L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #112 Context Menu: selection vs. reference

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10+ Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.

This tip is inspired by the forum post: Selection VS Reference Notes - Logos Forums and many, many others.

This is the start of a series on the Context Menu selection side which will not necessarily be continuous. Selection vs. reference is (a) the first entries in the context menu, (b) one of the most frequent issues in the forums in the context of notes, and (c) as reference vs. milestone a common issue in the forums in the context of searches.

As examples, I am using the following resources:

• a Bible:The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989.
• an encyclopedia: Herbermann, Charles G., Edward A. Pace, Condé B. Pallen, Thomas J. Shahan, and John J. Wynne, eds. The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church. Vol. I–XV. New York: The Encyclopedia Press; The Universal Knowledge Foundation, 1907–1913.
• a monograph by an early church father: Saint Augustine. The City of God. Edited by Boniface Ramsey. Translated by William Babcock. Vol. 6 & 7. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012–2013.

In all cases, I selected a single word referring to a person. These are the results:

Element: Selection

Definition: No official Logos definition. My definition: the text selected by the user prior requesting some application function be applied to the specific text. Note this refers to the specific text in this specific book (resource).

Search argument taken from the Context menu Search function: 

• Isaiah i.e. a simple text argument independent of Logos tagging. 
• "St. Anschar" illustrates that the text must be enclosed in quotation marks when a space occurs in the text.
• Marcellinus

Note: When a note is added to the selection, the note will appear only in that particular resource.

Element: Reference

Related element: Datatype

Related element: Milestone

Data Type
A kind (or family of kinds) of information distinct from other kinds.
Each data type has its own internal rules and structure. Some of the data types found in Verbum include:
• Author (around 1,500 types linked to authors)
• Bible (around 200 types associated with different versions of the Bible)
• Date
• Day of the Year (for daily devotionals)
• Early Christian Writings
• Greek Strong’s Numbers and Hebrew Strong’s Numbers
• Intertestamental and Post-Christian Jewish Writings
• Louw-Nida Semantic Domains
• Morphology
• Nag Hammadi Codices
• Page Number
• Pre-Christian Writings
• Pseudepigrapha
• The Laws of Hammurabi
• Works of Philo
The user-contributed public wiki has a comprehensive listing of codes for the various data types in Verbum.
See also Data Type Reference.

Data Type Reference

Data type references connect resources within the Verbum library. As such, they appear as hyperlinks within resources. Clicking a link opens the linked resource for that reference.

Commentaries, for example, are filled with data type references connecting them back to the Bible passages they discuss. So, clicking a Bible reference within a commentary opens the preferred Bible to that passage.

See also Basic Search.

Milestones

A milestone marks a specific location in a Verbum resource. It can be thought of as a waypoint or point of interest within the text of a resource.

For example, the beginning of every verse in a Bible will be marked as a location using a milestone that defines the verse. Milestones are called Indexes in Resource Information, because they tend to function as organizational markers within resources.

A single resource may have many milestones indexes. For example, many print editions of Josephus have one or both of two competing reference schemes (Whiston and Loeb, named for their creators) and Verbum editions of the works of Josephus generally have milestone indexes for both schemes.

Search: Using the Search function will provide results that reference the text (reference) not the text itself (milestone). Note that the encyclopedia has no reference; it uses headwords for access. 

If you wish to see where text belonging to that reference exists, add milestone: to the front of the search argument. Note that the text may vary, often simply by translation but for Bible commentaries as an example, the text is of the commentary not the Bible text.

Note: When a note is added to the reference, the note may appear in any book (resource) that contains that milestone.

When you understand these two elements, you have the basics for using Logos effectively. If you don't understand them, Logos will sometimes seem random.