Where did this feature go: topic browser
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Jannie van Niekerk said:
I just tried "topic:Peter" and got some results. The Reading lists might be a smarter way forward...
OK. This is a good hidden feature.It is basically a topic search, but not as rich as the topic browser was in finding alternative topics.
However, it only finds the first 5 resources that match.
Is there any way to get more than the first 5 matching resources? Perhaps a "Find more" button after the search is complete?
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Let me try to shed some light on all the helpful comments this thread has produced. My goals are to explain what Logos 4 can do today, and to give some sense of where it's going next. But i'll tell you up front that our work on topics is not yet complete.
There are a few issues mixed together in this thread:
- what is a topic in L4 and how do i find and use them?
- how do i manage the (sometimes overwhelming) search results?
- what are the most effective ways to find information?
First of all, "topic" has a new and different meaning in L4 (i'm going to call them concepts here to try to keep the distinction straight). We've put a lot of work into building a new framework for concepts that will provide much better results going forward. Right now our concept coverage is very incomplete: even though we have about 11,000 such concepts, they still don't include much church history (so no Calvin yet), they only include key Bible dictionaries (ISBE, Anchor, and some others), and they don't yet include all the possible synonyms for a concept.
We've integrated concept searching into general search: so if your search term matches a concept (like "centurion" or "marriage"), you'll get a Topic section at the top of the results with links to the dictionaries we've integrated so far. If you look for "communion", you'll see that concept groups together dictionary articles even though their titles are different, and if you open one and use the right-arrow key, it will now go to the right next article (this did not work right in L3 because it only knew when titles "matched", not when articles described the same concept). So in L3 you would never have found e.g. the Eerdmans Bible Dictionary article on "Eucharist" unless you also knew, and browsed for, that topical keyword. Also note that we've disambiguated two different concepts that match the same term "communion": the sacrament, vs the notion of fellowship.
What's below the Topic section is indeed searching the words in the text, and i agree that we need to provide more help in dealing with the potentially large quantity of results. The best way at present to manage that is to restrict the search to some collection rather than the entire library (or make your search terms more specific). For now, you have to do that first with Tools > Collections, outside the search panel.
Lastly, let me attempt a conceptual explanation of where we're going with this.Here's my rough assessment of how topic browsing performed in LDLS 3, vs. how it works now. Our ultimate goal is to provide all the relevant results (100% completeness), and only the relevant results (100% accuracy), and i'm certain we'll never get there. In L3, i'd say we provided pretty good completeness (note you never saw what you were missing!), but with a lot of noise as well: but skilled users learned strategies for dealing with that noise. What we've done with L4 is to take a big step in the accuracy direction with our new concept strategy, and we'll continue to drive that toward higher and higher completeness (the projected improvements in 4.1 and 4.2 are notional: don't treat these as real numbers, but as trajectories).
I know some disagree and would prefer the topic browsing experience of L3. Please be assured that we care about improving your experience, and we're doing our best to balance that with all the other challenges of providing a rich, complex application like Logos 4.
[Update: picture edited slightly to not show accuracy declining over time]
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Sean Boisen said:
First of all, "topic" has a new and different meaning in L4 (i'm going to call them concepts here to try to keep the distinction straight). We've put a lot of work into building a new framework for concepts that will provide much better results going forward. Right now our concept coverage is very incomplete: even though we have about 11,000 such concepts, they still don't include much church history (so no Calvin yet), they only include key Bible dictionaries (ISBE, Anchor, and some others), and they don't yet include all the possible synonyms for a concept.
Thank you for the detailed explanation. I look forward to the expansion of the topic list.
But when I keylink or use power lookup on a word, that does not seem to be using the controlled topic list. Is there someway we could integrate this type of search into the basic search? Like with a "More" link after the current topic hits?
Secondly, the types of topic indexing that the journals have (as Mark pointed out) seems to be ignored in v4. Have we lost access to these indexes (er, indices) in v4?
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The easiest way currently is to right-click on a word or phrase, select the Selection tab, and do a search. But i can see the benefit of Power Lookup including these results as well: thanks for the suggestion.
As far as i can tell, topic indexing in journals isn't exposed in the interface. Somebody mentioned using topic:someterm in search, but that doesn't seem to behave as i'd expect if it were really searching topics. I'll inquire further.
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Sean Boisen said:
The easiest way currently is to right-click on a word or phrase, select the Selection tab, and do a search. But i can see the benefit of Power Lookup including these results as well: thanks for the suggestion.
Actually my suggestion was the other way around (I think). I'd like power lookup type results in the basic search. I don't really want controlled topic results in the power lookup window. (if I understand you)
Sean Boisen said:As far as i can tell, topic indexing in journals isn't exposed in the interface. Somebody mentioned using topic:someterm in search, but that doesn't seem to behave as i'd expect if it were really searching topics. I'll inquire further.
