Accordance Blog

In an interesting bit of synchronicity, Peter Head blogs about red-letter Bibles over at Evangelical Textual Criticism. It's well worth checking out.

# posted by David Lang @ 10:27 PM 0 comments

Many print Bibles highlight the words of Jesus in red. Some people love this feature, while others hate it. Those who object to it argue that since there were no quotation marks in the Greek, it is not always clear which words are direct quotations from Jesus and which are not.

For example, in John 3, most Bibles interpret verses 10-21 as being directly spoken by Jesus. However, some interpreters think the quotation ends after verse 15, and that verses 16-21 are an explanation by the author of the Gospel. Having all those verses in red, or even enclosing them in quotation marks, is an interpretive decision made by the translators.

Those who are red-green color-blind object to red-letter Bibles for an even more fundamental reason: for them the words of Jesus disappear altogether!

Whether your reasons for objecting to red-letter Bibles are philosophical or ophthalmological, Accordance allows you to hide the red-lettering in any Bibles which include it. Simply use command-T (the one keyboard shortcut you absolutely must learn) to open the Set Text Display Dialog box for a given Bible, and check the Hide Red Letter option. You can also do this for all Bibles by going to the Text Display settings in the Preferences.

Even if you like red-letter Bibles, there may be times when you want to hide it. Today I ran into one of those. I did a search which seemed to find the phrase "Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord" in Matthew 23:39. I say "seemed to find" because the search I had done should not have highlighted all the words in that phrase. I was confused until I realized that the Bible I was searching (the HCSB) places the words of Jesus in red and boldfaces Old Testament quotations in the New Testament. Of course, Accordance highlights search hits by making them red and boldfaced, so I was mistakenly assuming that this phrase was part of my search result, when in fact it was merely part of that particular Bible's formatting. When I changed the display settings to hide the red letter, I could then distinguish my search hits from the OT quotations spoken by Jesus. Alternatively, I could have chosen to leave the red letter turned on, and chosen a different color and/or style for my search hits.

Regardless of your reasons for customizing the appearance of a Bible text, it's nice to have the flexibility to do so.

# posted by David Lang @ 11:38 AM 1 comments

My senior year of high school, I invested in a good, leather-bound study Bible in preparation for college, and it served me well for years. I recently found it in a box in my garage. It's pretty beat up and I no longer use it, but I've been unable to get rid of it because of the highlights and marginal notes it contains. Those highlights and notes are not particularly extensive, but they are a little window into how I was reading the Bible back in high school and college. So I decided to go through my old college Bible and create Accordance equivalents of whatever notes and highlights I found.

I started by creating a new Highlights file called College Highlights, and duplicating the marking system I used back then. Basically, I had four colors with which I would underline words and verses: black for verses of doctrinal importance, red for verses which I felt were personally applicable, blue for verses of encouragement or beauty, and green for prophecies. I also created a new User Notes file called College Notes.

I then began in Genesis scanning page by page for any highlights or notes. With the exception of a few "encouragement" verses in Genesis, there really wasn't much to speak of until I got to Deuteronomy, which I apparently studied in some depth. Most of the highlighted passages were obviously important: the shema, the commandments, the call to choose life rather than death, etc. Less obvious were passages like Deuteronomy 8:17-18, which I underlined as "encouraging." This passage tells us not to take credit for the wealth we receive but to remember that the Lord gives us the ability to create wealth. Since I had no money in college I'm not sure why this passage jumped out at me, but it is certainly encouraging to me today as I work to provide for my family.

There was only one note scribbled in the margins of Deuteronomy, and that was beside Deuteronomy 10:12-13:

And now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the LORD'S commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?

Beside this passage, I wrote simply, "God asks little of us." I dutifully recorded this comment in the College Notes, and then it occurred to me that it might be interesting to interact with this comment from my current perspective. I wrote the following:

20 Years Later: From the perspective of time and having failed many times to fear the Lord, walk in his ways, love him, serve him with all I am, and observe his commands, I wonder why in my youth I remarked that God asks little of us. I can only assume that I meant this: that complete devotion is little to ask of those who have been lovingly created and graciously redeemed. If I meant anything other than that, I was a fool.

