Where did this feature go: topic browser
Comments
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This is a slight difference than an internet search, because the value that logos provides is in the richly tagged resources. And what a great value and gift it is!
The engine tools are what helps us to access the value from these specially tagged resources. Topic tagging was (is) one of the valuable ways to access significant information in the library.
I am more than happy to wait for the further development of concept/topic searching/browsing and I look forward to it.
I just want to help Logos see how I (we) used the tool so they can determine the best way to build a better tool which can help us all study, learn, and grow.
Also, I want to understand how to use the new tool properly and effectively.
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Thanks Sam
I am not sure that searching the headwords or article titles is the best way to get where I want. I am just trying to understand and adjust my thinking.
I am sure y'all are working on strategies to be effective in our study that are better than the topic browser. I look forward to seeing how this will work.
Sean Boisen said:V3 topics aren't in Logos 4,
So are you saying that there is less tagging?
Sean Boisen said: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)
You said this is "for now" because this is really going backwards and not forwards. This is not much better than opening up a paper book.
Sean Boisen said:In future releases we hope to have better ways
Looking forward to seeing the new ways to navigate the library!
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I'm another who misses the topic browser. I just tried a topic search in L4 by typing 'topic:archaeology'. The result was disappointing to say the least.
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I agree. I just did a search on the work peace and got several resources with "the word" peace but not the topic. I am still deciding wether I want my money back and topic searching is a must for me so I will be watching this closely. I was able to customize Logos 3 using the built-in scripting language so it does a lot more including surfing the internet from within the program and tagging bible references so you can click on them. What I have done with Logos 3 makes it in some ways more appealing to me than Logos 4.
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Trey Selman said: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.
Trey:
Having made this claim, i'm chagrined to also find that it doesn't work as i expected. I thought i had confirmed this behavior before posting it. Maybe a bug has crept in, or maybe i misspoke. I'll have to get back to you about the correct right-arrow functionality: sorry!
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Let me see if I understand:
In version 3, articles were tagged (down in the text in some cases) with a "topic" that was nested (like sin:adultry:...) The topic browser looked through all of these topics and allowed you to search them and took advantage of the nesting with a "drop down" strategy (e.g., if you asked for sin, then you could see all of the "sin topics" under it - adultry being one in he example above)
Is this accurate?
Assuming it is:
Cost: -
- this meant that every article/section had to be tagged with the appropriate topic. This would mean a lot of work on the part of the "tagger". The more resources the more "by hand" work.
- the tagging was somewhat arbitrary. People were probably not consistent in how they tagged articles and tagging was likely spotty. Were any of the tags generated automatically? (my guess is that when you reach thousands/hundreds of thousands of articles you start thinking algorithms rather than people)
Beneft: - if someone went to the work to tag it with that topic then it likely was an article that merited my looking at the article when studying the topic.
For version 4 are you saying?:
- you deleted the topic "tags" out of the resources, or
- that you simply do not use them since you are not putting them in new resources and are pursuing the "concept" strategy which is "automatable"
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Your description of v3 topics is pretty close in terms of what the user saw. The details of how that happened were a bit more complicated, but the downsides were as you suggest: topics in v3 were neither comprehensive (you weren't really finding all the content on that topic, though it may have looked that way) nor consistent (topics were keywords selected by taggers, and not all resources were tagged to the same depth or consistency). Furthermore, with that approach we really couldn't escape the confusion between words like "sin" and their various semantics.
Just to save somebody else from saying it [:)] topics aren't completely comprehensive or consistent in Logos 4 yet either. But we want them to be, so we've invested a huge amount of effort to move in that direction. Our new strategy is not yet automatable, though i hope it will become more efficient over time: it still requires an enormous amount of manual effort. We're doing that because we think it will make the library work better.
We chose not to include v3 topics, in part because we feared confusing our customers with parallel but confusable notions of topic, and in part because we are focusing our energies on the new approach. But we are definitely hearing the voice of the customer asking for functionality that seems to have been lost.
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Sean Boisen said:
But we are definitely hearing the voice of the customer asking for functionality that seems to have been lost.
It has been a bit loud. [A]
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but these seemed the most appropriate place to post.
I hear Sean's arguments about topics and the need to re-tag. But I don't understand why topics can't work better in the meantime. Searching on topic:Gentiles currently returns five resources on my account. But once I open one of those resources, I can click on the + tab and find another dozen or so dictionaries that also have that 'topic'. Why, whilst you're adding the necessary tags, can't you duplicate the functionality of the +tab in the topic search?
