L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #173 Context Menu: below the line: Biblical events

MJ. Smith
MJ. Smith Member, MVP Posts: 53,041 ✭✭✭✭✭

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: L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #140 Context Menu: word information group: Bible Knowledgebase elements - Logos Forums

It's time to get back to going through the Context Menu which is central to using Verbum/Logos effectively. We've covered the top two sections, selection/reference and word information. Here we will cover Biblical Events. Personal opinion: I would much prefer if the events were at a great level of detail, were more comprehensive rather than emphasizing the overarching story, and integrated the many events which are "hidden" in labels. I will discuss the feature in roughly the order they were added to the app rather than physical order.

11. Events — Identifies the biblical event in which the selection takes place. A brief title for the event appears on the right, and the Factbook can be opened to provide more detailed information.

The standards for coding and the definition of available data is available in Parks, Jessica. Biblical Events Dataset Documentation. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2021.

(4) The event search is dependent upon the resources being tagged by the Logos tag i.e. event:"John the Baptist appears in the wilderness"; event tagging is sparser than the other Biblical knowledgebase tagging. A higher percentage of results are Faithlife resources as the division into events is not common to most reference resources. However, certain events have excellent coverage from the media resources.

(3) The interactive Biblical Event Navigator defines the events and presents them in a hierarchical order. It is the hierarchy that is reflected in the multiple entries in the Context menu.

  • the 4 events in the hierarchy listed in the Context Menu are in marked in red below.
  • the various elements that participate in the event are marked in green below.
  • the main portion of the panel contains the narrations of the event - here in parallel format - and references to the event below.

(2) the Atlas provides links to Factbook and a media search (an option not offered in the Biblical Event Navigator.) Note that the flag on the map corresponds to the flags in the legend.

(1) It is worth reviewing the contents of the Factbook page for a Biblical Event; it contains most of the information one needs about an event at the hierarchical level of that event, with See also containing the detail of participants, locations, things, etc.

In short, despite the short list of available actions, the Context Menu for a Biblical Event links you to nearly every place you would want to begin your study. The exception appears to be the timeline. That is simply a quirk of my sticking to the context menu I've used for most examples in this series. If I chose a different selection of text, I get the Timeline links beneath the Look up function.

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."