While the idea of recreating the highlights and notes from an old print Bible may seem tedious, I actually found it to be a good devotional exercise. It was fascinating to find the verses which stood out to me as a young man and to consider how my perspective on those verses has changed with years of work, marriage, fatherhood, and life experience. Best of all, I now have these youthful insights archived in a way I can access any time, rather than tucked inside a Bible in a box in the garage.

# posted by David Lang @ 9:25 AM 2 comments

In my previous two posts, I've been looking at ways to do a topical study using Accordance. In the first post, we opened Nave's Topical Bible and did a search for "Love." We then followed the links under the subheading "Love of Man for God." In the second post, we manually went through each of those 65 verses, marking the ones which made some connection between loving God and keeping his commands. Once we had finished marking the relevant verses, we placed those verses in a separate reference list window for future study.

Today, I want to back up and look at how I might have automated the process of looking for verses which equate loving God with keeping his commands. Rather than reading all 65 verses and manually marking the ones which spoke of keeping God's commands, wouldn't it be easier to search those 65 verses for the word "commands"? Certainly it would.

To do this, I will add all 65 verses to a Reference List, then search those verses using the CONTENTS command. The CONTENTS command enables me to take the list of verses from one window and use them as part of a search argument in another window. If you're following along, here's what to do (I'll go all the way back to the beginning just so we're all on the same page):

1. Open Nave's from the English Tools pop-up of the Resource palette.
2. Search the Entry field for "Love."
3. Command-click any of the verses under the heading "Love of Man for God."
4. In the text window that appears, select all the verses by clicking in the text pane and choosing Select All from the Edit menu (or using the keyboard shortcut command-A).
5. Add all those verses to a new Reference List by choosing New Reference List from the Add Selection To submenu of the Selection menu.
6. Open a new Search window containing whatever Bible text you wish to search.
7. Click the Search for Words radio button, then enter "commands", the AND command (shift-command-A), and the CONTENTS command (shift-command-C).
   
   Note: If there is more than one valid window open, Accordance will ask you which window you want to use the contents of. Choose the Reference List window listing the verses from Nave's.
    
8. Click OK to perform the search.

When I search the HCSB this way, I get 11 verses which contain the word "commands." Obviously, there are more than 11 verses in the whole Bible which contain the word "commands," but by using the CONTENTS command, I have restricted my search to the 65 verses Nave's listed as pertaining to the love of man for God. Think of the CONTENTS command as a way to create a custom search range out of any list of verses.

Now that I have these 11 verses, I can select them all and add them to a new Reference List which contains only verses which speak of loving God by keeping his commands.

In this post, I've shown how you can use Reference Lists and the CONTENTS command to sift through a list of verses from a topical Bible. Using this strategy, we found the 11 verses which speak of "commands" much faster than we would have using the previous post's strategy of reading through each verse and marking the ones of interest.

# posted by David Lang @ 9:03 AM 0 comments

In my previous post, I described how to do a topical study using topical resources like Nave's Topical Bible or Torrey's New Topical Textbook. With these tools, you search for a particular topic and then follow the list of verses provided. In this post, I'll pick up where I left off and look at ways to sift through those verses to find the ones of greatest interest.

When you command-click or click and drag to hypertext to multiple verses (see previous post for more on that), you get a text window displaying each of those verses. In the example we used previously, Nave's article on "love of man for God," we get 65 verses. Let's say I want to go through these verses and find all the ones which make an explicit connection between loving God and keeping his commands. To do that, I would read through each verse and option-click the ones I want to mark. This will place a blue bookmark icon next to the verses clicked.

Once I've marked the verses I want to zero in on, I can place them in a separate verse list window by choosing New Reference List Window from the Add Marked Verses To submenu of the Selection menu. Now that I have this subset of verses collected in one place, I can place a description such as "Loving God means keeping His commands" in the Description field at the top of the window, and save it so that I can call it up again later.

Collecting verses in a reference list window enables me to interact with my search results and focus on particular connections. Now if I wanted to add a note to each of these verses, I could do so relatively quickly, without having to wade past other verses which are not relevant to this particular topic. Or, if I wanted to paste a list of references on this topic into a paper or sermon outline, I could select all the verses in the Reference List and choose References from the Copy As submenu of the Edit menu.

