Logos Metadata better than Morris Proctor!
You may have seen today's blog post by Morris Proctor. He advises the following rule for a collection of all Greek lexicons:
type:lexicon AND title:(Greek,new)
I think it's helpful to set up such collections, but was sceptical when I looked at his rules. Also I wondered whether I had an existing collection rule to this end: yes there it was. Maybe I snatched it from the wiki or some forum discussion way back.
Putting the Morris-rule collection tab in one window and the library showing my old collection I compared them side by side.
Going by the titles will include false positives such as a lexicon to the Syriac New Testament or the Vulgate New Testament (which are not Greek, but Syriac and Latin lexicons).
And, much worse, Morris' rule will miss the popular and for users with smaller libraries probably relevant
- Enhanced Strong's Lexicon
- Kassuehlke's "Kleines Wörterbuch" (okay, it's Greek-German only)
- Lexham Analytical Lexicon to the Septuagint
Okay, using the Plus and Minus features of collections may get us where we want, which means I can manipulate Morris' collection so that it resembles line by line my old one. But then we could build our collection according to a different rule in the firstplace: type:lexicon subject:greek
Going by subject rather by title would be the point in having subjects at all. And I found that my old collection had some legacy minus entries for arabic, aramaic and syriac resources which I could remove since they no longer yield false positives.
So it seems, Logos metadata for lexicons today are more reliable for such a collection than going by titles. Since there was no former collection for Hebrew, I went on to put this theory to test:
left, the Morris-rule collection type:lexicon AND title:(Hebrew,old)
right, my library filtered for type:lex subject:hebrew
Going by the titles will again include false positives such as Swansons Aramaic lexicon to the Old Testament.
And, much worse, Morris' rule will again miss the popular and/or relevant resources
- Enhanced Strong's Lexicon
- Bosman et al's "Kleines Wörterbuch" (and, it's Hebrew/Aramaic-English, too!)
- Jastrow's Dictionary to the Targumin
The subject tagging obviously rules! But are these collections complete?
I went on and created collections for Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac and Latin, too.
Now I can check:
Metadata are incomplete for one Homeric Greek lexicon (not found via the subject or the title rule) and for one Latin one (Lewis' Elementary Dictionary which came with Perseus and is not to be confused with Lewis&Short). However, I'm glad this showed a decent quality of subject tagging in the lexicons.
Of course, my results are subject to the content of my library - yours may vary.
Have joy in the Lord! 
Comments
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Thanks for posting. That's the power of the forums.
Mission: To serve God as He desires.
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Lynden Williams said:
Thanks for posting.
You're welcome.
And for those who wonder: yes, I just put up the two incompletely tagged lexicons onto http://wiki.logos.com/Metadata_correction_proposals
Have joy in the Lord!
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Lynden Williams said:
That's the power of the forums.
Hi Lynden,
I also planned to allow for the power of Faithlife, i.e. I wanted to share the collections with Faithlife group Logos Collections. However, it seems this group doesn't allow members to publish their collections. Since you are EDITED an administrator a moderator of the group, do you want to create and publish them?
My goal would be for others to have working collections if they want [;)] , but also to find in their libraries potential further lexicons not yet tagged correctly (or tagged with additional languages? Modern languages, however, are type:dictionary, such as MW, COED and the Dictionary of Theological German).
Mick
Have joy in the Lord!
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[Y] Thanks!
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NB.Mick said:
And for those who wonder: yes, I just put up the two incompletely tagged lexicons onto http://wiki.logos.com/Metadata_correction_proposals
Did you notice that Hayley has been doing some work again? [Y] to both of you.
Mac Pro (late 2013) OS 12.6.2
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fgh said:NB.Mick said:
And for those who wonder: yes, I just put up the two incompletely tagged lexicons onto http://wiki.logos.com/Metadata_correction_proposals
Did you notice that Hayley has been doing some work again?
to both of you.Yes, and Kyle the latest. But this goes really slow. It's a bit of progress - and some areas have reached a good level (like lexicons - okay, tell no six-sigma producing car manufacterer that 2 out of 46 resources wrong is accepable quality) but accross the board I think that Logos ships wrong metadata faster these days than they correct the most glaring errors. So the problem mounts up instead of going away.
I don't know what makes fixing these things so hard internally at Logos - but it seems to be. Thus I don't expect them to be fixed in a reasonable time by Logos. Maybe user-editable metadata is the solution for many of these issues, so those of us who care can change stuff by ourselves. Nice would be a button "restore factory default metadata" for when we got it mixed up....
