Topically Searching the Early Church Fathers

Question: Is the topic tagging still there in .logos4 versions of the ECF resource files and if it is can it still be searched?

From LogosTalk - Mon, August 31, 2009: Topically Searching the Early Church Fathers

"The developers of the electronic version of this set tagged each volume with topics! This means if you want to find out what the patriarchs of the early church thought about a subject you don’t have to do a word search and then wade through thousands of hits. Instead you can search by topic and jump right to a location where your subject is discussed in depth. Here’s how to take advantage of the developers hard work."

The blog post goes on to explain how to search this topic tagging using the Topic Browser in LDLS (Libronix).

Also from LogosTalk - Tue, October 4, 2005 : Speaking of the Early Church Fathers …

"Huh? You didn’t know that the 37-volume Logos Bible Software edition of the Early Church Fathers has a topic index? Well, it does. And that particular topic index doesn’t exist anywhere else."

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Dave Hooton

Question: Is the topic tagging still there in .logos4 versions of the ECF resource files and if it is can it still be searched?

The essential "topics" are still present but the Topic Guide does things differently to the LDLS Topic Browser. The Early Church Fathers are not a primary source of topics as that is reserved for Bible Dictionaries/Encylopedias via a dataset known as Logos Controlled Vocabularly (LCV). But the LCV will still assist searching for topics in ECF provided you have a base library or crossgrade from Logos 4, Logos 5 or Logos 6 - see below.

(MTG is My Topic Guide)

I searched for "Kingdom of God" but the LCV also provided a search for "Kingdom of Heaven" as a similar/equivalent topic.

The setup was:

create a collection for ECF called e.g. "Church Fathers" with a rule series:"Early Church" (a lot easier than a Libronix collection)
include it in the Collections section of a Topic Guide
run Topic Guide and enter your topic.

Mark Barnes

Is the topic tagging still there in .logos4 versions of the ECF resource files and if it is can it still be searched?

No. To be honest, the topic browser rarely worked as well as you hoped it would. The Topic Guide, with it's LCV has effectively replaced that functionality, as Dave suggested.

Matthew

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/787539#Comment_787539

I had previously suggested the creation of a patristics topical index, but the idea never took off.

https://community.logos.com/forums/p/114872/759946.aspx

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/787550#Comment_787550

I had previously suggested the creation of a patristics topical index

A "topical index" usually points to articles or pages that mention the topic; whether within the same resource (e.g. a commentary series) or in another (external) resource e.g. the bible. They were provided for a manual lookup and they could even provide a useful discussion. Many were automated, or even created, for use in Libronix and could be searched via the Topic Browser, but results often fell below user's expectations.

Logos/Faithlife felt that the words in article headings would be more useful but wanted to resolve differences in the wording for a topic, and equate different expressions e.g. kingdom of God <=> kingdom of Heaven. So they created the LCV for Logos 4+ but restricted the targets to encyclopedias/bible dictionaries; which they also tagged to further enable searches. The Topic Guide provides the main search and also enables topical searches of other resources in the manner I described in my previous post.

However, "Baptism: teaching of Ambrose" is not a direct topic, although LCV has variations of "Baptism" for John and Jesus.

SineNomine

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/787753#Comment_787753

However, "Baptism: teaching of Ambrose" is not a direct topic,

In the other thread to which you are referring, the example topic given was "Baptism", not "Baptism: teaching of Ambrose". But said thread is a better place to discuss the proposal than is this one.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/787756#Comment_787756

In the other thread to which you are referring, the example topic given was "Baptism", not "Baptism: teaching of Ambrose". But said thread is a better place to discuss the proposal than is this one.

I was responding to Matthew by illustrating that a topical index is not used as the approach to topic searching (the subject of this thread) since Logos 4. But if his use of "Topical index" is a way to suggest topics for Logos 6 then I agree with your "better place"!

"baptism, the teaching of Ambrose" is not a topic in the LCV but one can find a mention of it in NPNF 2.7 & "History of the Christian Church" (Schaff) by searching for heading:baptism Ambrose.

Matthew

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/787957#Comment_787957

I was responding to Matthew by illustrating that a topical index is not used as the approach to topic searching (the subject of this thread) since Logos 4.

I posted what i did because the subject of the thread was specifically being able to topically search the church fathers. Faithlife has already created a Catholic Topical Index that provides SOME of this functionality, and it does not operate (as far as I know) by searching headings. My understanding is that it was manually created, and that after Logos 4. My suggestion was essentially that this project be expanded as a more accurate and efficient way to search the fathers than using headings.

I suppose your idea about LCV could be implemented, but it would be extremely inefficient to have a separate entry for each father's teaching on each subject (your example of "baptism, the teaching of Ambrose"). If Faithlife were to go the route of using the LCV in the topic guide (which I would be fine with), I would strongly prefer that all of the fathers would be listed under the search terms that already exist. In other words, I would search for baptism as a topic, and among the results would be a link to the teachings of Ambrose and everyone else. This way each individual father would not have to be searched separately. However, what I just described is essentially a patristics topical index as part of the topic guide, and that is exactly what my suggestion was in the link I provided.