In my next post, I'll talk about ways you can use your reference list as the basis for other searches.

# posted by David Lang @ 10:54 AM 1 comments

Someone on our forums recently asked for advice on how best to do a topical study and record his findings. The responses he got focused primarily on the question of whether he should record his findings in User Notes or a User Tool, but in this post I want to focus on the entire process of doing a topical study.

The first place to turn for information on a given topic is one of the resources designed for that purpose, such as Nave's Topical Bible or Torrey's New Topical Textbook, both of which are included in every level of the Library CD-ROM. Another excellent resource is The Thompson Chain Reference Bible.

When you open one of these resources and search for a given topic, such as "love," you'll get a listing of verses which relate to that topic, often organized into more manageable subtopics:

Nave's article on love has a long list of verses dealing with the "love of man for God." You can look up these verses in a variety of ways. First, you can simply drag your mouse over each reference to preview it in the Instant Details box. This is a good approach when you're looking for a particular verse and want to zero in on it quickly, but if you're wanting to read through all these passages, it's better to open them all at once.

The easiest way to do that is to command-click on any one of the references in the series. Alternatively, you can drag a selection from anywhere in the middle of the first reference to anywhere in the middle of the last reference, like this:

Either approach will open a new text window displaying all of the references in the paragraph. This makes it easy to scan through the verses quickly. If you want to see the verses in context, simply check the Show all text checkbox at the top of the window.

In my next post, I'll look at ways you can interact with the verses on a given topic.

# posted by David Lang @ 9:22 AM 2 comments

A while back, I blogged about the importance of Anchor Bible Dictionary, not only as a seminal resource for Biblical studies, but also as the impetus for creating many of the features Accordance users enjoy today.

A few months after that post, Anchor Bible Dictionary was sold to another publisher, and we had to suspend sales of the product until we could negotiate a contract with the new publisher. I'm pleased to say that all of that has now been resolved, and we are once again able to offer Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary for sale.

This new edition of Anchor has been updated with various corrections and extensive improvements to the hypertext links.

If you've been waiting for Anchor to be made available again, the wait is over. Anchor is on sale through the end of May for just $249, and those who already own Anchor (and Accordance 7) can get the updated edition for a whopping ten bucks!

# posted by David Lang @ 12:03 PM 2 comments

I'm excited to announce a major new upgrade to the Bible Lands PhotoGuide. With more than 400 new photos and improvements to the quality of many existing ones, this third edition of the PhotoGuide now offers more than 1600 high-resolution photos with in depth annotations.

The articles on Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Caesarea, Caesarea Philippi, Dan, Elah, Gibeon, Nazareth, Capernaum, Masada, Rome, and more have all been extensively updated. The article on Jerusalem includes photos of recent discoveries such as a Canaanite water-tunnel dating to the same period as Warren's shaft, the so-called palace of David, and the possible first-century location of the Pool of Siloam. Additional photos of the Second Temple model help flesh out what the various excavation sites would have looked like in the first century. And a new article on Flora explains the biblical significance of plants such as olive trees, figs, acacia trees, grape vines, wheat, and mustard seeds. Here are a few of the new photos which are included:

PhotoGuide 3 is available on our new Graphics DVD, along with our Atlas and Timeline. Upgrade pricing is available for those who own the first or second editions of the PhotoGuide.

# posted by David Lang @ 1:00 PM 1 comments

This famous saying, which I'd always heard attributed to Mark Twain, apparently originated with Benjamin D'Israeli. Whoever first said it, its meaning is clear: numbers can be very misleading.

Last week, I searched the MT/LXX for all occurrences of the Hebrew word bara using the Merge command, and got 54 hits. Then I searched for all the places where bara is translated with poieo in the Greek Septuagint. The number of hits returned was 30. Next I searched for all the places bara is not translated with poieo. This returned 39 hits.

I then asked you to explain the apparent anomaly in the Hit counts for these various searches. If there are 54 occurrences of bara and 30 of them are translated with poieo, we would expect our search for those cases which are not translated with poieo to number just 24 (54 - 30 = 24), rather than 39.

