BibleTech 2010 was a blast. I got to hang out with very smart, very fun people and spend all my brain cycles thinking and pondering about the intersection of Bible and technology.

Apart from simply hanging out with fun folks like James Tauber and Mike Aubrey (to name a few), the highlight for me had to be Neil Rees’ presentation on, essentially, bootstrapping a concordance as a model to create a new concordance. If you don’t care about stopwords and homographs, sure, you can just write a program. But most programs are that do such tasks aren’t too good and require a lot of human post-processing — particularly if you want a smaller, non-exhaustive concordance. Rees presented on using existing, well-edited concordances (in any language) as models of concepts to include in a new concordance of a new text. This is brilliant.

I know some presentations are making their way to Vimeo. There are three I can recommend. First, two from James Tauber:

• A New Kind of Graded Reader (this is more extensive than the video below)
• Using Pinax and Django For Collaborative Corpus Linguistics

Also check Weston Ruter’s presentation on the Open Scriptures API:

• Open Scriptures API: Unified Web Service for Scriptural Linked Data

Note that A portion of James’ 2008 BibleTech presentation dealt with the graded reader, a video describing it is below. Very cool stuff.