If the "topic:" prefix worked to search all topics and headwords, controlled or not, then that would be a good thing.
One problem I have now with the right-click lookup and power lookup is that it only works for single words (a multi-word selection doesn't give the lookup and power lookup options, only full text search is available). I had hoped I could use the search window to search dictionaries for multi-word entries. But I've documented the problems I've had with that above.
MacBook Pro (2019), ThinkPad E540
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Sean Boisen said:
if you open one and use the right-arrow key, it will now go to the right next article
The problem is that it also seems to go to resources that are not in the collection I searched.
I wish there was a way to show all search results in a group, like the More link in version 3 for a Bible Word Study. I can live with the 5 results as long as I can see all the others at will.
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Todd Phillips said:
If the "topic:" prefix worked to search all topics and headwords, controlled or not, then that would be a good thing.
The topic: prefix is good. But why force the user to learn command line syntax if you want it to be easy to use. It should be easy to add another option to the Search window for "Topic", in addition to Basic, Bible, Morph, Syntax. This would simplify the user interface and show that this hidden feature exists.
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Hi Sean Boisen and thanks for the explanation. I would like to know from you or anyone else the answer to my previous question. Ted
Ted Hans said: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
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I'll add my two cents which may or may not be new. I'm a seminary student and I used the Topic Browser in v3 to find articles for papers I was writing. Topics should be derived from title and headings, not surface text. If I do a topic search for marriage, "Marriage" should be in the title or sub-heading of an article.
One of the problems with v3 Topic browser was that in almost every case a single article showed up many many times in the results. That would need to be fixed.
So that's what I would want to see in a topic browser. Something that is based on titles and headings and returns one result per article.
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Let me hasten to say that titles and headings may not be the only source of topics; perhaps there is a more sophistocated way of determining that. But at minimum titles and headings are useful.
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Ted Hans said:
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
Ted/Gabriel:
It's not currently possible with Logos 4 to only search article titles and headings. While we'd like to offer that ability, there are some technical challenges we haven't solved yet.
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Hi Sean,
Is there a 1:1 correlation between the 'concepts' you were talking about above, and the topics for which reading lists are available, eg listed on topics.logos.com, are they the same thing?
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Sean Boisen said:
We've integrated concept searching into general search:
That was a most illuminating presentation of Logos' new concept for topics. I'd forgotten about (not associated) the power of the right/left arrrows for further results. It also helps to explain the presentation of results for Basic Search (and Bob's reluctance to present results summarised by book as in v3!). I think many of us would still like to separate Topics and Basic Search or at least have a Basic Search as per v3 and rename L4's search to be "Concept Search" as that would do justice to what you are trying to achieve. When the tech difficulties are resolved you can also integrate section and heading results.
Please keep up the good work because we have often criticised the accuracy of v3 Topic search.
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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Mark A. Smith said:
I don't understand why you and others are trying to defend the poor choice that Bob and his team made here.
I guess my comment to you would be that I don't believe it's a poor choice.
I showed you what I do...it does what I want, I find topics and info that are usable to me...you have the option to disagree.
Robert Pavich
For help go to the Wiki: http://wiki.logos.com/Table_of_Contents__
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Jon:
A few months ago there was a 1:1 correlation: the initial set of pages on topics.logos.com were generated from our concepts data. We created that site to invite community participation, including
- constructing reading lists
- adding other synonyms ("Alternate labels"). As an example, it looks like somebody has added synonyms like "synoptic apocalypse" and "little apocalpyse" to http://topics.logos.com/Olivet_Discourse
- adding web links to other useful resources
- adding new pages altogether (so it's not 1:1 anymore: there are lots of new pages there)
We haven't yet established what process we'll use to review that data and integrate it into our concepts database. But http://topics.logos.com is a good place for you to contribute if you'd like to add value to your library as well as sharing those benefits with others: it's our attempt to harness some of the collaborative wisdom that exists in our user community. And some of the content there contributed by the community shows up "live" in Logos 4 now (rreading lists and web links).
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Dave Hooton said:
I think many of us would still like to separate Topics and Basic Search or at least have a Basic Search as per v3 and rename L4's search to be "Concept Search" as that would do justice to what you are trying to achieve.
Dave:
Going forward, we definitely plan to enrich the ways in which concepts are used in L4. Thanks for your feedback and positive comments.
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The more instructions I receive on the forums, the clearer it becomes that the way to get some of the things we are used to doing in L3 requires knowledge of tricks, how to tag, use commands, etc. Of course, these were in use in L3 too with one difference: one could access a lot of what they wanted without having to use these (through menus and buttons).
