Where did this feature go: topic browser

Sean, here is what I was trying to do today.

I have made a collection of topical bibles.

I wanted to find the primary instances for "sin"(articles or headwords[not sure I am using this term properly])

In V3 I used the topic browser on this collection and got to the main main articles very quickly in resources like Naves Topical Bible, New Topical Textbook.

In V4 I did the basic search on the same collection and got a very long list that had over 5000 hits and they did not allow me to quickly navigate to the article titles in the various resources.

Granted "sin" is going to get a lot of hits, but the topic browser in V3 allowed me to get to where I wanted very quickly and see main topics and Articles in the various resources easily.

In V4, the basic search ranked or by book on the same collection was useless for navigating to these main articles in these topical resources.

Is there a way to search headwords or article titles and then have them easier to navigate to get where I want so that I can then read the article.

I see nothing in the help file to instruct me to do this more effectively.

I do realize that topics (or concepts) are being reworked but I am not seeing how it can be better than the Topic Browser. It may be, but I don't get it.

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. I am betting that I do not understand what you tried to explain. I don't want to be thick headed but I am afraid that I am not getting it.

Would you please give an example (or two) so that I could test it and see how it works?

steps to do the search and then what should be expected as I right click.

Currently it seems as though it works much more like the Parallel resource with whatever reference word is in the reference box.

Also, what if there are multiple instances in a specific resource of that reference word. In V3 there was a little black triangle to navigate in that reference. this no longer exists.

How do we take advantage of the rich tagging of the resources to make bible study faster?

MJ. Smith said:

Gabriel Powell said:

Topics should be derived from title and headings, not surface text. If I do a topic search for marriage, "Marriage" should be in the title or sub-heading of an article.

Sorry to say that I disagree ... the topics database allows you to have the reading list based on primary topic; the search allows me to find where its mentioned - which often has perspectives missing in articles focused on the topic.

I think Heading search should be a separate search. Who better to determine and summarize the content of an article then it's author? As far as topic searching goes I have no good suggestion so I'll leave it to the brains at Logos and the rest of you guys on the forum :-)

MJ. Smith said:

Sorry to say that I disagree ... the topics database allows you to have the reading list based on primary topic; the search allows me to find where its mentioned - which often has perspectives missing in articles focused on the topic.

Martha,

I agree. Notice that in my search there are synonyms, and different topics directly related to sin that I might have not seen were it not for this method.

Trey Selman said:

Is there a way to search headwords or article titles and then have them easier to navigate to get where I want so that I can then read the article.

We don't currently provide a way to search only article titles/headwords. V3 topics aren't in Logos 4, so what you used to do with the Topic Browser can't be done.Our hope is that (if you've selected Ranked as the view) the best matches will be at the top.

The best approximation i can suggest for now is to use Search, restrict the search to your topical collection, with the Ranked view, and then skim the headings, clicking through for any that look promising (which should bring them up fairly quickly). 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).

In future releases we hope to have better ways to take those Search results and further refine/search them.

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!

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.

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"

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.

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.

Add me in as well. 

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.

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.

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.

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?

Mark:

Thanks for clarifying, you're right that

1. i misunderstood your initial suggestion
2. 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.

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.

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.

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.

SamHenderson said:

That worries me a bit. Have Logos dropped topic tagging their resource files because it's too time consuming and expensive for them? Have they made a strategic decision to privilege speed and quantity over refinement and quality in the search facilities they offer in Logos 4?

The way that Libronix did topic searching was dependent on the chapter and section headings in books. They are working on implementing true topic tagging for Logos 4, it's a big project and only in its infancy. While many people found the old Topic browser to be helpful it was relatively inaccurate  and missed a lot of content (when I was a student I found it's results in research to be woefully inadequate). They are working on a new way of doing things that will be more accurate. Go back into this old thread and read Sean Boisen's post on Wed, Nov 4 2009 3:18 PM, it'll explain this issue more fully.

SamHenderson said:

I believe that Logos tagged many of their resources for significant topics and references and that this tagging was time consuming and expensive (which is why not every Logos book featured this type of tagging - usually the higher value ones). I remember them trumpeting how long it had taken them to topic tag the Early Church Fathers collection and why topic tagging made this Logos resource so much more useful than a mere public domain PDF version of the ECF which could only be searched literalistically for a simple word or literal phrase.

And that for me is the difference. Using the Topic Browser in Logos 3 was like going to the index page of a well edited book - you knew it would point you to significant and intelligently selected treatments of the search term/topic and offer you sub-topics to refine your choices. Searching in Logos 4 is more like searching a PDF or using Google - it offers you a series of occurences based on an alpha-numeric match (refined by a few fancy algorithms).

 

It was that extra effort by Logos that made their books worth the extra money we had to pay for them. For example, Logos is selling Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas for $199.95 for a savings of $50.00. Amazon is selling the complete Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas for $0.99 for the Kindle. Both are English only and both are translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Amazon can sell Summa Theologica so cheaply and included free wireless delivery to the Kindle because the work is in public domain. The only way I can justify paying 200 times more for the Logos version of this work is if Logos provides added value! Added value includes such things as providing the page numbers in the original book, tagging references and topics. Without these added features I cannot justify paying 200 times more for the same public domain work.

Forgot to formally ask:

I know you guys are working on this but . . .

PLEASE bring back at least the same functionality we had with the Topics Browser in L3.

There.  Just had to say it straight out.

You can add my name.