I only got one response explaining the numbers, but that response was so thorough and clearly written that I suspect no one else felt the need to respond. Here is the explanation given in the comments on the last post:

In the first search where you merge the BHS and the LXX using the AND operator, each occurrence of bara and each occurrence of poiew are counted as hits separately--i.e. each pairing of bara/poiew counts as 2 hits (one for each word). So, the 30 hits reduces to 15 actual results.

In the other search--BHS NOT LXX--this phenomenon doesn't occur since negated search terms don't produce any counted hits. Thus, only the occurrences of bara in the result set are counted as hits, and the 39 hits equals 39 results.

Therefore, the problem with the calculation in the previous post is that you're including the number of hits on poiew from the first search. When you exclude those, the numbers work out as expected: 54 - 15 = 39

That's exactly right, and I couldn't have explained it more clearly. I'm glad the commenter wasn't fooled by my intentional misreading of the numbers. I hope others of you found this little exercise to be illustrative. It's important, when looking at the statistical information in Accordance, to make sure you understand how things are being counted.

In general, any single search element will be counted as a hit. So for example, if I search for "Moses AND Aaron," each occurrence of Moses and each occurrence of Aaron will be counted as a single hit. If, however, I search for the actual phrase "Moses and Aaron," each occurrence of that phrase will be counted as a hit. If the phrase occurs five times, Accordance will give a hit count of 5. If it were counting each word separately, it would give a hit count of 15, which would be confusing in most cases.

If I were to search for two phrases joined by a Search command, such as "Moses and Aaron OR Jacob and Esau," Accordance would count each occurrence of the phrase "Moses and Aaron" and each occurrence of the phrase "Jacob and Esau." It would not count each of the words in those phrases.

Similarly, if I develop a search using a Construct window, each occurrence of the entire contruction is counted as a hit, as opposed to the individual words within that construction.

Finally, as our commenter made clear, negated items are not counted as hits. In the search "Moses NOT Aaron," each occurrence of Moses is counted. Aaron can't be counted because it would not exist in the set of verses returned by such a search.

At first blush, all this talk of what gets counted might seem a little confusing. On the one hand, it might be more consistent just to count each individual word that was found by any search, regardless of whether you were using search commands, searching for phrases, or searching for constructs. But when you search for a three-word phrase, do you really want to have to divide the number of hits by three to get the actual number of times that phrase occurs? I certainly don't. Accordance therefore attempts to count the number of hits as intelligently as possible, so that the number you get is most likely to be the number that makes the most sense.

Nevertheless, if statistics are one of the three kinds of lies, it doesn't hurt to know how Accordance is arriving at the figures it gives.

# posted by David Lang @ 9:21 AM 1 comments

In yesterday's post, I did a series of searches of the MT/LXX. First, I searched for all occurrences of the Hebrew word bara using the Merge command. This returned 54 hits. Then I searched for all the places where bara is translated with poieo in the Greek Septuagint. The number of hits returned was 30. Then I searched for all the places bara is not translated with poieo. This returned 39 hits.

Does anyone see a problem with those numbers? If there are 54 occurrences of bara and 30 of them are translated with poieo, we would expect our search for those cases which are not translated with poieo to number just 24 (54 - 30 = 24), not 39!

There's a logical explanation for these numbers, but I want to see if you can tell me what it is. Feel free to leave your explanations in the comments on this post, and I'll follow up with a more complete explanation.

# posted by David Lang @ 7:59 AM 1 comments

Last week, I talked about how the settings in the Show pop-up menu of the Tools window enable you to determine what kind of information gets displayed. This week I want to give you a very practical example of how this feature can be useful in sophisticated tools such as the MT/LXX. But before I can do that, I need to introduce you to the MT/LXX and how it works.

MT/LXX is a tool which places each word or phrase of the Masoretic Hebrew text in parallel with the corresponding Greek words from the Septuagint. This makes possible some very interesting comparisons.

For example, let's say I want to find every place where the Hebrew word bara, "create," is translated by the Greek word poieo.

As with all tools, the MT/LXX is divided into different fields of content. Search the Entry field to find particular verses, the Hebrew field to search for Hebrew words, the Greek field for LXX words, etc.

