TIP of the day: Plain meaning/ analytic reading - OpenText visualizations

MJ. Smith

This post covers the following resources:

• Porter, Stanley, Matthew Brook O’Donnell, Jeffrey T. Reed, and Randall Tan, OpenText.org. The OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament. Logos Bible Software, 2006.
• Porter, Stanley E., Matthew Brook O’Donnell, Jeffrey T. Reed, and Randall Tan, OpenText.org. The OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament: Clause Analysis; OpenText.org Clause Analysis. Logos Bible Software, 2006.
• Porter, Stanley, Matthew Brook O’Donnell, Jeffrey T. Reed, and Randall Tan, OpenText.org. The OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament Glossary. Logos Bible Software, 2006.
• OpenText.org

Some background material:

• New Testament Greek Syntax Databases: Retrospect and Prospect by Michael Aubrey has a significant section on strengths and weakness of OpenText
• Reflections on OpenTsxt.org by Mike Aubrey which begins "I retract all of my criticisms of the Opentext.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament. From this point on, I view Opentext.org as an excellent database."
• OpenText.org: the problems and prospects of working with ancient discourse (on Philemon) by Matthew Brook O’Donnell, Stanley E. Porter and Jeffrey T. Reed

Note that the website include New Testament Apocrypha and Apostolic Fathers not include in Logos. There is also an additional functional visualization and tagging layer.

1. OpenText has its own coding and visualizations. In order to learn to think "OpenText" I find it best to have the web site open beside by Logos/Verbum application. Once I "get the hang" of the coding, the internet crutch is no longer required. Note that the Clause Annotation of OpenText uses the same units as a line as the Logos OpenText Bible.

2. The Logos application gives the definitions of the elements as popups on hover. The primary unit in the Logos OpenText Bible is the clause.

3.The vertical lines mark components.

4. Logos depicts a sub-clause both by tag and the indentation.

5. Here we see that the OpenText Word group visualization also uses the same line units but the tagging is not immediately reflected in the Logos side which shows the morphology rather than syntax relationship.

6. The OpenText functional view is not well documented on the web site and it missing entirely on the Logos side.

7. The Logos OpenText clause visualization displays as a group of lines what is a single line in OpenText. The tags for each box within the OpenText lines appear in the Logos tree-form visualization.

8. Logos does provide documentation in the form of a glossary but it does not include the morphological coding or the paragraph level (functional) coding.

9.  As usual the morphology search itself provides a bit of documentation both on the parts-of-speech that are recognized by the system and the morphological aspects encoded. The example of a noun.

10. The example of a verb.

11. For morphology, the OpenText Annotation Model Specifications & Guidelines provide the missing detail. Unfortunately for the paragraph functional coding the document is incomplete.