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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MarkBarnes said:
Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but these seemed the most appropriate place to post.
I hear Sean's arguments about topics and the need to re-tag. But I don't understand why topics can't work better in the meantime. Searching on topic:Gentiles currently returns five resources on my account. But once I open one of those resources, I can click on the + tab and find another dozen or so dictionaries that also have that 'topic'. Why, whilst you're adding the necessary tags, can't you duplicate the functionality of the +tab in the topic search?
Double clicking on a word (keylinking) and Power Lookup both also find dictionary entries that the topic search ignores.
MacBook Pro (2019), ThinkPad E540
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Sean Boisen said:
I'll have to get back to you about the correct right-arrow functionality
Thanks Sean
I would like to know how to use this functionality when it is determined.
Thanks for giving us your thoughts and help.
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Mark:
Adding a tab gives you a list of parallel resources: they may or may not have an entry that matches the thing you're looking for. To pick on my favorite obscure example, Anchor has an article on Japanese Biblical Scholarship. If you go to that article and then click on the + tab, you'll see a number of parallel resources: but none of them has an article on that subject. And if you open one of them, you'll either go the last article you visited there (if you've opened it before), or just the title page.
So the existence of parallel resources doesn't guarantee they actually have an article on that topic. And when you do find other dictionaries with article titles like "Gentiles", that's because it doing string matching: it's not matching the topic in any deep sense.So the basic point is that string matching doesn't necessarily produce the same topic (though it will be close perhaps 80% of the time): we're re-tagging because that doesn't seem good enough.
From experimentation (i'll have to ask the developers if i've got it right), it seems like right-arrow works more like what you describe: you get a parallel resource that has an article with a matching headword. "Eucharist" is a good example: you'll get several other resources with that as an article headword, but you won't get articles on Lord's supper or communion, and you won't even bring up those resources.
BTW, while i'm not sure yet what the search syntax "topic:Gentiles" means, it doesn't do a "topic search" in the L3 sense: that's incorrect information from some earlier posts about topics. If you want to find the (new style) topic, just search for "Gentiles". If there's a topic, you'll see a Topic section in the Passage Guide: otherwise you won't.
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Thanks, Sean, I appreciate the reply. A few points:
- Thanks for the explanation re: the + tab. Nonetheless, I do think that it would be better for Logos to do string matching in article titles for dictionary-type resources whilst the manual tagging is still ongoing. It sounds like it will be a while until you're done. Why not give us more results until you are?
- topic:Gentiles does do a topic search. That may be unplanned behaviour, but it works. That's because typing in xxx:searchterm returns topics for the search-term, but not library results! So we get topics quickly and don't have to wait for our library to be searched. Not only so, but there must be some resources with topics, because topic:Gentiles returns 2 hits in my library (from the Deluxe Map Set) whereas xxx:Gentiles retuns none (though both return the same results in the topics section).
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Add me in as well.
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Sean,
I am really surprised that L4 cannot search the article titles and headings of resources. In my mind, this is an invaluable search criteria for the journals. The ability to search title:marriage or title:peter or title:searchterm (on anything) is the real value of the Electronic Journals.
I know this functionality is part of other bible software engines and with all that L4 is, this is a real hinderance in specific research.
Can you please advise if this is something to look forward to in the future, or is this a fundamental limitation in the new architecture?
Thanks,
Ross
MacBook Pro 15' Retina • 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7 • 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 • Version 10.10
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MarkBarnes said:
it would be better for Logos to do string matching in article titles
Enough folks have asked that we're considering some other approaches (like this) in the meantime. You're right that it will still take some time to finish organizing resources with new-style topics.
MarkBarnes said:topic:Gentiles does do a topic search.
A better statement on my part would have been "what topic:XXX does isn't very predictable". A few resources have been tagged in such a way that this finds the tags (note this is now a _third_ sense of "topic", different from new-style Logos 4 topics, and different from matching strings!), but most have not. So it's not a reliable way to find topics (in whatever sense one means) in your library.
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RossStrader said:
I am really surprised that L4 cannot search the article titles and headings of resources ... Can you please advise if this is something to look forward to in the future, or is this a fundamental limitation in the new architecture?
Ross:
This is not a fundamental limitation of the new architecture: it's just one of literally hundreds of decisions we had to make about priorities and trade-offs. We all agree that it would be more useful to be able to search article titles and headings, and we'll definitely do what we can to address this issue in the future.
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I agree with Mark. If you used Topic Browser in L3 quite a bit, there really is no comparison. I used it for finding hymns that went along with my sermon, and for sermon illustrations.