If I search the Hebrew field for the word bara, I find just 20 occurrences. But when I search the BHS-W4 for this word, I get no less than 54 occurrences. Since the MT/LXX is supposed to have every word in both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Septuagint, shouldn't I expect my search for bara to deliver the same result I get when searching the Hebrew Bible?

The discrepancy is due to the fact that the MT/LXX is not grammatically tagged like the BHS-W4. Thus, when we search the MT/LXX for bara, we will find the twenty times bara appears in that exact inflected form, but miss the 34 times when it appears in other forms.

Fortunately, we can overcome this limitation of the MT/LXX by piggy-backing on the tagging of the Hebrew Bible. We’ll do this through the use of an advanced search command called the MERGE command.

The MERGE command joins two windows together so that they both reflect the same search result. In this case, I need a Search window containing the BHS-W4, and a Tool window containing MT/LXX. In the Search window, I'll search for bara. In the MT/LXX window, I'll enter the MERGE command (by selecting it from the Enter Command submenu of the Search menu) and select the window I want to merge to (BHS-W4). When I click OK in the MT/LXX window, the results of my lexical search of the Hebrew Bible are reflected in the MT/LXX.

Using the MERGE command in this way makes for some very powerful searches, especially when I Merge with additional Search windows. To find every place where the LXX translates the Hebrew word bara by some form of the word poieo, I would need to open a new Search window containing the Septuagint, and search for poieo. I would then return to my MT/LXX window, add the AND command, followed by a second MERGE command which points to the window containing the LXX.

When I click OK, this search turns up 52 hits, and I can see that both the Hebrew word bara and the Greek word poieo are highlighted.

As I scroll down to Genesis 2:4, however, I find a place where bara and poieo both appear in the same verse, but where poieo is actually being used to translate a different Hebrew word.

I can exclude such false hits by opening the More Options section and specifying that I want the Greek and Hebrew words to appear in the same paragraph—that is, on the same line—rather than just in the same article. When I click OK to perform this search again, the number of hits goes down to 30, and Genesis 2:4 becomes excluded.

If I want to see all the places the LXX translates bara with some word other than poieo, I need only change the AND command to a NOT, like this:

Here's where the Show pop-up menu comes in handy. If I set the window to show only the hit paragraphs, I can quickly scan my results to see all the different ways bara is translated.

Of course, the downside of this view is that I can't easily see which verse each hit comes from. The reference for the verse at the top of the pane is shown in the Go To box at the bottom right corner of the window, but I have no easy way of telling where the other hits I'm looking at are found. Choosing Add Titles from the Show pop-up solves this problem by giving me the verse references for each hit.

That was a lot of set up just to reinforce the usefulness of the Show pop-up menu, but hopefully you've also learned something about the MT/LXX, the Merge Command, searching within every paragraph as opposed to every article, etc. The MT/LXX is an extremely powerful tool which is made all the more powerful when you know how to use the various options Accordance provides.

# posted by David Lang @ 12:02 PM 2 comments

[Today's guest blogger is Rick Mansfield, one of several new Accordance trainers who have been leading free training seminars across the country this Spring. I asked Rick to share his experience of leading a seminar for the first time, and much of what he's written echoes my own experience of leading seminars. Except, that is, when he chronicles all the preparation he did. I'm afraid I'm not that much of a go-getter! ;-) —David]

Last Fall, OakTree Software invited me and a few others to come down to Florida for a weekend with the purpose of training us to be Accordance trainers. I jumped at the chance because I've been using Accordance for about a decade now and it is absolutely integral to my work and daily routines. It was a great experience to finally meet folks at OakTree with whom I had corresponded over the years, but had never actually met in person. The weekend itself was fairly intense as we spent many hours, sometimes late into the night, going over the workings of Accordance—from the big picture and philosophy of the software to the very minutiae of its extremely powerful capabilities. Then on Monday following our weekend of training, each one of the trainers-in-training took about an hour to present a segment at an actual Accordance Training Seminar in Orlando.

Flash forward six months. This past week, I had my first opportunity to "fly solo" as a trainer: leading a seminar on Friday at Asbury Theological Seminary and on Saturday at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I'm no stranger to the classroom, but one thing I've learned over the years is that whenever I have a new "prep," I don't let the students know I'm teaching something for the first time. I've found that if I demonstrate confidence in my presentation, the students will have confidence in their learning.

