Most Important Logos 8 Bugs and Improvements for Academic/Seminary Users
During the next six months, we plan to make some improvements to Logos 8 for academic and seminary users with an emphasis on original language study.
We'll be investing in fixing bugs, improving existing UI and features, and maybe a little bit of new feature work.
What bugs would you like to see us fix? What areas of the software would you like to see us improve? Feel free to include issues for desktop, mobile, and web. If there are existing threads that discuss your issue in more detail and you can find them, it would be helpful if you include a link to them in your post.
We already have a list of things we'd like to address, but I'd love to cross-reference that against the things you'd like to see us do.
Please keep your requests focused on the kinds of things relevant to the needs of the academic/seminary audience with a special focus on original language study.
Thanks!
Comments
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I would love to be able to view the translations within commentary series as translations to compare with other translations.
That is I want to see how the NICNT, WBC, ZECNT in-commentary translations compare to the ESV and the original greek/hebrew. Eg. attached appendix which took a while to make.
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Thank you for asking!
I'd like to have the lexicon information of any word just right-clicking.
Another suggestion would be to have a collaborative way to include answers and commentaries to the exercises proposed in languages textbooks.
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1. n-tuple function in the concordance function so that occurrence of multi-lexeme elements can be studied.
2. ability to provide a manual stemming table for both the concordance and search functions - this would not only handle the exceptions but also allow older texts with variant spellings to be found more easily.
3. Option to show all possible parsing of a manuscript lexical item - root and morphology - to encourage the learning of actually reading the language rather than accepting Logos tagging as true. Especially useful if linked, when relevant, to a commentary that supports the particular parsing.
4. ability to add bible milestones to psalters and bibles from Text Creation Partnership
5. Repair BUG: Display of thorn forms and all other font issues
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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Off the top of my head, I seem to remember that neither the morphology charts nor the tagging of the LHB have ever been completely finished. It seems to me that both of these would be a must for academic/seminary users.
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We'll be investing in fixing bugs, improving existing UI and features, and maybe a little bit of new feature work.
The performance of the context menu is a big one for me. It's grown out of control, and it's the most important and most used tool when I'm in the original languages. While you're fixing it up, we also need to be able to execute Milestone searches from the context menu.
This might not fit tightly in your definition of 'original languages', but the biggest single improvement you could make to Bible searching would be to add wildcard searching to labels/datatypes, so you could search for all women, or all cities, or even all people. There's dozens and dozens of academic and lay uses for that feature.
A few bugs that fit broadly into this category are:
- Reproducible Bug: Logos mangles a valid INTERSECTS search
- Can't add non-Bibles with a Bible index to the Passage List
And some more minor ones:
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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Yep. THis.
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3. Option to show all possible parsing of a manuscript lexical item - root and morphology
[Y][Y] identify possible alternative parsing. 8-case vs. 5-case. Knowing these differences permits the academician to dialogue outside his/her own institution.
In a similar vein - the dialogue between time and aspect in the Greek Verbal system should be indicated in such a manner that avoids dogmatism from either camp. (I learned time in undergrad, and took Greek again 20 years later in grad school and the Verbal Aspect perspective forced me to "unlearn" much that I thought I knew)
Making Disciples! Logos Ecosystem = Logos10 on Microsoft Surface Pro 7 (Win11), Android app on tablet, FSB on iPhone, Proclaim (Proclaim Remote on Fire Tablet) & FaithlifeTV via Connect subscription.
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...mobile...
I'd like to suggest improving the mobile orignial word study ui with a "One Click Word Study Panel." I quickly put together a mockup below of how it could look and work. Right now doing word studies in mobile is slow and clunky. I use Android mainly, but ios could use this kind improvement as well!
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Is Logos set up for writing papers within Logos? Do most people do this as a Sermon?
Edit: I am not intending to hijack this thread, but I guess this is by way of suggestion... If the only way to write a paper in Logos is as a sermon or a note, perhaps that could be one area of improvement?
(But people with more experience may say that there is another way to do it that I don't know about.)
Edit: I guess you just write the paper in word and upload it as a Personal Book? I guess that's fine with me...
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What bugs would you like to see us fix?
In the desktop software, it would be very helpful if, when using the Passage Guide, clicking to expand/close the preview list of three (only three [:(]) results for an item in a Collection never sent me (my visual focus) back to the top of the Collection section, as it frequently does now and has as long as I can remember. This bug makes using the PG exceedingly tedious when there are lots of results.
