New idea: Word Frequency by (expandable / contractible) text units
Wouldn't it be great to be able to run a quick word frequency analysis (call it, F.A. for now) on a particular pericope?
and then to expand that F.A. to include the surrounding pericopes? - might pick up something that would otherwise have been missed.
And what about being able to look at the larger text units (as they comprise various divisions of the book / and also the whole book)?
Example - Possibilities: John - just the prologue, just one narrative, the entire "book of signs" or the whole book.
There are presently check boxes in the PRINT tab of each book which allow the user to select the printable sections. How about something like this for Bible texts which might allow the user the ability to run frequency reports on selected units of text simply by checking boxes? The idea is quick and easy experimental freedom.
Comments
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Ron Corbett said:
word frequency analysis
Ron, do you mean simple word counts, or something graphical?
(I love those little mini-graphs that MS Excel lets you put in a cell...something like that would be a nice touch if you mean a graphical analysis...I like my stuff to fit on a page.
Eating a steady diet of government cheese, and living in a van down by the river.
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I suppose you know that you can do something very similar (not expanding by "check boxes") via the concordance tool? You simply redefine the reference range while keeping the results sorted by count.
I would like to see the ability expand to (I know it's ridiculous) include letter counting. For example, I was doing discourse/literary analysis of Gen. 11.1-9 with it's amazing symmetry and poetic features. I came across several references to claims that the entire passage uses the letters ב and ל and נ very heavily with this assonance culminating in the בבל/בלל word play. I wished I could check this claim (and compare other passages for correlations) without manually counting all the letters!
I agree with Doc, that something graphical for word counts would be nice, though.
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Doc B said:Ron Corbett said:
word frequency analysis
Ron, do you mean simple word counts, or something graphical?
(I love those little mini-graphs that MS Excel lets you put in a cell...something like that would be a nice touch if you mean a graphical analysis...I like my stuff to fit on a page.
There are probably a number of ways for this to be displayed. My desire would be for it to be easy to get to and neat in appearance.
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Reuben Helmuth said:
I suppose you know that you can do something very similar (not expanding by "check boxes") via the concordance tool? You simply redefine the reference range while keeping the results sorted by count.
There are several "problems" with this.
1] it takes TOO long
2] One would have to have each pericope entered in to the RANGE beforehand OR be looking at it so you could enter it in
I suppose what I am proposing is a way to have each verse linked to the pericope sets for that particular Bible. A simple right-mouse-click could generate a word frequency search. And if you are using the Pericope tool - each Bible version has its own boundaries which means that searching in a different version could give a different result. Maybe being able to right- click on the pericope boxes in the Pericope tool would be nice.
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Many of us define pericopes via lectionaries rather than Bibles and are interested in metapericopes as often as pericopes. But I am a bit confused. How is what you are asking for different than this? Once you have built the concordance it is cached so that time is not a concern. It seems to me that what you are asking for is simply a selection box that considers pericopes like the Home Page Go box It would show only percopes for the Bible that the concordance is built against and lectionary pericopes.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Ron Corbett said:
Wouldn't it be great to be able to run a quick word frequency analysis (call it, F.A. for now) on a particular pericope?
and then to expand that F.A. to include the surrounding pericopes? - might pick up something that would otherwise have been missed.
The "Interesting Words" Passage Guide section does this; see https://wiki.logos.com/Interesting_Words for more details.
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The "Interesting Words" Passage Guide section does this; see https://wiki.logos.com/Interesting_Words for more details.
Agreed, the issue though is that this is not in a numeric form, but in (nifty) graphics and is not easily navigable.
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MJ,
I did consider your suggestion about the Concordance tool. I put it to use this morning set to Lemma on Isa 40. I have to say it was amazing. I clicked on Hebrew - language and was able to see many interesting word relationships within the chapter. The words were listed in descending order in Hebrew and the results were in English. So easy to use. I also enabled the Sense tool under each Hebrew word. This was also very helpful. I am sold on this now. What a remarkable way to study a passage. And you can easily adjust the boundaries of the passage to work with smaller units or larger units as needed.
BTW - If you try the Concordance tool in this way, don't discount word frequencies of 2-3 / passage as some of these "discoveries" were fascinating.
[If you try out this passage, look at tohu, mishpat, har, yoshev, etc.]
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