Hi. I took the plunge and decided to try Logos 5 Minimum Crossover. I immediately found myself very disappointed with the timeline because:
1) It showed entries I strongly belive are non-Biblical
2) There seemed to be no way to hide these entries that are non-Biblical
3) There seemed to be no way to add entries (for example to replace the one's that are non-Biblical).
Is is possible to override these dates? For example, I was looking at the timeline using the filter "Daniel". Despite the hogwash that has been spread through the years, Daniel was written primarily by Daniel (some by Nebuchadnezzar) and therefore would not have been written in the timeframe specified by some of the timeline entires.
How do I fix this? It steams me enough I'm ready to return Logos 5 and go back to Logos 4.
Thank you.
Hi Heyedid
(1) Probably most of the entries are 'non-Biblical', meaning that they describe surrounding events. So you're probably correct.
(2) You 'hide' the non-Biblical by clicking on the 'Biblical' in the upper-right. The view may go 'blank' until you move the view around.
(3) Logos4 and 5 timelines are not addable/changable/creatable as they were in Libronix.
I'm not sure why you're so frustrated (compared to Logos4). Logos5 still has the Logos4 timelines (look in your library) plus a WHOLE lot more (the original language tool additions).
I agree the timelines need 'versioning' instead of a 'tossed salad' of various assumptions throughout with no user control and limited labeling.
Unfortunately the information is taken from books in Logos, mostly those on your computer (if not all, I don't recall). We have no control over those so no control over the dating that shows up. On my Timelines I sometimes have multiple dates for the same event reflecting varying points of view. I find it helpful to know what others are thinking even if I disagree, so I suppose my overall feeling about dates I consider to be incorrect is different from yours.
Regardless, I'd hate to see you judge Logos 5 on the basis of a single tool.
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
DMB, by non-BIblical events, I don't mean events unrelated to the Bible, I mean that the timing of the event is inconsistent with Scripture (as illustrated by the example above regarding Daniel).
Mark, are you with logos? I don't think the information is taken from books in Logos, is it. I think they defined events and put dates to them and linked the dates to books in Logos. This would be altogether different.
If the tool is inconsistent with Scripture, I consider it pretty much worthless.
No I am a user just like you. The dates are drawn from various resources. If you click on one of the events as I have done in the screen capture below, it will bring up a list of references to that event in your resources.
I could be wrong, but I think you are misunderstanding what that list is. I think the dates and events are hardcoded and the books shown in the list are references from your library to that date. For example, for many of my dates, there are no books shown at all... just the date and the event.
For example, if I filter by Daniel, I see "James Montgomery and Daniel 1806-1812" if I click on it, "James Montgomery and Daniel 1806-1812" is listed in the popup again with no books listed.
DBM, yes, that is one frustration with Logos. They take great ideas (such as a timeline, and a library) and they just throw it out there without a lot of polishing (ie. poor library management in Logos 4, no timeline editing in Logos 5 with a hodge podge of dates.
There seem to be what you call hard-coded dates, but in my case they are few in number compared to those that originate from resources in my library. I am not even sure about them being hard-coded or just not having functioning links (which would be a data problem).
I am sympathetic to the somewhat random appearance of the Timeline. Some good suggestions have been made to improve how they look and work. You might have some others.
I think the point is that no one is trying to impose dating upon you or anyone else. You are interesting in imposing what you believe are correct dates in your version of the Timeline. That isn't possible and probably will not be added, but you could suggest it. For the purpose you want the current Timeline function is of no value to you. (I wonder whose Timeline would be completely to your liking? Is there one you know of? If not, what you seem to want is a tool to build your own Timeline which is available in L3 but not L4 or L5.)
As I said, I hope you will not judge L5 by that feature alone.
Hayedid: I could be wrong, but I think you are misunderstanding what that list is. I think the dates and events are hardcoded and the books shown in the list are references from your library to that date. For example, for many of my dates, there are no books shown at all... just the date and the event.
The events on the timeline are ultimately sourced from resources in the Logos library (not just your library, but all Logos books). We perform some cleanup, give the events a short name, unify events that are the same, etc., but ultimately we're not making an editorial choice about what is and isn't an event. (If an event doesn't appear in the timeline, it's probably just because we haven't processed a book that defines that event, or because our automatic text extraction algorithm missed it. Errors and omissions can be reported in this forum, or sent to data@logos.com.)
One UI problem in the timeline right now is that the popup for an event only shows links to unlocked resources. If the only links for an event are to locked resources, it doesn't show anything. We plan to improve this in a future version of the software, to help you understand where the events are coming from.
Hayedid: For example, if I filter by Daniel, I see "James Montgomery and Daniel 1806-1812" if I click on it, "James Montgomery and Daniel 1806-1812" is listed in the popup again with no books listed.
