Where did this feature go: topic browser

Hello all,

My attempts to use the L4 help file to find some of the features I am looking for was not all that successful. Hence the idea for mutual help by posting "Where did this feature go: [L3 feature name]" posts, giving the opportunity to someone else who discovered it to let the rest of us know.

In this post, I am asking about the topic browser. I have not figured out quite yet how to do a topic search in L4. I would be grateful for an answer to this and look forward to hearing answers proposed to other "Where did this feature go" type of questions.

Blessings,

Francis

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Mark Smith

I have not figured out quite yet how to do a topic search in L4.

There have been some other posts about this today. The Topic Browser is not in 4.0 and there really is not a good way to do topic searching in 4.0. As far as I (and some others) are concerned this is a big deal that Logos needs to address. Can we add your name to the growing list of people who want to see this ability restored?

(Keep L3 close by until this gets fixed so you still have this capability.)

Francis

Yup!

Mark Smith

Yup!

Good. That now makes 4,672 people who want better topic searching in 4.0. If we keep up at this pace we'll hit 5,000 by 6 AM EST tomorrow. [;)]

Timothy Lovegrove

Francis,

I'm not sure exactly what collection you have, but if I click the search button in L4, and then search my library for the word "centurion" (the kind of term I would expect we would do a topic search for), I get three Bible dictionary / Encyclopedia entries at the top in the "topic" section. Then the library results below are pretty helpful too: an assortment of concordance entires, other dictionaries, a commentary discussion, and more. Of the first @15 entries from the library results, at least 12-13 are helpful. See below.

Mark Smith

Timothy, this is not anything like topic searching nor topic browsing in 3.0 It seems this is what Logos is trying to sell as topic searching, but we've seen better and this is NOT an upgrade. Logos has said they are 'working' on improving topic searching, so perhaps we'll get something better, but it was NOT on the list of features Bob referred to as being in the offing through the middle of next year.

Timothy Lovegrove

I am not trying to be argumentative at all (just a user like you!), but isn't the L3 topic search for "centurion" (below) only slightly different than my L4 search for it? What do you mean when you say L4 is "not anything like" L3?

Jon

When searching your entire library for a topic you will find useful
information though the way that the results are arranged still needs
some refining.

However, L4 brings an entirely new architecture
for researching topics. Try doing a basic search for "Peter". In the
topic section at the start of the results you have some dictionary
articles, you also have a "Reading list" and some online links. Click
on the reading list, this provides you with a human-edited reading list
broken down into categories of resources to research about Peter - far
more precise than a topic browser list generated with an algorithm
could be!

You can have a look at topics.logos.com to see how it
all works, topic entries have been created for every person, place,
thing in the bible just for a start, it will take time for these to all
be populated with useful links and reading lists, but it's managed as a wiki and its
refinement over time will be a community endeavour. I believe there are plans for more instructional material there to show you how you can contribute...

Sean Boisen

Mark:

Could you articulate for me what you wish topic searching/browsing was like in 4.0? Can you walk me through a scenario of how you would use it?

Jeremy

I think we would like it to do exactly what it did in 3. It is a quick way to find topics that don't always come up in the searches. It was better than the Topic Study in Logos 3 because that was not linked to a collection and wouldn't even register dictionaries like Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels.

Mark Smith

What do you mean when you say L4 is "not anything like" L3?

First we need to distinguish three things: topic study from the home page, topic searching using basic search, and the topic browser.

What you showed in 4.0 is search results of the word 'centurion'. You got hits in 2402 articles. Do you really want to look through all of those to be sure you've discovered what you want? (I know you can limit the search.)This is simply a surface text search for the word centurion as far as I can tell. It is not looking for centurion as a topic, just the simple word centurion. Topic Searching from the home page in 3.0 gave you about a dozen articles directly related to centurion. In 4.0 you got three such articles. Not as good. May I change my wording a bit and say "hardly anything like 3.0"?

In 3.0 if you clicked on the "Search entire library for this topic..." on the example you gave, you would get a listing of additional places the word centurion appeared but no where would it be 2400 articles (I got 123 occurrences in I don't know how many articles). I don't understand how L3 generated this but it is more helpful than what you were able to produce in L4.

There just is nothing like the Topic Browser in 4.0 so we can't really compare 3 to 4 with this one.

There is also nothing like topic searching in 4.0. All we can do is a surface text search of our resources. Logos has not provided a way to locate topics.