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DanCleghorn said:
If you used Topic Browser in L3 quite a bit, there really is no comparison
I really miss the topic search facility on L4. I used it regularly especially as a start when doing research for a particular subject. The fact that it is missing together with the PBB resources is all that keeps me from ditching L3.
Bert Barnes
Acer Extensa, 4gig Ram, 160gig 5400 HD, Core 2 duo processor, WinXP
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Sean Boisen said:RossStrader said:
I am really surprised that L4 cannot search the article titles and headings of resources ... Can you please advise if this is something to look forward to in the future, or is this a fundamental limitation in the new architecture?
Ross:
This is not a fundamental limitation of the new architecture: it's just one of literally hundreds of decisions we had to make about priorities and trade-offs. We all agree that it would be more useful to be able to search article titles and headings, and we'll definitely do what we can to address this issue in the future.
Making Topic searches in L4 less functional/usable is a step BACK for L4. It was a function I used a lot, and hope it is re-incorporated to make it at LEAST AS functional as it is in L3. If "topic search" isn't searching headings/titles then I think I'd rename it to "content" search or something, because it isn't really topical.
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Please add me to the list of people that would like the topic browser function and the topical search as well. It seems to me that this is a very difficult thing to accomplish. I can't imagine how it could be done without tags having to be added to all existing books - not a trivial task.
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Sean Boisen said:
Adding a tab gives you a list of parallel resources: they may or may not have an entry that matches the thing you're looking for. To pick on my favorite obscure example, Anchor has an article on Japanese Biblical Scholarship. If you go to that article and then click on the + tab, you'll see a number of parallel resources: but none of them has an article on that subject.
Sean, this isn't correct, and reinforces my point. If you click on the + tab on a slightly less obscure topic, say, for example, Bethlehem (Place) in Anchor, then you'll see two columns in the new tab. The lefthand column (which is what you were referring to) shows similar resources. As you said, it lists them regardless of whether the topic is included. But the right hand column shows only those resources which are relevant, presumably by mysteriously searching the headword, which is something we can't do. All I'm suggesting is that until you've manually tagged everything, you take this existing functionality and place it in the search function. Surely that must be relatively straightforward?
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark A. Smith said:
That now makes 4,672 people who want better topic searching in 4.0
I'll join the club.
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Mark:
Thanks for clarifying, you're right that
- i misunderstood your initial suggestion
- i was talking about the left side, not the parallel resources column on the right
That seems like a useful suggestion, and please be assured that we're actively considering how to expand our functionality for topical search.
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Thanks, Sean.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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I don't know how well this will work until better topic searching comes but if you did YYY WITHIN 15 words YYY, maybe you could weed out at least single occurrence results. If you add more WITHIN statements you might even get closer.
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Thanks for considering our suggestions. The topic browswer in L3 is far better.
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Sean Boisen said:
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 currently have 15 books in my Sermon Illustration Collection. I would have added more but Logos 4 doesn't have the ability to search the topic field! Even with my downsized collection I still get too many hits when I search for a key word. For example, when I search the collection for the word "love" I get 8,430 results in 3,301 articles! I want need the ability to limit the search to the topic "love" in these books! I don't want to waste my time reading through results that may use the word love, but are about a totally different topic. Also, the topics in the Bible dictionaries (that do show up in a search) are almost useless when looking for sermon illustrations.
There reason I spent the extra money to buy the sermon illustrations books is because I wanted to be able to find illustrations quickly. It is almost easier to find an illustration using the physical version of the book than it is using Logos 4! This is because these books have the topics indexed and are easy to find in the print versions. But wait, the electronic books must also have the topics indexed since I was able to search for them in Logos 3. It's just that Logos 4 is incapable of searching for topics.
I'm not hard to please. All I want is for Logos to say they are working to fix this problem. I can wait for a fix.
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Yes I would love to see Topic search as per Topic Browser in L3 too.
POSSIBLE IMPLEMENTATION:
Once the tagging of headings and article titles is completed, for me the best possible implementation would be to add "Topics" into the search tab as per pic below - after Basic or after Bible.
95% of the searching I did in L3 were Bible and Topic Browser searches. I will do the same when L4 implements Topic search - as per Topic Browser or some better implementation.
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Jason Mc said:
Once the tagging of headings and article titles is completed, for me the best possible implementation would be to add "Topics" into the search tab as per pic below - after Basic or after Bible.
I agree..that's consistent with the UI.
Robert Pavich
For help go to the Wiki: http://wiki.logos.com/Table_of_Contents__
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