EDIT:
I still would like to use this (New Testament Use of the Old testament Interactive) in class... and it is still as broken and utterly useless a tool as ever. The content is good enough, but the tool just doesn't work (in all the ways already mentioned in this thread).
“The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others and no one thinks about reforming himself.” St. Peter of Alcántara
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Thinking about it more, as someone seriously considering seminary in the fall, I have to say the biggest thing you could add is not any new features but simply fixing the touchscreen/ pen support. Most people my age have a touchscreen laptop or convertible tablet. We expect modern Windows programs to work with mouse, touchpad, touch, pen, or any combination of those. Even when I have a touchpad, I find myself regularly reaching up to the touchscreen for one thing or another. When I am mostly reading rather than typing, I often take the keyboard of of my Surface Pro tablet and read as a tablet. I also use it as a tablet in Bible studies or other places where I don't want my laptop to be as conspicuous. I would love to use Logos that way as well, except that it is currently almost impossible to navigate Logos without a mouse. Making it work consistently with the built-in Windows handwriting panel would be really nice as well. Currently it is sporadic - it works in prayer lists, but not notes.
I bought Logos knowing these issues, but only because I fully expect them to be fixed in my lifetime. Hope that is sooner rather than later!
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I have often found that when you switch from an interlinear language view with the ESV that you don't wind up at the same verse. It's kind of wonky.
The mind of man is the mill of God, not to grind chaff, but wheat. Thomas Manton | Study hard, for the well is deep, and our brains are shallow. Richard Baxter
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Give BHS a thorough once-over for orthographic/encoding issues: x-ref this thread.
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Glad to hear you'll be working on this. Here are some things I would consider priorities:
- Ability to build complex searches using a sidebar/drop-down menu. We need to be able to use the amazing search capabilities of the software without having to remember how to write all the commands and curly brackets and so on.
- Build "Information management" into the notes tool. The most important building block that is still missing is structured tagging. This would allow a researcher to, for example, create structured tags that reflect a future table of contents an article or book they are working on, and add clippings and notes to different sections of that table of contents as they research. That is, not only are you taking notes and clipping, but you are organizing them in the software as you research.
- Redesign the context menu for speed and better utility. It is constantly used by academic and seminary users.
- Fix the "New Testament's use of the Old Testament" interactive - The "Original Language" button of this interactive is broken, making what should be one of the most useful interactives for the classroom and study almost entirely useless. It has been broken for over three years now. Cf. https://community.logos.com/forums/t/119433.aspx?PageIndex=1
- Revise the Lexham Survey of Theology with an ecumenical team of theologians - I know this isn't programming as such, but it is important to allow academic use of the Theology Guide. Currently the base text of the theology guide, the Lexham Survey of Theology, is written from a orthodox Evangelical perspective. While I consider it fundamental that any Theology Guide produced by Lexham reflect faithfully the orthodox Evangelical perspective, it should also reflect faithfully other perspectives, such as the Catholic, Orthodox, and other traditions within Protestantism. At the very least, I can attest that it does not do so as regards Catholicism. I think this is understandable given there were no Catholics or Orthodox on the team of scholars who designed it and reviewed it. This greatly limits its usefulness within academic circles, where an openness to representing other peoples viewpoints in ways they can affirm as accurate is essential.
There are other points, of course, but I think those five would be what I would see as top priorities.
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Export to LaTeX, especially for handling language boundary transition correctly.
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Works Cited.
What good is it if when I copy and paste from a resource, the works citation is not correctly formatted? It even lets you pick the format (Turabian, Chicago, etc..), why if it is not correctly formatted?
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- Revise the Lexham Survey of Theology with an ecumenical team of theologians - I know this isn't programming as such, but it is important to allow academic use of the Theology Guide. Currently the base text of the theology guide, the Lexham Survey of Theology, is written from a orthodox Evangelical perspective. While I consider it fundamental that any Theology Guide produced by Lexham reflect faithfully the orthodox Evangelical perspective, it should also reflect faithfully other perspectives, such as the Catholic, Orthodox, and other traditions within Protestantism. At the very least, I can attest that it does not do so as regards Catholicism. I think this is understandable given there were no Catholics or Orthodox on the team of scholars who designed it and reviewed it. This greatly limits its usefulness within academic circles, where an openness to representing other peoples viewpoints in ways they can affirm as accurate is essential.