But that doesn't mean that I didn't have some initial concerns as I prepared to lead an Accordance seminar completely by myself for the first time. Even though I've used Accordance for almost a decade now, it's no secret that it's a very sophisticated program. It's simple enough for a casual user to sit down and go straight to work, but at the same time it's complex enough for the most advanced biblical scholar.

I'll admit to my own initial anxieties about going on my own for the first time. The Accordance Training Seminars last from 9 AM in the morning to 5 PM in the afternoon. Taking time for breaks and lunch, that still leaves roughly six and a half hours of straight instruction time. Could I possibly talk about Accordance for that long, or would I—like a new minister preaching his first sermon—run through all my material in a mere matter of minutes? And although I use Accordance almost every day, I don't use all of it everyday. I don't build elaborate constructs regularly. What if I got asked questions I couldn't answer? What if the attendees conspired together to play "stump the teacher"?

Fortunately, because I had quite a bit of lead time for my first two seminars, I prepared as if I were studying for the Bar Exam (well maybe not quite that intensely). I had David Lang's own instruction in the very excellent Accordance Training DVD that contains about five and a half hours of material. I watched the entire DVD completely through twice and watched certain segments more than that. I pored through the printed version of the Accordance 7.4 manual, underlining, highlighting, and placing sticky notes all throughout the pages marking significant spots. Perhaps most significantly, I had my own experience to draw from that included not only my own routines for using Accordance, but also little tips and tricks that I've picked up over the years.

Early on in my preparation I prepared a basic outline for what I would cover during a full day's seminar. The morning would be introductory, focused on the philosophy and basics of the Accordance interface including a Resource Palette and Search Window overview. From there, I planned to move to basic searches and cover search commands and symbols. The time after lunch would be reserved for more advanced topics such as Greek and Hebrew searching and the construct window. I also planned to cover topics such as tools and tool searching, the Atlas and Timeline, and creating one's own user tools and Bibles if time allowed. As I continued in my preparation, my outline grew more and more detailed. In some places, I gave myself very simple instructions: "Run through elements of the search window from top to bottom"—a very simple instruction that took 45 minutes or so to actually do. In other places, I wrote down bullet points that included exact elements to put in a search field or in a construct window, step by step. For those kind of demonstrations, I wanted to make sure it worked right the first time, and I wanted to be sure that I had every element in place so that I wouldn't accidentally forget something. By the time I was ready to actually lead the seminar, my notes had grown from that simple outline to an eleven-page document.

I also thought about what the attendees would see from my screen. I have a MacBook that I use for most of my work, but I knew I needed to clean it up a bit. Teaching software is different from teaching a class using presentation software such as PowerPoint or Keynote. Using those programs, learners only see what you've included in the slides. But in teaching software like Accordance, the projected screen is going to mirror my own. So I cleaned up my desktop, placing all those stray files that have been piling up there for a while elsewhere on my hard drive. I downloaded a nice Accordance-themed wallpaper from the Accordance Exchange. I switched the Mac OS X dock to autohide rather than remaining visible so I could use as much of the screen as possible. I removed all the little system icons from the top menu bar except for a basic minimum. Thinking that I might show attendees the Accordance website, forums and Exchange, I set Safari's homepage to accordancebible.com to save time. And finally, although I prefer to use the Accordance toolbar horizontally on top of the screen, I set it back to the default vertical position so as not to confuse new users. In fact, so as to change my habits, I did this a full week before my first presentation so that I would not confuse myself!

All this preparation really paid off. In the end, none of my worries were really warranted (of course careful preparation itself didn't hurt!). I found that a full day's seminar really wasn't enough time to cover everything. In fact, I think I could have very easily used an entire other day as well! That fact, of course, is testimony to the richness of the Accordance program itself.

At the beginning of each session, I informally polled the room in an attempt to determine the various levels of proficiencies among the attendees. I wanted to be careful not to rush into anything too difficult, but I also didn't want the experienced user to get bored during the morning sessions. On each day, there were enough "new" users that I felt justified in not assuming anything and starting with the very basics. At the first break, I asked a few of the folks who had been using Accordance for a while if what I had covered so far was too elementary for them. No one said that it was. Even these users were picking up little tips and tricks or discovering a basic feature here or there that they didn't know about.