We can do surface text searches in 4.0 right now but that isn't topic searching.

I'd like to be shown that the facility of 3.0 exists in 4.0. So far no one has been able to do that. Logos is very silent on this issue, and I suspect that is because they know they haven't provided this capability and perhaps don't intend to. I do hope better but the assurances haven't been frequent and strong in this direction.

Todd Phillips

Mark:

Could you articulate for me what you wish topic searching/browsing was like in 4.0? Can you walk me through a scenario of how you would use it?

I'm not Mark, but I find it harder to find topics since it only finds exact matches or sometimes no matches at all. The v3 topic browser showed all the hits that matched the beginning of your search pattern. (and you could do a topic search with a wild card as well)

None of the following searches bring up Topic entries for John Calvin:

calvin
john calvin
calvin, john

I see the entries in the Library search results, but not in the topic results.

Same thing for "oxford movement"...no topic hits, but it's a topic in several references including the ODCC. Same problem with "tractarianism". In fact I don't seem to be getting any topic hits for the ODCC.

"Eusebius" only gives me two hits. (AYDB and Eerdmans Bible Dict). But there's lots of Eusebiuses in NNCD, Columbia Enc., ODCC and they don't show up in the topic results.

"Bede" gives no topic hits. But library results show:

"Bede" in Who's who in Christian history
"Venerable Bede, The" and "Bede, St." in Nelsons New Christian Dictionary
"Bede, Saint" in Columbia
"Bede, St." in Pocket Dict of Bib. Studies

Finally example: searching for "Jesus" returns the topic "Jesus" in the ISBE, but not the "Jesus Christ" topic.

Mark Smith

Could you articulate for me what you wish topic searching/browsing was like in 4.0? Can you walk me through a scenario of how you would use it?

Sean I will do my best but I'm a little curious. It would seem that saying I'd like the 3.0 capabilities in 4.0 would be self-explanatory. I'm not into software design. I just would like to be able to do the same thing with topics in 4.0 that I can do in 3.0.

When I look for a topic I am not looking for surface text but for articles that deal specifically with the topic. That means, I suppose, that somehow there has been a way for a search engine to determine what is and what is not a treatment of a topic. I have no idea how this was handled in 3.0 and earlier versions, but it worked pretty well. I'd guess some sort of tagging had to be done to the text or perhaps a sophisticated search algorithm was used. It's in 3.0 so I'm sure someone at Logos knows how its done.

The Topic Browser could take a topic and find a host of possible sub-topics that I might want to look at and then present the hits so I could decide if I wanted to look at them. Again, this wasn't just a surface text search yielding hundreds or thousands of hits. It homed in on articles that in one way or another (if everything worked right) dealt with some aspect of the topic. There had to be some tagging or some other way for the browser to figure out what was topical and what wasn't.

In 3.0 I can do a topic search in Basic Search using a search parameter (topic) and it would give far different results than a straight surface text search. Not as accurate as the Topic Study from the home page, but the same thing that 3.0 generated automatically if I clicked on 'Search entire library for this topic...' at the end to the Topic Study results. 4.0 has nothing like a 3.0 topic search capability. There is no 'topic' parameter I can use to specify a topic rather than a surface text search.

I want topic searches to return articles that deal with the search term as a topic. That's what 3.0 gives. The Topic Browser builds even further on this.

I don't know if this helps but I'm not asking for anything new.

Ted Hans

I have not figured out quite yet how to do a topic search in L4.

There have been some other posts about this today. The Topic Browser is not in 4.0 and there really is not a good way to do topic searching in 4.0. As far as I (and some others) are concerned this is a big deal that Logos needs to address. Can we add your name to the growing list of people who want to see this ability restored?

(Keep L3 close by until this gets fixed so you still have this capability.)

Add my name to the list, i am with you Mark on this!

Ted

Ted Hans

Yup!

Good. That now makes 4,672 people who want better topic searching in 4.0. If we keep up at this pace we'll hit 5,000 by 6 AM EST tomorrow.

I like the way the Topic Browser functions in V3. A specific search for "Peter" in the Bibliotheca Sacra narrows the search field to Exegetical articles on Peter as oppose to all the places where Peter is mentioned in the articles. Can this be done in Logos 4? Ted

V4 brings up all instances where Peter is mentioned

Donald McNeeley

Add me in as well.

Ken F Hill

That now makes 4,672 people who want better topic searching in 4.0

I'll join the club.

William Emberley

You can add my name.