It seems to me that part of the problem is also with the help file. Yesterday, I typed in "topics" to see what I could find. None of the tricks discussed in this forum were made available to me by the help file suggestions. Using reading lists -- which is absolutely not what I (and I believe others) are looking for -- was the primary recommendation.
Then I figured, I better know some of these commands and tags others are speaking about (for instance, using the "type:" "lang:" "subject"). I don't know what's available as commands or what can follow these commands (ex: for "lang," "eng" -- but what if I wanted Greek or French, should I use Gk, Grk, Greek; Fre; Fr; French?). Also I learned about these two quite hazzardly on the forums, so I wanted to find a list, so that I know what is available to me and learn to use them. My attempts to find this in the help file by keyword search were again unsuccessful. Also, I looked in vain for an "advanced search" section as there was in the L3 help file.
I know that it takes time to learn a new software and get used to new ways of doing things. I don't have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is to have to go through tons of forum posts in order to -- perhaps -- find answers and more often than not, not being sure whether there are better answers or where to find information. In other words, some posts can be someone's idea, not the official recommendation and who knows which would be best when we can't tell what we've got!
Amidst all the pressing needs Logos faces, I plea for prioritizing better documentation and training. I do believe that a better help file will go a long way in enabling users to learn how to use L4 and be less frustrated.
Once again, thank you Bob and the Logos team for your work and your listening ear, and to fellow users for their contributions. We understand also setbacks such as staff getting sick. Blessings on you.
Francis
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Francis said:
Amidst all the pressing needs Logos faces, I plea for prioritizing better documentation and training. I do believe that a better help file will go a long way in enabling users to learn how to use L4 and be less frustrated.
Francis:
I completely agree with the need for better documentation (and we're working on it). I found your particular examples very helpful: we don't always know what people are missing (in fact, i stumbled over the "lang:" one yesterday!).
Can i suggest that you start a new forum thread entitled something like "Features that need better documentation: library search", and re-post your examples there (so they don't get lost in the pile of other comments on topics and the L3 topic browser)? Along with everything else going on, we don't all get to read all the forum posts. And having a clear title like that will make it easier for developers to find your suggestions, as well as enabling others to either add their own questions, or contribute their own comments.
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Sean Boisen said:
[Update: picture edited slightly to not show accuracy declining over time]
I was curious about that trend.
Thanks for trying to explain this. I'm not sure all of this will work out but it helps to know what you are trying to do.
Let me suggest that one thing that ought to be considered for incorporation in the topics section of the search results would be relevant references to topical-type resources (New Nave's Topical Bible, etc). This existed in 3.0 when you did a Study Topic on the Home Page. Topically relevant Scripture references would be something a 'concept' searcher would undoubtedly be interested in.
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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Gabriel Powell said:
Topics should be derived from title and headings, not surface text. If I do a topic search for marriage, "Marriage" should be in the title or sub-heading of an article.
Sorry to say that I disagree ... the topics database allows you to have the reading list based on primary topic; the search allows me to find where its mentioned - which often has perspectives missing in articles focused on the topic.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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MJ. Smith said:
Sorry to say that I disagree ... the topics database allows you to have the reading list based on primary topic; the search allows me to find where its mentioned - which often has perspectives missing in articles focused on the topic.
What you say is true, but can't that be accomplished right now through simple searching? I think what Gabriel is suggesting is that a topic search needs to focus on the major treatments of the topic which would (normally) have some heading or subheading to point that out in the text. I think of it as being able to search a detailed Table of Contents of a book, not the text of the book itself. I already have the ability to do the latter, but not the former.
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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Sean, here is what I was trying to do today.
I have made a collection of topical bibles.
I wanted to find the primary instances for "sin"(articles or headwords[not sure I am using this term properly])
In V3 I used the topic browser on this collection and got to the main main articles very quickly in resources like Naves Topical Bible, New Topical Textbook.
In V4 I did the basic search on the same collection and got a very long list that had over 5000 hits and they did not allow me to quickly navigate to the article titles in the various resources.
Granted "sin" is going to get a lot of hits, but the topic browser in V3 allowed me to get to where I wanted very quickly and see main topics and Articles in the various resources easily.
In V4, the basic search ranked or by book on the same collection was useless for navigating to these main articles in these topical resources.
Is there a way to search headwords or article titles and then have them easier to navigate to get where I want so that I can then read the article.
I see nothing in the help file to instruct me to do this more effectively.
I do realize that topics (or concepts) are being reworked but I am not seeing how it can be better than the Topic Browser. It may be, but I don't get it.
