TIP of the day: Logos tagging #23: Understanding tagging for the Systematic Theologies section

MJ. Smith

This post simply directs you to the documentation provided by Faithlife with some direction as to what requires emphasis.

1. The documentation for the Systematic Theologies dataset is Brannan, Rick, and Peter Venable. Systematic Theology Cross-References: Dataset Documentation. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2015.

2. The resources tagged for this section are identified by the library filter type:"Systematic theology".

3. The data is classified in two dimensions: theological stream/denomination and systematic theology categories. The theological streams are:

If like me, you need a little help on remembering the interrelationships between these groups, here is a diagram extracted from the wikipedia denominational charts:

4. Understanding the categories of systematic theology is less important as long as you can find the topic you wish to research. However, you should have a general sense of the divisions.

5. In the "Categorizing References" section, Faithlife explains that about 2,000 articles with > 32,000 references were handed coded. The remainder of the references, described as > 665,000 and growing, have computer generated coding. They achieved 95% agreement with the manually generated cases which means you will find errors but the data is clean enough to be a major assistance.

For the nerd or Ph.D. student, they take advantage of the Wikipedia feature to provide a link to the classification processing technique used.