In yesterday’s post, I showed how you can use the period symbol to search for all question marks in an English Bible. I then showed how to use the Hits Graph to see where the greatest concentration of questions occurs. The end of Job, where God fires a series of questions at Job, was the clear winner. Today, I want to look at another way to visualize the results of this search: namely, the Table Bar Chart.

Having searched an English Bible for .?, choose Table Bar Chart from the Details pop-up menu to the right of the Context Slider. You should then see something like this:

TableChart1

Where the Hits Graph measures frequency of occurrence across the entire search range, the Table Bar Chart breaks down the search results by book or by chapter. The default is by book, so here we can see the frequency of occurrence in each book of the Bible.

If you want to make it easier to see which books have the greatest frequency of questions, you can customize the display of the Table Bar Chart by choosing Set Graph Display from the Display menu (or using the keyboard shortcut Command-T). In the dialog which appears, check the Sort by Count option and click OK. This will change the display so that each book is displayed in descending order of occurrence.

TableChart2

Here we can see that the book of Malachi has nearly the same frequency of occurrence (or average number of hits) as the book of Job. That’s not something that was very obvious from the Hits Graph we looked at yesterday.

So far, we’ve just looked at the distribution of Average Hits, which means that we’re focused on the frequency of occurrence rather than the actual number of occurrences. For example, Malachi has nearly the same frequency of questions as Job, but Malachi is a much smaller book, so it may not have anywhere near the same number of questions. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll show how to examine the differences between the two.