TIP of the day: Interesting Words

MJ. Smith

In  TIP of the day: Word frequency in a pericope we briefly touched upon Interesting Words. Here we will look at them in a bit more detail:

How are the interesting words selected?

Basically it compares the frequencies of the words in the passage to their overall frequencies in the larger text. Words that are more frequent than you'd expect often correspond to "more important to this passage". It's not perfect, but it can help focus your attention on specific content in the passage. I find it tends to work better for ranges of several verses to a pericope: a single verse is usually too short, and a whole chapter too long. But these are just broad suggestions.

The size has to do with relative importance (i.e. roughly speaking it's the ratio of the frequency of the word in this passage to the frequency in the whole Bible).

...  Giving stats as part of "Important Words" -- in my opinion -- over emphasizes stats, when what makes a word important is more subtle, and there may not be any perfect algorithm for determining it. Again, why we use the Wordle -- it's an exploratory tool, not a statistics report. (The words are sized with stats, and pretty clever ones, but they still aren't perfect. We emphasize words whose frequency in this passage isn't necessarily high, but whose frequency in this passage is different than their normal frequency in other nearby passages.)

If you want stats on a word, you can run a Bible Word Study and get stats in the Bible, a graph of relative density in Bible books, occurrences in other corpuses, etc.

Then read What You Need to Know When Using Word Clouds To Present Your Qualitative Data from SurveryGizmo.

1. This is a standard Interesting Words, a default section in the Passage Guide. Note that it does not offer alternate representations as the Topics section does. And it only provides two language options - English and original language. It would be useful for language teachers or multilingual communities to be able to generate the section in any language for which you own a Bible with the relevant passage.

2. Changing the chosen language to Greek (upper right) produces:

3. Clicking on a word within the wordle/word cloud opens a list of its occurrences.

4. Hovering over the Bible reference provide the text of the verse (not terribly useful). Clicking on it opens the Bible positioned to the reference. SHFT + click opens the Bible in a floating panel. Right clicking opens a context men (right-click menu) for the reference.

5. Clicking on the highlighted word in the text will open the Bible to the specified location. SHFT-click will open the Bible in a floating window. The context menu is opened via a right-click.

6. This particular feature takes the Septuagint (LXX) into account offering the Hebrew Scripture in Hebrew, Greek and English.