Mick
NB: I counted on you to drop by in a thread with metadata in the title... [:)]
Have joy in the Lord!
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NB. Someone creted this rule for Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicons
Subject:(Aramaic,Hebrew) Type:(Dictionary,Lexicon) OR (Type:Encyclopedia AND Title:(Greek,Jewish) AND Title:(Defined,Dictionary))
Mission: To serve God as He desires.
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I have the same rule as yours for Greek Lexicons and the same amount.
Mission: To serve God as He desires.
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Just published the Hebrew, Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicons to the collections.
Mission: To serve God as He desires.
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Lynden Williams said:
NB. Someone creted this rule for Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicons
Subject:(Aramaic,Hebrew) Type:(Dictionary,Lexicon) OR (Type:Encyclopedia AND Title:(Greek,Jewish) AND Title:(Defined,Dictionary))
For my current library, this gives only type:lexicon resources with subject:Aram and/or subject:hebr - and that's as it should be: there should be no original language resources of type:dictionary and even less of type:encyclopedia. However, I'd like to hear from people with a greater variety in their liobraries and resources that don't fit.
type:lex subject:greek (plus manually the Homeric lexicon)
type:lex subject:hebr
type:lex subject:aram
type:lex subject:arab
type:lex subject:latin (plus manually Lewis "Elementary Latin" lexicon)
should assign all dictionaries into language-specific collections (some of course come up in two or three of them)
Have joy in the Lord!
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Lynden Williams said:
I have the same rule as yours for Greek Lexicons and the same amount.
including the Homeric one, I have 25. I'm still lacking BDAG and LSJ, though.
Have joy in the Lord!
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Lynden Williams said:
NB. Someone creted this rule for Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicons
Subject:(Aramaic,Hebrew) Type:(Dictionary,Lexicon) OR (Type:Encyclopedia AND Title:(Greek,Jewish) AND Title:(Defined,Dictionary))
Second answer: but I think I see what the rule is intended to accomplish.
It doesn't work, but it seems the creator wanted to include the Holman Treasury of Key Bible Words (subtitle is "200 Greek and 200 Hebrew words defined and explained") which Logos has as an encyclopedia since it goes from English headwords to Greek/Hebrew. I'd probably build an extra collection for this kind of resources, and would also include The New Strong's Guide to Bible Words in it (which is type:monograph but indexed for English headwords).
Have joy in the Lord!
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Missed with these rules:
- Analytical Key to the Old Testament
- Building Your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary
- Building Your New Testament Greek Vocabulary 3rd Edition
- Synonyms of the Old Testament
- A Treasury of New Testament Synonyms
- All Syriac lexicons (obviously)
Some of these aren't very 'lexicon-like', but I like to include them, not least to remind myself that I have them. And surely the Building... ones have incorrect type?
Unfortunately, I also discovered that about half of all books I checked have title capitalization errors in the citation.[8o|]
Mac Pro (late 2013) OS 12.6.2
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fgh said:
Missed with these rules:
- Analytical Key to the Old Testament
- Building Your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary
- Building Your New Testament Greek Vocabulary 3rd Edition
- Synonyms of the Old Testament
- A Treasury of New Testament Synonyms
- All Syriac lexicons (obviously)
Some of these aren't very 'lexicon-like', but I like to include them, not least to remind myself that I have them. And surely the Building... ones have incorrect type?
Thanks for your input!
The Syriac lexicons are only missing in my list of rules - sorry for that. I actually do have a rule just like the others type:lex subject:syriac (and thus excluded this subject in my last screenshot in the original post).
The Analytical Key to the OT seems to be comparable to Zerwick's Grammatical Analysis of the Greek NT and I personally don't think such a resource fits into a collection of lexicons - rather I'd think of it as a category of its own which, along with Lexicons-Greek and Grammars-Greek, could be later lumped into a meta-collection "Greek Stuff". I can't think of a use case where it would come up alongside the other lexicons (in the sense of being the same. There are multiple size flat, Philips and Torx screwdrivers in the toolbox and a handsaw - all are tools for home repairs, but this doesn't make the saw a screwdriver) .
The Synonym resources might belong to the same category as the Holman and the Strongs Bible Word resources above: going from English to the original language. At least the OT one looks like that. I don't have Custer's Treasury of NT Synonyms and it shows no look-into pages or samples. Does it have Greek/Hebrew headwords or English ones? The potentially comparable Trench's Synonyms of the New Testament comes from the Greek, is tagged correctly and thus comes up in the rule for Greek lexicons above.
