interaction around the texts is not divorced from the texts, and the texts are not fragmented by being shared. Some online Bible sites have the ability for users to add their own comments on the text -- YouVersion seems to have the lead in this. But I don't see enough evidence that coherent dialogue is coming out of this; instead, people are simply putting up their own thoughts about the passages.

We need a way for people to create something together around the Bible text. Just as some very smart people have figured out how to let all kinds of people create Wikipedia together, we need some very smart folks to figure out how to let all kinds of people create together a kind of shared Bible-related text. There are so many issues and fears that hinder this -- the Bible is the central spiritual authority in the lives of tens of millions of people, and yet there are thousands of different ways of interpreting it, all of which have fierce adherents. In this kind of world, letting all kinds of people create together a shared Bible-related text is a dicey undertaking.

What else do we need? What are your thoughts about all of this?

I am grateful to the organizers of BibleTech 2010 for inviting Elizabeth Drescher to give this talk on the "social logic of communication." She is raising important issues, and we need more discussion about them.

Automatic Concordancing

The first session I attended at BibleTech was by Neil Rees from the United Bible Societies. Neil was demonstrating Paratext, a widely-used tool for doing Bible translation, and the Concordance Builder that works in Paratext.

Neil encouraged all of us who are involved in Bible translation to get onto Paratext. Paratext has 2000+ registered users and is being used on around 1000 Bible translation projects worldwide. So I went to the Paratext website and registered for an account. I'm still waiting to hear back. (It looks like Paratext is only available to people who can verify that they are involved in Bible translation in some fashion.)

The bulk of the talk concerned Concordance Builder. Neil reminded us that an intelligently edited concordance is an important tool for users of the Bible, to help them find concepts and topics by key terms. Now, it's certainly possible to provide an exhaustive concordance of every word mechanically, but this is much less useful for a number of reasons, including (1) too many hits, (2) no grouping of related word forms, and (3) no distinguishing between different meanings of the same word. Besides, it's impossible to print such a concordance in the back of a Bible. And even if your primary delivery is digital, a mechanically-generated concordance is much harder to use than one which has been intelligently edited.

So a concordance needs to be edited, and that's where all the time is spent in concordance-making. But this is where Concordance Builder really shines: (1) It aids grouping by word-stem; (2) it automatically generates lists of references for a given word or stem; (3) it comes with model concordances and statistical glossing functions to aid in creating these lists of references; (3) the generated list of references for each term can be edited; (4) the overall term list can also be edited, so as to exclude "structure" words like "the"; (5) it enables the inclusion of cross-references and alias terms; (6) it automates the process of selecting the portion of the sentence for display, based on column width; (7) it produces XML output that can be imported into typesetting software such as Adobe InDesign.

Using Concordance Builder, Neil says that an excellent, edited concordance for a new translation can be created in a few days or weeks rather than months or years.

More information about the theoretical basis for automatic concordance building can be found in an academic paper by the presenter, Neil Reese, and his colleague, J. D. Riding, entitled "Automatic Concordance Creation for Texts in Any Language." In addition, J. D. Riding has published a paper entitled "Statistical Glossing - Language Independent Analysis in Bible Translation", which is about the process of mapping one language to another, in order to give a head start at concordance building. More information about Concordance Builder and related topics is available at Neil Reese's and J. D. Riding's academic website.

For those who are involved in Bible translation work and making concordances, I have not seen a better toolset; and because it outputs XML and has been integrated into InDesign, it can be used in any Bible publisher's workflow.