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.

Here’s the paper I presented at BibleTech:2009:

Stylometry and the Septuagint: Applying Anthony Kenny’s Stylometric Study to the LXX

In 1986, Anthony Kenny wrote a book called A Stylometric Study of the New Testament which gives details for compiling and comparing book-by-book stylometric statistics for the Greek New Testament given a morphologically tagged corpus. This exploratory study proposes to apply Kenny's method to the LXX, using the Logos Bible Software LXX Morphology, to analyze style.

While Kenny's primary application of his method was in the area of authorship studies, this paper is more interested in the general style of the LXX, and not at all interested in authorship theories or assigning a 'hand' to different passages. For better or worse, this paper treats the LXX as a corpus, and has little interest in its relationship with the underlying Hebrew text.

Once the analysis has been detailed, some points of interest (known only when the analysis is complete as the nature of the study is exploratory) will be further explored. Areas in which the work could be further developed will also be reviewed.

If you actually read it, and then actually have feedback, then please let me know what you think.

In a nutshell, after looking at book-level and chapter-level distributions of part of speech, case/number/gender, tense/voice/mood; I have a worked example of future tense in Leviticus (and then in the Pentateuch). My conclusion: In the Pentateuch, anyway, future tense verbs appear in concentrated groups. The application is when you read or work through these works, then, you should pay attention to the clustering of the future tense to determine what is going on (law-giving, prophetic stuff, whatever). And, if you run across an isolated instance of the future tense, you should pay double attention to that because it is not normal.

At some point in the future, the audio from the talk will be on the BibleTech website.

It's Saturday, day 2 of BibleTech:2009. My paper (Stylometry and the LXX) is on at 3:00 this afternoon (Room 1 if you're here). I'll post the actual paper later (probably Sunday).

Yesterday was excellent. Intelligent people doing some pretty awesome stuff. The highlights:

• Steve Runge on annotating the Greek NT with higher-than-word-level markup
• Ellen Frankel on the Tagged Torah
• Mike Aubrey on SIL's FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx)
• Sean Boisen on semantic information and the Bible

The best parts, though, are the in-between times. At BibleTech, the meals are included, so you can get in conversation with folks who you run into (everyone here is doing impressive stuff, not just the people presenting) and learn more about their projects.

Gotta go before the laptop battery dies.

BibleTech:2009 starts tomorrow (Friday) AM, and I’m ready. My paper is written, I have a reading copy (yes, I’ll be reading it) and I have PowerPoint ready to go too. My presentation is Saturday afternoon from 3:00-3:45 in Room 1. The title of the paper is “Stylometry in the Septuagint: Applying Anthony Kenny’s Stylometric Study to the LXX”. I’ll post a copy of the paper to may academic papers page sometime after the conference. Check the schedule page for more info.

Some folks will be live-blogging the conference, others will be twittering to their heart’s content, I’m sure, but I won’t be doing any of that. Perhaps a post on Friday evening sometime, but maybe not even that. Or maybe a post on Sunday after the whole thing is done; we’ll see.

Looking forward to it! If you’ll be there, make sure to catch up with me during a meal — I’d love to talk more about you with whatever sorts of Bible-techie stuff you’re working on or considering!

Jim West will be aghast, but I'm going to quote Wikipedia.

Doing simple searches on "stylometry" landed me on the Wikipedia page, which has the following (and yes, Jim, the quotation is footnoted). The bold portion is the money quote:

The development of computers and their capacities for analyzing large quantities of data enhanced this type of effort by orders of magnitude. The great capacity of computers for data analysis, however, did not guarantee quality output. In the early 1960s, Rev. A. Q. Morton produced a computer analysis of the fourteen Epistles of the New Testament attributed to St. Paul, which showed that six different authors had written that body of work. A check of his method, applied to the works of James Joyce, gave the result that Ulysses was written by five separate individuals, none of whom had any part in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

All the more reason, at least for me, for being interested in stylometry as a better understanding of style, and learning more about how authors communicate. If your primary or even only interest in studying style is authorship attribution ... well ... you'll be disappointed.

Also: In many extended discussions on the authorship of the Pastorals, you'll run across Morton's name and work. Now, I'm not saying it's all bogus, there is important stuff in there about style. But discerning particular attributes of "style" (particularly through counting) does not mean one has discerned authorship. Of this, beware.