Faithlife, if make this sort of revision to the LST, please consider adding the ability to filter by tradition (as difficult as that might be). This would make it much easier from an academic viewpoint to focus on a particular tradition and compare/contrast them on specific points.
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- Ability to build complex searches using a sidebar/drop-down menu. We need to be able to use the amazing search capabilities of the software without having to remember how to write all the commands and curly brackets and so on.
- Build "Information management" into the notes tool. The most important building block that is still missing is structured tagging. This would allow a researcher to, for example, create structured tags that reflect a future table of contents an article or book they are working on, and add clippings and notes to different sections of that table of contents as they research. That is, not only are you taking notes and clipping, but you are organizing them in the software as you research.
- Redesign the context menu for speed and better utility. It is constantly used by academic and seminary users.
- Fix the "New Testament's use of the Old Testament" interactive - The "Original Language" button of this interactive is broken, making what should be one of the most useful interactives for the classroom and study almost entirely useless. It has been broken for over three years now. Cf. https://community.logos.com/forums/t/119433.aspx?PageIndex=1
Thank you, FL, for considering these.
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Thread => Help with a how to.... for learning Original Language words. Idea for Reader's Edition is choosing to hide words occurring less than ### times (so frequently appearing words have inline interlinear).
Dreaming of a filter so can exclude resources from search whose explicit copyright does not allow snippets to be printed for other students to use in their papers: e.g. inmates in prison who are studying for ministry (who are not allowed to use Logos Bible Software plus have an enforced limit of personal books in their possession).
Example copyright restrictions (so would like to exclude these resources from searches since am not allowed to print snippets for seminary students inside prison to consider for their papers):
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—except for brief quotations for the purpose of review or comment, without the prior permission of the publisher, P&R Publishing Company, P.O. Box 817, Phillipsburg, New Jersey 08865-0817.
Richard D. Phillips, Revelation, ed. Richard D. Phillips, Philip Graham Ryken, and Daniel M. Doriani, Reformed Expository Commentary (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2017), iv.
You may use brief quotations from this commentary in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission.
JoAnna M. Hoyt, Amos, Jonah, & Micah, ed. H. Wayne House and William D. Barrick, Evangelical Exegetical Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018).
Hugh Williamson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
H. G. M. Williamson, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Isaiah 1–27: Commentary on Isaiah 6–12, ed. G. I. Davies and C. M. Tuckett, vol. 2, International Critical Commentary (London; New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark: An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018), iv.
Keep Smiling [:)]
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1. For academic work, it would be good to have a German and French dictionary available as part of the academic packages. Does not need to be fancy but enough to at least provide glosses.
2. In the same vein, make mobile offline word checking possible in the languages pertinent to academic study: biblical languages, Latin, French, German and (for ESL users) English. Academic study today means traveling and working from all kinds of locations. Assuming that one can be on wifi at church or at a local starbucks may work for most in the US but scholars like (sometimes need) to be able to check lemmas and so on on the go.
3. Continue to develop the search templates to make it easier to build complex searches faster. As of yet nothing for clause and syntax.
4. Solve the autopopulate lag problem: scholars don't have time waiting around when they need things to be done!
5. Provide automated tools to compare texts, starting (but not ending with) the gospels. After all this time, we still have no way (that I am aware of) to isolate double or triple tradition and/or to see at a glance shared lemmas and/or identical terms in original languages. We need that for the DSS and basically any major collection of manuscripts used for biblical studies.
Thank you very much for and please continue to provide academic pricing and discounts for pastors.
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KS4J,
My understanding is that US case law has established that it‘s OK (fair use) to use up to 10% or one chapter (whichever is the shorter) of any book, regardless of the copyright notice. There’s more here: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/academic-and-educational-permissions/non-coursepack/
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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During the next six months, we plan to make some improvements to Logos 8 for academic and seminary users with an emphasis on original language study.
We'll be investing in fixing bugs, improving existing UI and features, and maybe a little bit of new feature work.
What bugs would you like to see us fix? What areas of the software would you like to see us improve? Feel free to include issues for desktop, mobile, and web. If there are existing threads that discuss your issue in more detail and you can find them, it would be helpful if you include a link to them in your post.
Phil, I'm grateful that you and Faithlife will be working on improvements in these areas. Here are a few ideas:
Original Language & Datasets
- Canvas Tool (and/or text-charting/bible-arcing). I recently provided some feedback here.
- Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ). I've reported a number of formatting and editorial errors in BHQ via the typo tool. The problems appear to be common and likely widespread, similar to recent problems with Emanuel Tov's Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible and the Von Gall's Samaritan Pentateuch. Faithlife seems to have recurrent editorial problems with Hebrew. This is understandable to the extent that Hebrew text, diacritics, and formatting are complex. These problems, however, go well beyond that. I'm not sure if part of the problem is a lack of fluency among proofreaders.
- LDGNT & LDHB. The Lexham Discourse HOT and GNT Datasets have been in desperate need of revision for years now. I discussed this with Tavis Bohlinger and Steven Runge on the Nerdy Language Majors Facebook group just a couple of days ago (under my comment here for members of the NLM group). Steve is well aware of the issues and left a gracious reply. Please, do whatever you can to get him and his team the resources and the time needed to resolve these issues. The initial revision will be costly but will make future revisions that much easier. Such unique and useful databases and datasets shouldn't be left in such an incomplete, unrevised state.
- Names of God Interactive. When it comes to the Holy Spirit, this dataset has been a disaster for some years now. Many instances of the Holy Spirit in Hebrew have been miscategorized under the Father and many/most are no longer tagged at all. This was not originally the case. It seems to have arisen after some potential false positives were reported, although I wouldn't agree with many of them if understood in their proper literary, discourse context. Regardless, something happened behind the scenes that made a complete mess of this dataset, well beyond any reported problems that I'm aware of. The Bible Referent Data for the Holy Spirit is much more reliable—or was the last times I've checked—even if there are some potential errors and room for some disagreement / alternative readings. Don't get me wrong: The Names of God interactive is/ was/ could be a wonderful tool! But when problems this severe can go unresolved for so long (even after being reported), it does not engender confidence in the quality of Faithlife's data.
Mobile
- Bible Word Study fails with Modern Hebrew UI font. This function fails on my Moto G5 Plus Android device (8.1.0) when my default UI-font is set (or prioritized) to Modern Hebrew. I finally figured out what was causing this problem somewhat recently. I haven't tested this with other right-to-left and left-to-right, non-English languages. It's a major problem, but I'm not willing to sacrifice Hebrew fluency for the BWS feature to work all of the time. I can change the device language to English if I really, really want to use it; otherwise, I now avoid using it altogether.
Suggestions
- Modern Hebrew UI. Modern Hebrew has many benefits for biblical scholars (e.g., reaching the highest levels of Hebrew fluency and easy access to Israeli scholarship, publications, and resources). Setting UI settings to Hebrew is just one simple and effective way to redeem the time and immerse oneself further in the language. This could also make Logos Bible Software and other products, such as Noet, more accessible to many Israelis and Hebrew speakers.
- Hebrew Audio Bible.
- (Restored) Koine Greek Pronunciation Audio Bible (and Church Fathers, "LXX", Josephus's Jewish Wars, etc.). A couple scholars who are capable of this would be Randall Buth and Benjamin Kantor from the Biblical Language Center. Benjamin Kantor is producing Koine Greek audio and video resources at an impressive rate on KoineGreek.com. An even more unique and ambitious project would be a multi-cast audio recording that draws on the most experienced teachers and associates of the Biblical Language Center and perhaps elsewhere. Hearing multiple, fluent speakers with different vocal qualities facilitates greater fluency in listeners. Modern Greek Audio Bible(s) would also be welcome.
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Modern Hebrew UI. Modern Hebrew has many benefits for biblical scholars (e.g., reaching the highest levels of Hebrew fluency and easy access to Israeli scholarship, publications, and resources). Setting UI settings to Hebrew is just one simple and effective way to redeem the time and immerse oneself further in the language. This could also make Logos Bible Software and other products, such as Noet, more accessible to many Israelis and Hebrew speakers.
For the relationship and value of Modern Hebrew to Biblical Hebrew, see Aaron Hornkohl's two papers/addresses below.
- Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew: Reflections on Their Integration (SBL San Diego November 2014)
- Training Bible Translators in Israel: The Value of Modern Hebrew for Mastering Biblical Hebrew (Home for Bible Translators 20th Anniversary, March 2015)
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I would like to see a really comprehensive documentation for advanced search functions. E.g. about
- possibility and limits for using brackets in clause/morph search
- some operators in syntax search like 'gap'
- labels like <Person God> are great... i'd like to have the possibility in morph search to restrict a label e.g. to 'noun' (i know the workaround via 'INTERSECT', but there should be a more simple and more effecitve way)0 -
Original Language & Datasets
- Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ). I've reported a number of formatting and editorial errors in BHQ via the typo tool. The problems appear to be common and likely widespread, similar to recent problems with Emanuel Tov's Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible and the Von Gall's Samaritan Pentateuch.
- LDGNT & LDHB. The Lexham Discourse HOT and GNT Datasets have been in desperate need of revision for years now.
[Y]It is hard to overstate the need to sort out these issues. I was actually first drawn to Logos by the Lexham Discourse offerings but, to put it charitably, the databases looked like works in progress.
Adam's other suggestions are excellent too.
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I'd like a text comparison tool which would function with the addition of any manuscript, including original language fragments, codices, medieval texts, modern versions, etc.
I know that's not asking much. [:)]
Eating a steady diet of government cheese, and living in a van down by the river.
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Thread => Help with a how to.... for learning Original Language words. Idea for Reader's Edition is choosing to hide words occurring less than ### times (so frequently appearing words have inline interlinear).
I thought we had this. Doesn't it work now?
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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Many instances of the Holy Spirit in Hebrew have been miscategorized under the Father and many/most are no longer tagged at all.
Many of us believe the concept of the Holy Spirit to be quite late and consider tagging Hebrew to "Holy Spirit" to be an error. I would suggest that an alternative solution be found that is more theologically/historically neutral. I agree that the lack of tagging is problematic.
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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Thread => Help with a how to.... for learning Original Language words. Idea for Reader's Edition is choosing to hide words occurring less than ### times (so frequently appearing words have inline interlinear).
I thought we had this. Doesn't it work now?
Reader's Edition currently can hide interlinear line(s) for words occurring more than ### times. Hence suggestion is a Learner's Edition for focusing on learning frequently occurring words.
KS4J,
My understanding is that US case law has established that it‘s OK (fair use) to use up to 10% or one chapter (whichever is the shorter) of any book, regardless of the copyright notice. There’s more here: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/academic-and-educational-permissions/non-coursepack/
Thanks for possible research idea [:)] Noted prisons are not listed as an educational institution example nor are seminrary student exegetical papers included in "Educational Purpose" examples (where snippet provided by a volunteer mentor could be cited). Also aware institutional prison chaplain desires to avoid copyright issues so dreaming of search filter (so can exclude resources whose snippet printing has potential for copyright lawsuit).
Keep Smiling [:)]
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Many instances of the Holy Spirit in Hebrew have been miscategorized under the Father and many/most are no longer tagged at all.
Many of us believe the concept of the Holy Spirit to be quite late and consider tagging Hebrew to "Holy Spirit" to be an error. I would suggest that an alternative solution be found that is more theologically/historically neutral. I agree that the lack of tagging is problematic.
Thanks, MJ, I understand that. I realize that I need to clarify a couple things. I was intending to use the primary labels (or category-headings) in the Names of God Interactive in order to summarize and not go into detail here (i.e., God, Holy Spirit, and Jesus). I realize now that I made a mistake by going from memory. I should have written "Many instances of the Holy Spirit in Hebrew have been miscategorized under [God] and many/most are no longer tagged at all." More specifically, I was referring to רוח יהוה ("Spirit of the Lord") occurring 27x along with רוח אלוה ("Spirit of God") occurring 1x under "God" and רוח יהוה ("Spirit of the Lord") occurring 4x under "Holy Spirit" (with the English translations/referent-labels supplied by the interactive). The inconsistency and untagged instances do not fit with interactive's own "Names of God" categorization.
I don't have a problem with the primary labels/headings, although they could alternatively use "Spirit of the Lord[/God/YHWH]" or transliteration. Translation is probably better for English users whenever possible. I would acknowledge that there are plenty of instances of word plays, metaphors, and complex themes running thoughout the Scriptures. The Hebrew word רוח can of course convey different ideas/conceptions in various communicative contexts/situations.
In general, I can see a place for including more than one referent label or a broader referent label in some particularly ambiguous, difficult, disputed cases (i.e., of various people, places, things). I recall that that referent data does do that occasionally. That said, there is also value in providing an actual analysis of discourse referents even if readers don't always agree. Good documentation always helps.
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