TIP of the day: Logos tagging #9: Factbook datasets - referent and person

1. The referent dataset is the Logos tagging that "translates" pronouns etc. into their antecedent (actual meaning). In the sample case it tags "their" as Jesus and Mary. This allows the search for a person to be very powerful. To this add the people coding which differentiates Mary as Mary the Mother of God not Mary Magdelene, Mary wife of Cleopas ...

The Context menu offers us Factbook, Searches and "Bible Dictionaries"

2. In the Factbook, we see how to coding of "Mary" is traced backward to provide additional information - referred to as (surface text of tag Mary), lemmas (original language lemma of text to which tag Mary is attached), semantic role (semantic role attached to the same text as tag Mary)

3. The <Person> search is one you should become familiar with. A drop down menu will help you select the correct way to disambiguate common names if you are typing in the Search rather than launching a Logos search. Note however that the results are drawn from 55 resources in this case. That is because the specific Mary (mother of Jesus) is only searchable in tagged resources. Resources tagged in this manner are a small percentage of the Logos library. However, you can expand the number of resources by the use of Community Tags.

Compare, however, a simple search for the string Mary (no all forms or equivalents) which returns 13, 586 resources (many historical documents folks - I don't have a gigantic library). However, one immediately sees that many of the Mary's are unrelated to Mary (mother of Jesus) ... author's, contemporary folk music ... It's important when doing searches to understand the difference between the <person> search and the string search.