You do have a point regarding forgetting resource: I forgot about the Building Vocabulary ones even though I own them. I'm not sure whether according to Logos' internal logic they should be in the lexicon type - but then again, why not? They are comparable to smaller lexicons and might be looked at in parallel resources, especially if people really use them for learning the vocabulary (might be comparable to the neon-light voltage tester that doubles up as small screwdriver in our example). Thus I tentatively concur about the resource type proposal and the inclusion into our collection.
Have joy in the Lord!
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NB.Mick said:
I can't think of a use case where it would come up alongside the other lexicons (in the sense of being the same. There are multiple size flat, Philips and Torx screwdrivers in the toolbox and a handsaw - all are tools for home repairs, but this doesn't make the saw a screwdriver) .
If you sit at your desk with a printed BHS and one other book, AKOT would serve the same purpose as a beginner's lexicon. Not much depth, certainly, but it does have glosses. Thus no saw. More like using a flat screwdriver when you can't find a Philips one: it generally works, but it's not ideal.
But thanks for reminding me about Zerwick. Shouldn't it be type:Bible Notes, though, like AKOT is?
NB.Mick said:going from English to the original language
Synonym resources are (at least potentially) more useful than just that. Because synonyms are grouped together, you may get a better discussion about nuances than in a normal lexicon: what does it mean that this word was used in this passage, and not that?
NB.Mick said:I'm not sure whether according to Logos' internal logic they should be in the lexicon type
Neither am I, but I would think they should at least be the same type.
Mac Pro (late 2013) OS 12.6.2
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fgh said:
t thanks for reminding me about Zerwick. Shouldn't it be type:Bible Notes, though, like AKOT is?
well, he is type:bibe commentary now and Logos told us they take a pragmatic stance on the differentiation between those two types, and AFAIK there's no functional difference. So, you're probably right from a consistency point of view, but I wouldn't bother to list that on the metadata corrections. But go ahead if you like.
fgh said:NB.Mick said:I'm not sure whether according to Logos' internal logic they should be in the lexicon type
Neither am I, but I would think they should at least be the same type.
True.
Have joy in the Lord!
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NB.Mick said:
I'd probably build an extra collection for this kind of resources, and would also include The New Strong's Guide to Bible Words in it (which is type:monograph but indexed for English headwords).
It was a lexicon but became a monograph as per "Metadata correction proposals - Addressed by Logos" --> "Not a topical or word index to the scriptures like everything else in the Bible concordance type. Text.monograph suffices." Its Subject includes "Bible--Concordances, Biblical--Dictionaries--English, Hebrew language -- Dictionaries-- English! This sort of inconsistency should be resolved whenever a Proposal is implemented; it's not up to users to maintain quality.
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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NB.Mick said:
And, much worse, Morris' rule will miss the popular and for users with smaller libraries probably relevant
- Enhanced Strong's Lexicon
- Kassuehlke's "Kleines Wörterbuch" (okay, it's Greek-German only)
- Lexham Analytical Lexicon to the Septuagint
The latter is not "New" testament. I have a Proposal that: "Lexicons with O.T. or N.T. -> please apply as per commentaries/bibles e.g. O.T. is useful with a Greek lexicon of the Septuagint but don’t apply to lexicons with full coverage." which will enable a rule like type:lexicon subject:(Greek, N.T.). At present about 50% of the lexicons have N.T. or O.T. in Subject.
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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Dave Hooton said:NB.Mick said:
...Morris' rule will miss the popular and for users with smaller libraries probably relevant
- Enhanced Strong's Lexicon
- Kassuehlke's "Kleines Wörterbuch" (okay, it's Greek-German only)
- Lexham Analytical Lexicon to the Septuagint
The latter is not "New" testament.
Which is true, but Mo didn't set out to produce a set of lexicons being one for OT work and one for NT work, but more simply just a Greek and a Hebrew one. Last I looked, the LXX was in Greek. Moreover, these are chance hits and misses, this resource or a comparable one could as well be named "Lexham Analytical Lexicon to Septuagint Greek" and then the title triggers the rule, as it currently does for LEH's Septuagint lexicon
It would surely be relevant for scholarly precision to differentiate LXX Greek from NT Greek (and both from Homeric Greek), but that's not the level of sophistication we are discussing here. Ideally, one should be able to build such collections based on metadata alone, without titles, plus and minus.
Have joy in the Lord!
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