These kinds of lightbulb moments lasted all day. The attendees were encouraged to ask questions or even ask me to go through a particular procedure again. The setting was very informal, and even though everyone had his or her own Mac laptop, it was very much a "group" learning experience. We had a variety of ages in attendance ranging from those who were in college, all the way to a 76-year-old retired Greek teacher!

Although I spent most of my time teaching the group, I also had the opportunity to provide quite a bit of one-on-one assistance. During the breaks and even after the seminars were officially over each day, I stayed and helped attendees individually by giving further instruction, offering clarification or occasionally troubleshooting something that wasn't working correctly for a user.

In addition to essentially following my initial outline for the day, I also showed attendees how to get more help using the Accordance forums. Plus, I introduced them to the Accordance Exchange and encouraged them to offer up their own user tools to the rest of us. Bravely, I decided to give out my own email address. Although I suggested using the forums or technical support for a first line of defense when needing assistance, I told the attendees that I wouldn't mind helping out as well if I could. Already I've received a handful of emails and have been able to have some positive follow-up correspondence from the seminars.

I should note, too, that as someone who gets to teach adults fairly regularly, I'm used to looking at the back of laptops. But normally, I see Dells and Toshibas and a small number of token Macs. How exciting it was to look out and see nothing but glowing white Apple logos shining back at me! Well…with one exception. On the second day of seminars, there was one lone individual who was actually running Accordance in Windows in the emulator. Such creatures really do exist! She testified that it worked quite well, but has already decided that her next computer will have to be a Mac. Good idea :-)

Even though I led both days by myself as far as the training goes, I wasn't by myself. OakTree sent a member of their sales staff to join me for the purpose of selling any additional Accordance software and modules to the attendees. I believe we made a very good team, and from what I understand, the bags she carried home were much lighter than when she first arrived.

At the end of both days, although I was tired, I also felt very good about the entire experience. It's very rewarding as a teacher to know that I've helped people learn something new. All the feedback (at least what I've heard!) has been very positive. But in reflection, it's not just some random piece of software I've helped folks with. Accordance allows us to study the Bible—God's Word—more efficiently. Studying God's word at any level allows us to understand Him better and our relationship to Him. By helping people better use Accordance, I've been able to instruct people how to "self feed" in their own spiritual journey. When I first agreed to become a trainer, I never realized there was an aspect of ministry to it as well, but there is.

So what now? After the seminars were both over, I was pumped. When's the next one? I'm ready to do this again! We are in talks for me to lead another one, but right now I've been told it would probably take place in the Fall. The Fall? Hey, OakTree, I think I could lead one of these every other week. Line it up, and I'm there!

# posted by David Lang @ 12:00 PM 2 comments

Yesterday, I talked about how the settings in the Show pop-up menu of the Tools window enable you to determine what kind of information gets displayed. All text will display your search results in the context of the entire tool. That means every paragraph and article will be displayed regardless of whether it actually contains the word you were searching for. Selecting Articles will show every paragraph of any article which contains your search term. Selecting Paragraphs means that only those paragraphs which actually contain the word you were searching for will be displayed. The narrower the context you select, the easier it is to scan all your search results, but the harder it becomes to know where you are in the broader context.

I said yesterday that the default setting for the Show pop-up menu is All text. For example, if you just open Louw & Nida from the Resource palette, the Show pop-up menu will be set to All text and the entire text of Louw & Nida will be displayed. But now I'm going to let you in on a little secret: this is not what happens when you amplify to Louw & Nida.

Remember that amplifying is what we call it when you select a word before choosing a resource from the Resource palette. If I select the word ginomai in the Greek New Testament and then select Louw & Nida from the Resource palette, Louw & Nida will automatically be searched for the word ginomai. Most readers of this blog already know that. But what you may not have noticed is that when you amplify to Louw & Nida, the Show pop-up menu is set to Articles rather than All text.

Why this difference? When we develop an Accordance tool, we think carefully about how the text should display after you amplify to that tool. Should it show the hits in the context of the entire text, or should it just show the articles which contain a hit, so that you can easily scan all the words that were found?

