Proverbs Explorer... will it ever be updated?

Mattillo

I'm just curious if Logos plans to update their Proverbs explorer interactive tool.  I love playing with the Psalms explorer but when I switch to the Proverbs explorer it is just a let down for me.  Maybe I've been spoiled with the Psalms version?

It would be nice if they could do the same thing with the proverbs explorer and have things sort into colorful circles as well as break down the structure of each proverb like you can in the Psalms explorer.  At the very least, is it possible to add the sort field of "bible book"?  If I'm only looking for proverbs in Proverbs I have to manually scroll to find them.  An about file (or help file) would be nice when needed to explain some of the terms in there.

Just hoping!

MJ. Smith

Some things didn't change with my hiatus:

Fun, perhaps, but what information do you want it to convey?

Something that we could narrow down some categories with and have the bubbles change similar to the Psalms Explorer, but with different categories, While this can also be done via the sidebar right now, having the graphical overview view with the bubbles would be great.

Sorry to be skeptical but the psalms shows only the 150 psalms with few potential additions: Ps 151-155, Psalms of Solomon and Dead Sea Scolls. The size of the bubbles reflects the length of the psalms which differs dramatically. Colors divide into 6 basic categories.

The proverbs start with 565 proverbs with many suggested additions especially from the deuterocanonicals. Reference lengths are longer and not commonly known - requiring bigger minimum bubble size. Length is more concentrated around a few values making it less informative as a controller of bubble size. If type is used to determine color there are 7 colors - two with more than 200 entries, one with 62 and 4 with less than 15. Assuming one recognized the type (color) you are seeking and given that two colors have a large number of entries but little difference in length, finding a particular proverb would be comparatively difficult. As I believe the data determines the best visualizations, I don't believe that proverbs are a good candidate for the bubble format. If you want more bubbles, perhaps parables are a likely candidate.

Bubblegrams are a good way to convey information where relative size is important, and clustering by some measure of related-ness is useful, but sequence is not. They are essentially an inefficient but visually engaging way to pivot items by magnitude.

In the Psalms, the number of verses translates straightforwardly into a circle diameter. There isn't a similar intrinsic quantity for Proverbs.They vary in length, but not enough to be interesting. Extrinsic quantities such as (say) citation strength, that is, the number of references to this Proverb across the library or some subset thereof might be fun to see.

For what it's worth, we did write a bubble view for the Proverbs explorer internally, and with 565 bubbles it was intolerably slow and didn't convey much information. In addition to the issues MJ has correctly pointed out, there is also the issue that a Psalm has a short identifier to put into the bubble (the chapter number) that a proverbial saying does not. What we ended up with was a LOT of teeny bubbles without names.

Other visualizations might have utility. I haven't thought about it much, though.

Parables Explorer would be a LOT of fun to see. :-)

Agree. It's on our short list of candidate interactives.

So yes, a visualization would be nice if we knew what visualization would be useful and meet performance standards.