The actual event is "1806–1812 James Montgomery and Daniel Parken maintain friendship". This event is sourced from the Logos library:
Bradley Grainger (Logos):One UI problem in the timeline right now is that the popup for an event only shows links to unlocked resources. If the only links for an event are to locked resources, it doesn't show anything. We plan to improve this in a future version of the software, to help you understand where the events are coming from.
Good to know and thumbs up on improving the info.
A lot of events in the scriptures, including when they were written, we are not provided any date. So tools like the timeline are simply giving us access to the wide scope of scholarship on when these things took place. I totally agree with you Hayedid that some of this scholarship is inconsistent with my belief about scriptures when we talk about when or why it was written. But at the same time I don't want Logos to act as a censor on the scholarship. It would be impossible for them to do this in a way to please everybody. If I were undertaking a research degree I would also want access to all of the information, not just what fits my preference.
I agree that I don't want Logos to act on sensorship (since they publish full Mormon and Islamic libraries [community pricing]).... who knows what would result; however, it seems that modifying your own timeline is such a basic tool and a definate necessity to make the timeline useful. Jumping back to my search on Daniel
You can see the various opinions represented.
Logos, please consider this: In teaching a class on Daniel, a person may do a lot of initial research, pin down the reasonable dates and information. Several weeks later while teaching on Daniel 8, if a question arose about timing, one would want to see the dates previously figured out.... not the broad spectrum of dates composed by everyone who had a theory [many of which are not based upon Scriptural evidence].
Based upon the way the tool works and the comments above it looks like the timeline was developed this way:
When viewing the timeline, the events in #1 appear with a list of any unlocked links from #2. This is a logical way of doing it, but I kindly request a few fixes:
* Users should be able to modify the events in #1 to add to them or hide them. Every time I research Daniel's timeline, for example, I don't want to see the entries about Daniel being written in 1-3BC as the New Testament clearly authenticates Daniel as the author.
* Depending on what you click at the top corner All / Biblical, there seems to be a bug. At times the whole timeline goes blank and I can click on All and Biblical to my hearts content and the timeline will stay blank. I've resolve this by exiting it and starting it again.
* The intro to Logos 5 video says Isaiah 6:1 starts out with "In the year that King Uziaha died..." and that there are links to the timeline to that event. Where? I purchased Minimum Crossupgrade.... I see no links in there from the Bible to the Timeline. Perhaps Logos linked to a particular Bible translation? If so, why not allow the other Bible translations (NKJV, NAS, etc)... to show these timeline links at the beginning of a verse? Scripture is key in Bible Study. Things such as timeline links, notes, highlighting, tagging, etc... should be common / shared among all Bible Translations.
* If you do change the links to something other than Unlocked resources, please make this an option. I would prefer to have an an empty dropdown list than to have references to a bunch of books I don't have.
Hayedid:it seems that modifying your own timeline is such a basic tool and a definate necessity to make the timeline useful.
Hayedid:Logos, please consider this: In teaching a class on
Yes I totally agree from a presentation point of view we need to customized this sort of information to be relevant to the needs of the audience...not all academic scholarship needs to presented to all audiences. Not sure the way you are wanting to do this within Logos those is the way to do it, or that Logos would want to support it that way. It opens up a whole new can of worms and customizing data sets by users is one thing I don't think they will be to ready to embrace any time in the near future.
At this point this raises the question should Logos be more than a research/study tool or should it also be a tool to assist in preparation of presentation of material. Or is this outside the scope of Logos and should be handle in Word, Screen Grab and Picture Editing tools like Snag it, etc.
Hayedid:The intro to Logos 5 video says Isaiah 6:1 starts out with "In the year that King Uziaha died..." and that there are links to the timeline to that event. Where? I purchased Minimum Crossupgrade.... I see no links in there from the Bible to the Timeline.
I have a much larger package and can see no link from bible to timeline. Timeline events does not show up in the drop down list of visual filters for ESV like it does in say ISBE. To get to it I have to right click on Uzziah in bible text, choose selection and under my list of prioritized resources choose a bible dictionary e.g. ISBE, go to that article and then look for the information to get the link to the timeline. Workflow should be a timeline event flag in bible next to work year that takes me to timeline and the event, from here I can then choose any of the link dictionaries that are attached to this event. The existing method is hit and miss as I must hope the article I choose has the timeline information encoded. If I could go straight from bible to timeline, I'd be getting direct access to the resources that do have the information I was looking to retrieve.