Louw & Nida is a Greek lexicon which groups the words it defines according to semantic domain, or category of meaning. Where a traditional lexicon like BDAG will list each word once, and then list all the different meanings of that word, Louw & Nida will list the various categories of meaning (semantic domains), and then list all of the words which express each meaning. Thus, a word like ginomai, which can express a state of being, the act of becoming, linear movement, behavior, possession, etc. will appear multiple times throughout Louw & Nida, listed under those various semantic domains.

If we were to show All text by default whenever you amplify to Louw & Nida, you might be misled into thinking that the first meaning listed is the only meaning. Because of the way Louw & Nida is arranged, the first meaning listed may not even be the primary meaning of the word. So when we created Louw & Nida, we actually set a flag which tells Accordance to show only the hit Articles after you amplify. That way, someone new to Louw & Nida can easily see that there is more than one entry for the word they wanted to look up.

Now, what if you want to see each entry for that word in its surrounding context? After all, the whole point of Louw & Nida's arrangement is to show you related words within a given semantic domain. To see the surrounding context, simply choose All text from the Show pop-up menu. Because Accordance recycles windows, you only need to change this setting once. The next time you amplify to Louw & Nida, the window will update to show the new word while preserving your All text setting. Of course, if you close the window and then amplify to Louw & Nida later, a new window will open with the Show pop-up set to Articles.

In this way, we try to build our modules so that they deliver the results of a search in a way that makes sense and is not misleading. It's not many tools that we set to show Articles by default after an amplify, but there are a few which make more sense that way. That's just one example of the kind of thought which goes into the development of each Accordance module, as well as the kind of flexibility provided by the Show pop-up menu.

# posted by David Lang @ 8:28 AM 1 comments

One of the fundamental design elements of the Accordance interface is the ability to determine how the results of a search are displayed. For example, when you do a word search in a Search window, Accordance displays only those verses which contain the word or phrase you were searching for. The advantage of this view is that you can quickly scan the results of a search, without having to scroll past all the surrounding context.

There may be times, however, when you prefer to have your hit verses displayed with a little more context. The Add context pop-up menu in the More options section lets you choose to view a certain number of verses on either side of the hit verse, or to view the hit verses in the context of the entire text.

This concept is pretty easy to grasp when dealing with Bible texts, but did you know you have similar display options for tools? The Show pop-up menu lets you choose how much of the surrounding context you want to see.

For most tools, the Show pop-up menu is set to All Text. This means that when you do a search, the entire text of the tool is displayed, and the hit paragraphs are bookmarked. To advance to the next hit, you would click the down Mark button.

The advantage of viewing the entire text of a tool is that nothing is hidden from view. But there may be times when you want to focus on your search results without having to scroll past the surrounding context.

For example, let's say I want to find all the quotations in Gathered Gold that mention "courage." I search the Content field for the word "courage" and get a variety of quotes in different articles. With the Show pop-up menu set to All text, I need to jump from hit to hit using the Mark button.

If I want an easy way to scan all the quotes that were found, I need only change the Show pop-up menu to Paragraphs:

If I want to see which articles these quotes come from, I can choose Add Titles, which basically shows the hit paragraphs plus the titles of the articles which contain those paragraphs.

Finally, the Articles option lets me see the complete text of any article which contains a hit (as opposed to just the titles).

In this way, I can control how much of the text I deal with at any given time. For example, if I want to print out all the quotes on courage, I can just show the hit paragraphs and print. If your only option was to view the text in its entirety, you would have to jump to each hit paragraph, copy and paste that quote into a word processor, and then print the word processing document you created. By giving you the flexibility to adjust the display to your needs, Accordance makes it easier to work with the information you find.

# posted by David Lang @ 7:55 AM 0 comments

No, it's not an April Fool's joke. This month, we're offering a sale on all our primary collections: The Library, the Scholar's Collection, the Catholic Collection, and the Jewish Collection. If you've been waiting to buy one of these packages, now's the time to do it.

We're also offering a substantial discount on the Context of Scripture, which is this month's featured module.

So after you're done reading about such revolutionary new products as the iPod Nada, be sure to take advantage of the "serious" savings we're offering. :-)

# posted by David Lang @ 9:18 AM 1 comments