Why are Logos lexical databases not public?
The description of LHB indicates that its lexical tags (lemmas, including homographs), morphological and root, are based "mostly" on HALOT. SBLGNT is also based on different critical editions of GNT. I've noticed that these tags are the ones Logos uses for its databases such as "Biblical word guide" or the lemmas that appear in the "word lists."
Why are these DBs not public? I think it would be good because of the importance they have, make them public as well as their methodology.
Blessings!
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The DBs *are* available to the public, to anyone who pays licenses to Logos.
Do you mean, why not give it away for free in return for praise and donations? Probably for the same reason that professors take a fixed salary and don’t count on donations or selling daily tickets to the classroom to students. Everyone needs income somehow, and Logos/Faithlife has chosen to earn the revenue they need by selling Logos software and resources.
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That's a problem area. I agree, but I'll list the discussion.
1. Who does? You're hard pressed to even know what changes in the major translations were based on, or which mss's won the day.
2. Working on useful features or esoteric 'now and then'?
3. Even the source often may not quite remember. Employee turnover, busy, quick decisions, etc
4. Logos is unique in making available huge chunks of lexical information. Who else does this?
5. Internal databases are reachable, though unsupported and discouraging any alteration.
Now. Of these, #4 is how I became a Logosian. I may have tippie-toed on the UA, but I've been militant on not abusing it. Others have made use of #5. And periodically, discussions on #3 decision-making have been very useful (with Logos staff). Plus FL has been odd on #2, often forgoing bucks for esoteric classifiers.
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
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No, no Reimar. I said public, not free. I don't mean they offer it for free, just offer it somehow. As well as the BD of preaching topics and its methodology is documented in "Husser, Lydia. Preaching Topics: Database Documentation. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2018", and the BD of theological topics in "Ward et al. Lexham Theological Summary. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018 ".
I apologize if I didn't express myself well.
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Ah ok, get it. Sorry for misunderstanding you, German. The tags are available, but you want a published methodology and explanation on how they arrived at them. My guess is that these tag DBs have such a large history, adapted over time, that nobody knows anymore, nobody has documented the development and each choice made. Personally I use the tags as handy suggestions for my own reading. Good enough for daily use, but I’ll go to commentaries and grammar references for academic discussions if I initially don’t agree with a tag.
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Yes, I would like the methodology and also an index. Now that I think about it, there is no such thing for general topics (extracted from dictionaries and encyclopedias).
Although of course you can study the Bible without knowing where the labels that determine your flow of study come from, I think they should do with thematic and lexical tags the same as they did with the preaching and theological themes.By the way, you talk about agreeing with a tag or not. I think that with the tags we cannot agree or disagree, in the sense that you mention. Rather, we could disagree with the definition of some lexicon of that tag. The importance of tags is that they determine the flow of study by redirecting us to all our resources.
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