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Trey Selman said:
Is there a way to search headwords or article titles and then have them easier to navigate to get where I want so that I can then read the article.
The answer to this seems to be no. Somewhere in the past couple of days this was suggested and the response was that for now implementing this would be (as I recall the word) 'problematic.'
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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Sean Boisen said:
if you open one and use the right-arrow key, it will now go to the right next article (this did not work right in L3 because it only knew when titles "matched", not when articles described the same concept).
Sean,
I tried this with what you said and it did not work as I understood you to explain. I am betting that I do not understand what you tried to explain. I don't want to be thick headed but I am afraid that I am not getting it.
Would you please give an example (or two) so that I could test it and see how it works?
steps to do the search and then what should be expected as I right click.
Currently it seems as though it works much more like the Parallel resource with whatever reference word is in the reference box.
Also, what if there are multiple instances in a specific resource of that reference word. In V3 there was a little black triangle to navigate in that reference. this no longer exists.
How do we take advantage of the rich tagging of the resources to make bible study faster?
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MJ. Smith said:Gabriel Powell said:
Topics should be derived from title and headings, not surface text. If I do a topic search for marriage, "Marriage" should be in the title or sub-heading of an article.
Sorry to say that I disagree ... the topics database allows you to have the reading list based on primary topic; the search allows me to find where its mentioned - which often has perspectives missing in articles focused on the topic.
I think Heading search should be a separate search. Who better to determine and summarize the content of an article then it's author? As far as topic searching goes I have no good suggestion so I'll leave it to the brains at Logos and the rest of you guys on the forum :-)
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I know it's not EXACTLY the same as V3 but this seems about as servicable as it gets...there is context for each hit...the topic headings are clearly seen...
what's not to love?
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=193808921078#/video/video.php?v=1228097953060&oid=193808921078
Robert Pavich
For help go to the Wiki: http://wiki.logos.com/Table_of_Contents__
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MJ. Smith said:
Sorry to say that I disagree ... the topics database allows you to have the reading list based on primary topic; the search allows me to find where its mentioned - which often has perspectives missing in articles focused on the topic.
Martha,
I agree. Notice that in my search there are synonyms, and different topics directly related to sin that I might have not seen were it not for this method.
Robert Pavich
For help go to the Wiki: http://wiki.logos.com/Table_of_Contents__
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I really appreciate Sean how to serve as liaison between the forums and Logos, as well as the other staff who do the same. Thanks Logos for being in conversation with us.
Your explanation concerning concepts was rather clear. I think that it contributes to confusion to call topics word searches. Clearly they are not topics and it would eliminate the confusion if this terminology was adjusted. What I mean is that the word "concepts" works as a designation for topics, but the word "topics" does not work for word occurence. As long as there continues to be references to topics in that way, there will be an ongoing source of confusion. So I would suggest adjusting the terminology back to a more expected usage.
I think that the goal to improve the accuracy of L3 topics/L4 concepts is great. I have not understood how that goal relates to mere word searches.
I am also confused as to what is technically a challenge to implement in L4. I am not asking for a technical explanation but to understand what you actually mean is a challenge. I asked the question because concerning "concepts" you say that the work has been and is underway, but then you made that statement about the technical challenge to implement a L3 topic search equivalent. I for my part am not looking for the same way or look, but for the access to the same results (or better) with the same ease (or better).
I want to add agreement also to the suggestion to add the concepts search to the search dialog and generally speaking to have a lesser dependence on syntax line searches.
Finally, I would suggest to follow users that we start sharing our best coping strategies while we await a further implementation of concepts search. I was just thinking today that the way the search works at present is not different than searching relevant hits in an Internet search engine and so, the same kind of strategies that are used to refine website hits can help us better our results. Of course, the liability will be the best as in an Internet search: we are likely to miss very good results because we did not match the terms that would have allowed us to find it. Perhaps have a "speed search" (display results as you type, not have to press enter all the time) might make the process faster and easier.
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Trey Selman said:
Is there a way to search headwords or article titles and then have them easier to navigate to get where I want so that I can then read the article.
We don't currently provide a way to search only article titles/headwords. V3 topics aren't in Logos 4, so what you used to do with the Topic Browser can't be done.Our hope is that (if you've selected Ranked as the view) the best matches will be at the top.
The best approximation i can suggest for now is to use Search, restrict the search to your topical collection, with the Ranked view, and then skim the headings, clicking through for any that look promising (which should bring them up fairly quickly). If you turn on the table of contents in resources like Nave's, it will be a little easier to find the context when you're dropped into the middle of an article (Nave's has a lot of "X .... Of Sin" sub-articles).
In future releases we hope to have better ways to take those Search results and further refine/search them.
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