Drop media from Factbook Bible Books heading section

I don't know why it's there in the first place. First, it is not a category (e.g., "media"). Instead it is part of the description section (though it is not part of the description) with a link to search for media. This means that it cannot be collapsed for those who don't want the visual distraction and clutter. Second, it is not the same kind of information as what follows. Third, media is accessible through other tools and does not really need to be there. It just seems to take away from the focus of the tool.

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Comments

MJ. Smith

Sorry Francis, while I have no objection to adding a media heading in above it to make it collapsible which may be necessary for small screens, I like its position and open state in the context of using Verbum in parish adult education. I do object to the slowness with which it loads.

Rosie Perera

I agree it should have a heading and be collapsible. I personally wouldn't use it but I can see why someone might.

And why not allow users to customize the order of sections in the Factbook Bible Books thingies, so if you like having the media up top, you can, but if you want it not taking up space (even collapsed) you can omit it or move it to the bottom.

Francis

I like its position and open state in the context of using Verbum in parish adult education

I think that your reply may be missing the point of my post and suggestion.

It's fair to say that all of the sections that are part of the guide are the kind you find in a commentary introduction with two exceptions (media and events). You may have use for it but should a link to sermons be inserted at the top also because some people might be using this tool for sermon development? Events is also a bit out of sorts there: why should it be included but not persons, places or cultural concepts? Why not maps or timelines? The more you start thinking in that direction, the more the tool loses its specificity in relation to other tools where you can find media, sermons or other contents various users might find useful.

The point is also the following: the more specific the tools, the clearer in the user's mind what to use them for. Too much duplication (unless it serves a distinct purpose such as a different entry point, e.g., topic versus reference versus Bible word) makes the whole program messier as opposed to keeping it sharp.

At least, that's my opinion for what it's worth.

MJ. Smith

I think that your reply may be missing the point of my post and suggestion.

No, I didn't miss the point of your post. I merely did not want to argue. The Factbook is designed to be the easy entry point for non-academic, perhaps even non-professional users. A basic user needs to know little beyond the Go box on the home page, the Factbook, the home page lectionary, and the basic of basic & bible search. For the same reason that "popular" level Bible dictionaries have become much more pictorial Factbook should be pictorial. The pictures also serve a usability function of making the Factbook at a glance look more inviting and giving the layout more visual appeal.,

Several of your "why not's" appear in the See Also section. I fail to see a strong relationship between the Factbook and "commentary introductions"; the relationship I see as strongest is between Factbook and a Bible/Biographic/Cultural Dictionary. It appears to me that you are basing your comparison on an extremely small percentage of the Factbook entries.

An aside: There are a number of churches which have a very strong visual tradition because for many centuries their congregations could neither read nr afford books. Pictures and sculptures served as reminders of the Biblical stories.

Eli Evans (Logos)

For most headings, the Factbook is a sort of automatically-generated encyclopedia. Encyclopedias often have illustrations of the thing in question, and we have a lot of media that is already tagged to topics and concepts, so it seemed a reasonable fit. The media that is returned is not always the best, though: Just because something appears in or is tangentially related to a media item doesn't mean it's a suitable illustration of that thing. So we've hand-curated the media that returns for the top few hundred Factbook entries, and we'll keep doing that slowly but surely for other entries.

To be fair, for some headings, like "Epistle of James" the encyclopedic information that is generated is a lot like a commentary introduction, because of the Bible Book Guide dataset information on author, setting, themes, etc. But as MJ says, that's only a few entries.

Anyway, we like the media in Factbook (most of the time), but I can also understand the motivation to want to turn it off. We'll consider putting it into a collapsible Media section in a future update.

Eli Evans (Logos)

And why not allow users to customize the order of sections in the Factbook Bible Books thingies, so if you like having the media up top, you can, but if you want it not taking up space (even collapsed) you can omit it or move it to the bottom.

We considered having Factbook work like Guides in this respect, even so far as letting you remove sections. Turns out, there are around a dozen different Factbook templates — one set of sections for a Person, another for a Place, another for a topic, and yet another for a topic that also includes a cultural concept, and so on. The Factbook is supposed to be easy to use, so we intentionally hide that complexity. Moving a section down in one wouldn't necessarily imply that it should be moved down (to what position?) in all of them. Besides, at some point, we may want to hand-edit the sections per heading (not just per type of heading), more like a real encyclopedia would do.

So we decided that collapsing would have to be close enough, because that's a very lightweight user interaction, and easy to make universal for all the templates. (It's a preference for the section irrespective of where that section appears in order.)