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 what I've submitted for BibleTech:2009. We'll see whether or not the paper is accepted.

Note that the deadline for submissions is Nov 3, 2008. Last year was a blast, so I'm pumped for this year's conference (on March 27-28, 2009 in Seattle, WA).

Stylometry and the Septuagint: Applying Anthony Kenny's Stylometric Study of the NT 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.

I should stress again, the key word is exploratory, particularly since I'll be using a beta/in-development form of the Logos LXX Morphology. I don't have theories I'm trying to prove, I'm interested in seeing what sorts of information comes to light when applying a Kenny-esque technique to the analysis of the style of the LXX.

Will you be at BibleTech:2009? You really should, last year's was one of the best, most fun conferences I've ever been to. And, if your paper proposal is accepted, you don't have to pay the conference registration! How cool is that?

BibleTech08 was two days chock-full-o' Bible-geeky goodness.

The highlight for me was time spent between sessions and at meals talking with folks. Prime among those was time spent with James Tauber. I've emailed with James back and forth for at least five years now; it was great to spend time with him in person, reflecting on sessions, talking about the doctroal work he's doing, and all sorts of other stuff. Here's the not-so-great picture I took with my cell phone to prove it:

Others have summarized sessions (Check the tag bibletech08 on Technorati for a listing) so I won't do that here. I will say that some of the stuff James Tauber talked about work with Ulrik Sandborg-Petersen at MorphGNT.org regarding lemma alignments was thought-provoking; Andi Wu's presentation on treebanks caused me to covet my neighbor's syntax data; Sean Boisen's Zoomable Bible presentation made me think about interface in ways I hadn't before; Kurt Fuqua's stuff made my head hurt (though not necessarily in a bad way), Zack Hubert's zhubert.com retrospective was awesome; and Bob MacDonald's talk on structures in Psalms was much appreciated both for the visualizations and also for the esteem in which he presented it -- unlike so many presentations at places like SBL, you could tell that for Bob, this was not simply an academic exercise, the text has profoundly influenced him.

My profuse thanks to everyone who came to Seattle for two days of Bible-geeky goodness. Hopefully we'll do it again next year!

I had an insanely great time at BibleTech:2008 and will blog about that in a bit; though I wanted to get links up to my paper.My paper on cross-references went well, I thought, though my presentation itself was somewhat scattered. Here are the goods:

• BibleTech2008Paper.pdf (531.26 KB)
• BibleTech2008Handout.pdf (64.45 KB)
• Rick Brannan BibleTech2008.ppt (1.54 MB)

I'll be posting these on my personal web site on Monday; I also believe the BibleTech website will hold copies of the paper, handout and powerpoint. And maybe even audio!

Note that my colleague Sean Boisen (who blogs at Blogos) has blogged on a number of the papers presented. Here's his primary post; hopefully he'll add some tags to link them together over the next few days.

This morning the Logos Bible Software blog announced the BibleTech 2008 conference. It'll take place January 25-26 in Seattle, WA.

While Logos is the primary conference sponsor (disclaimer: I work for Logos), the conference is not about Logos Bible Software. It is designed for those who are interested in the intersection of the Bible and technology. So this could be professionals, hobbyists, publishers, bloggers, webmasters, educators or just about anyone else. If you're interested in the Bible and technology, no matter where you are, what you do, or who you work for, we'd love to see you in Seattle.

Several folks have already agreed to present. I'm most interested to hear from James Tauber (general XML/Python stud and co-creator of MorphGNT.org) and Zack Hubert (creator of zhubert.com).

The call for participation is open. Have an itch you'd like to scratch, or a cool side project you'd like to present? Then submit your ideas. I know I've got a few different ideas a-brewin'.