Andrew,
Hi. I'm not really talking about Logos being a presentation tool. I'm just talking about it being able to filter the results. In programming, this would be very easy. Consider the following as a simple database
index datetime description 1 2BC some event description2 15AD some erroneous event description that is not supported by Scripture3 5BC some other event description
Now a simple user database could have entries such as:
Rejected Timeline Entries2
And then the Logos, when querying the data would do:select * from TimeLine Database WHERE entries NOT IN (rejected timeline entries)
and then for dropdown links.... something like:SELECT book entries where book.date = timeline.date OR book.date is within timeline.daterange
Logos may do it a bit differently than that, but Logos does something similar all the time with the searches, filters, etc.... Such foundational capabilities for the timeline should be pretty simple and easy to implement.
Thank you for the clarification. It seems that the timeline was definately not fully implemented as it could be. This seems to happen a lot with new logos features. It's nice to know it's not just because I have a small set of books.
Hayedid:Such foundational capabilities for the timeline should be pretty simple and easy to implement.
The two difficulties I would see:
To see if there is sufficient interest to give the reject timeline entry function priority, add it to uservoice and make a post directing people to your uservoice item.
Orthodox Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."
I get what you are saying but this is leading into the idea of preparing data for presentation. And it comes down to customizing the data sets, which they would see as a support nightmare. They don't allow us to customize much simpler things in the software.
I am not disagreeing with you just saying based on current Logos policy I can't see this happening.
edit: I have worked with both oracle and SQL server and studied relational databases at Univeristy so totally understand the how of your suggestion.
A further issue beyond the how would be what happens to timeline flags in resources for events on the timeline if you have filtered them out?
I did not read through this posting earlier, but just did so today and have some concerns.
Bradley Grainger (Logos): The events on the timeline are ultimately sourced from resources in the Logos library (not just your library, but all Logos books).
The events on the timeline are ultimately sourced from resources in the Logos library (not just your library, but all Logos books).
All books... can we define 'all books'? Surely we are aware of the reality of the tension between 'sacred and profane', which obviously includes books. I read this and start to get a little concerned. So Logos is going to start populating this with dates from all sorts of non-Christian books, even books antithetical to (mainstream) Christianity. Are we going to see dates from the 'prophet' Joseph Smith (e.g. the tribe of whatever coming to America) what about the so-called 'prophet' Mohammed? Are dates from these going to be put into the timeline simply because there are dates in books about them in the Logos library?
Bradley Grainger (Logos): but ultimately we're not making an editorial choice about what is and isn't an event.
but ultimately we're not making an editorial choice about what is and isn't an event.
Now I start to get really worried. In my opinion there has to be some sort of editorial discernment and discrimination. What if there was a book in the Logos library with the title 'Horrendous Heresies and Salacious Sects' written to disprove and counter said errors. What if that book was full of dates related to junk spewed out by these heresies and sects — are they going to go into the timeline? How will they be presented — as real dates??
The Catholic church has a function for 'vetting' books — Imprimatur which means 'let it be printed' — perhaps something similar should be exercised here.
Bradley Grainger (Logos): The actual event is "1806–1812 James Montgomery and Daniel Parken maintain friendship". This event is sourced from the Logos library:
I'm sorry but... huh?!? Who the heck are these guys and what do they have to do with a tool in a Biblical scholarly resource platform? Can we expect Christian romance novels from Vyrso http://vyrso.com/product/24568/her-good-name next? That title looks like it has dates in it.
"I want to know all God's thoughts; the rest are just details." - Albert Einstein
Patrick S.:Now I start to get really worried. In my opinion there has to be some sort of editorial discernment and discrimination.
Maybe there is a different vision of Logos than you have - this is a library not a magisterium. If you are worried about interpretations that you disagree with or are "too far" from what you or anyone disagrees with, as related to the time line, couldn't the same be said for Scripture interpretations, commentaries, devotionals, dictionaries, manuscripts, encyclopedias, magazines, and more?
That's why it's a library not a single authority - even a Catholic scholar wants to have access to ALL what has been written on the subject. I suspect many people here feel the same, I know I do.
Dominick Sela: Patrick S.:Now I start to get really worried. In my opinion there has to be some sort of editorial discernment and discrimination. Maybe there is a different vision of Logos than you have - this is a library not a magisterium. If you are worried about interpretations that you disagree with or are "too far" from what you or anyone disagrees with, as related to the time line, couldn't the same be said for Scripture interpretations, commentaries, devotionals, dictionaries, manuscripts, encyclopedias, magazines, and more? That's why it's a library not a single authority - even a Catholic scholar wants to have access to ALL what has been written on the subject. I suspect many people here feel the same, I know I do.
My personal philosophy and approach to the timeline tool in Logos:
Scripture alone is my rule.
The timeline is just a tool.
My library's looking glass.
It's dates aren't all the same class.
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