EDIT: The above points aside, it would be a more user friendly interface for the software to present links to the fathers' teaching on a subject than for users to have to manually type "heading:baptism Ambrose." Many users would either not know that such a search is possible or not take the time to run every variation of that search for every father. In fact, it would not even be possible to run every variation of that search unless one first compiled a list of every father to enter into the search. The much more elegant solution would be for Faithlife to solve the problem on their end (whether by means of LCV, an index, a dataset, etc.) so that users can simply search for a topic and get results that link to the fathers.

Matthew

Question: Is the topic tagging still there in .logos4 versions of the ECF resource files and if it is can it still be searched?

Since Dave had mentioned heading searches, I figured I would run one and see what kind of results I got. Since we have been using the example topic of baptism in this thread, I went ahead and just searched for heading:baptism. I was a little surprised that there were only 147 results in the entire 37 volume set. If my math is right, that is only 4 hits (OK, 3.97) per volume. Not sure if the tagging is incomplete or if I just had unrealistic expectations (probably the case).

For what it is worth, I ran a few more searches. Here are the headings and corresponding number of results.

Love, 226

Faith, 308

Eucharist, 16

Heaven, 101

Hell, 12

Fasting, 63

For the time being, this does seem like the best way to search this set. However, I still think it would be beneficial if Faithlife took the index data that already exists and spruced it up a bit. I would like to be able to see this information displayed and sorted by father, and eventually by century and geographic region.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/788006#Comment_788006

Thanks for your input Matthew.

Faithlife has already created a Catholic Topical Index that provides SOME of this functionality, and it does not operate (as far as I know) by searching headings. My understanding is that it was manually created, and that after Logos 4. My suggestion was essentially that this project be expanded as a more accurate and efficient way to search the fathers than using headings.

I was using "topical index" in the Libronix sense and/or the sense that it is used in hard-back books. My understanding would be that the "Catholic Topical Index" was implemented via LCV and tagging in some specific (Catholic) resources - presenting those topics in Passage Guide as opposed to being hidden in the Topics section (?).

EDIT: The above points aside, it would be a more user friendly interface for the software to present links to the fathers' teaching on a subject than for users to have to manually type "heading:baptism Ambrose."

I agree. But even if your proposal is implemented there would always be the need to search for subjects in a similar way! A number of users are familiar with Heading Text and Large Text via the Search drop down under "All Text". heading:baptism Ambrose or largetext:baptism Ambrose means that "Ambrose" is not restricted to the heading text.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/788066#Comment_788066

I was a little surprised that there were only 147 results in the entire 37 volume set. If my math is right, that is only 4 hits (OK, 3.97) per volume. Not sure if the tagging is incomplete or if I just had unrealistic expectations

The issue is whether all the book's headings were tagged. The headings are useful for identifying, and searching for, topics but the LCV identifies word variations in order to classify them under a single topic. In select resources Faithlife provides additional tagging for topics and Topic Guide searches that tag for its primary results. The secondary results (in the Collections section) come from a heading search and matching variations via the LCV, so it will usually provide more hits than a normal heading search.

I would like to be able to see this information displayed and sorted by father, and eventually by century and geographic region.

Sounds like a project for an Interactive resource!

JAL

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/788181#Comment_788181

Thank you Dave, Mark, Matthew, and SineNomine for responding and taking the conversation further.

I would like to be able to see this information displayed and sorted by father, and eventually by century and geographic region.

Sounds like a project for an Interactive resource!

Dave I agree with you that the development of such an idea as Mathew has suggested seems appropriate for an Interactive. Such an Interactive resource may be useful.

I hope such tools and features flourish along with a revenue model that supports continuing innovation.

What I desire in this case seems to me more modest in scope. I would like to see topical indexing expanded to include resources other than encyclopedias and dictionaries. I believe this could be accomplished by leveraging indexing that already exists for many resources. I would also like this level of functionality included in the non-subscription products.

Before originally posting I tried, as Dave illustrated and explained in his initial response, to topically search the ECF by adding the resource collection to a custom Topic guide. If I understand correctly the resulting list of references in the ECF is compiled by searching the text of the resource collection for the spelling of the topical search term and the spelling of any near equivalent terms as determined by LCV.

Thanks to Dave for illustrating how LCV effects the results of the search. On the several searches I attempted I did not see any evidence of this. In fact searching for the topic Mass (meaning the Eucharistic Mass) produced two results, both occurrences of the word mass referring to numbers of people and having nothing to do with the topic. A search with so few results is easier to deal with than one with hundreds of results scores of which that have no relevancy.

Formerly I found the Topic Browser to be helpful with very good, and satisfying, results most times that I used it.

Going back to Logos Library System 2.0 there was the global word list which helped populate topical searches. This could be built by scanning resources but there was usually also a precompiled version included on the CD-ROM with resource libraries or collections. I remember E4 stated that the precompiled global word list files on their CD-ROMS contained additional topically relevant information that would not be available from a file generated by scanning the resource files alone. I think other publishers may have done this as well. I don't know if this is how the ECF topical indexing was first made available for use. With Libronix I think the topical indexing was incorporated into the individual resource files. Seems like a step back in some ways to have lost this metadata.

Recently I have been primarily accessing my libraries from the Android app on my phone. I've done a good amount of reading but want to start working with my libraries more through the desktop applications again. For that reason this conversation has been helpful to me. Thanks again.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/788272#Comment_788272

With Libronix I think the topical indexing was incorporated into the individual resource files. Seems like a step back in some ways to have lost this metadata.

For resources not included in the LCV, that would be so, but I can't comment about the ECF.