NICNT upgrade

[Abram K-J]

I've gotten into the habit of checking the sales/specials page early Tuesday morning, and was happy to see the recent updates to commentary series there.

I own NICNT (20 vols.) in Accordance and want to upgrade to the new collection to get the Hebrews volume. Maybe you'll clarify this in the publicity that comes out today, but the product page says, "To get full functionality with the new 21-volume NICNT, users should remove the original NICNT module from the Accordance Library prior to upgrading to the new NICNT (21volumes) module."

 

Not knowing how the underneath-the-hood parts of Accordance work, does this mean I'd lose all my highlights from the 20-volume series (quite a few, in my case) if I wanted to install the 21-volume series?

[Helen Brown]

You can keep the older NICNT, but if you do some internal hyperlinks from the new volumes may not work or may link to the old ones. However, your highlights will not transfer as the module names are different. We'll have the same problem when we allow notes on tools. In this case, the new NICNT-18 is just corrections to the NICNT so you won't lose much by keeping the older volume.

[Abram K-J]

I'm not sure I understand--is the NICNT-18 an older version? I have the 20-volume NICNT and am looking to upgrade just to gain the new Hebrews volume. I see that my 20 vols. are split into "NICNT" (18 volumes) and "NICNT2" (2 volumes).

 

Do you mean that if I upgrade to the 21-volume NICNT, I could keep NICNT (18 vols.) and its highlights, and delete my NICNT2 (just 2 vols. for me) and replace it with NICNT2-3? In my case this would work, since I don't have any highlights in NICNT2.

 

And will the NICNT corrections you mention also be made available from within NICNT-18? I've reported a number, so would be glad for the update. This could be my needed workaround to keep my highlights and get the upgrade.

 

In any event, I'm sure everyone has worked very hard on this, but losing this many highlights seems an unfortunate price to pay for an upgrade to the full 21-vol. series.

Edited March 4, 2014 by Abram K-J

[Helen Brown]

We are moving to a system of numbering commentary sets by the number of volumes, as we have to change the name when we add a volume otherwise it's a free upgrade. The previous 20 volume set was sold as NICNT but included NICNT and NICNT2 (2 additional commentaries on the same books). Now we have NICNT (21volumes) which includes NICNT-18 and NICNT2-3. NICNT-18 is actually the corrected NICNT but for technical reasons we had to rename it. You won't get the corrections in NICNT and you won't get the highlights in NICNT-18 but you can keep both modules as long as you don't mind the internal links from NICNT-18 going to NICNT. I don't have a better solution at present, sorry! Maybe in the future we'll be able to transfer highlights.

[JonathanHuber]

Does this mean that the same issue will arise for future additions to WBC, Pillar, etc. series that are yet unfinished?

[Abram K-J]

In the absence of being able to transfer highlights why not correct NICNT, too? Then those opting to keep that module would have a cleaner, more accurate text (and presumably see the fruits of their "Report Correction" emails). This would also allow someone to forego the upgrade and simply add on the Hebrews volume as a separate module--then a user would have all 21 volumes, with corrections, and preserve all highlights.

[Helen Brown]

We will certainly look into updating NICNT with the corrections. We do have plans to allow the transfer of highlights from one text to another (such as ESVS and ESVi, or GNT-T and GNT28-T) but tools will be much more difficult if major sections have been added.

[Abram K-J]

Thanks, Helen--yes, I think that would be great if NICNT could be corrected. That would make for a decent workaround, at least.

 

I don't know how Accordance programming works, but I wonder if most users (certainly I do) might expect that a tool upgrade would function the same as an app update? I.e., when I install Accordance 10.3, it just goes over top of 10.2 and everything (notes, highlights, user tools) transfers automatically.

 

It would be great if there could be some way that highlight files could automatically be re-mapped to tool upgrades.

[Chuck Schneider]

It would be great if there could be some way that highlight files could automatically be re-mapped to tool upgrades.

 

I agree.

[Guntis]

If I understand correctly, current work-around is to search for the highlights in the old commentary set, place the new commentary in the parallel pane, then scroll and manually highlight it all over again. And probably delete highlights from the old commentary so your highlights file doesn't grow unnecessarily.

[Abram K-J]

Well, sure, that's the laborious, manual option. (Noting, too, that you'd want to first search all the highlights in the old series and go mark-by-mark through the hit results, rather than actually manually scrolling line by line through a whole series.)

 

If you bought a new commentary volume in print, all your highlighting in old print volumes would remain intact (obviously). Given all that Accordance promises to be (and usually is), and given how electronic texts are supposed to make (and usually do make) our research and reading easier, transferrable highlights when upgrading a series ought to be a given, in my opinion.

Edited March 5, 2014 by Abram K-J

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Its funny automating things like this. People find the task generally very simple but massively boring and laborious. On the other hand a computer has no problem with the labour or boredom, but cannot easily grock the task well enough. If its a simple copy its fine. If there has been any movement in the text between the editions I would expect it to become non-trivial and as the number of differences grows so would the difficulty.

 

Sometimes a model based on automatically doing ones the software can be sure of while taking a shot at the others and flagging them for review works ok.

 

Interesting problem.

 

Thx
D

[Abram K-J]

Daniel--maybe the issue is in how the modules are grouped and understood by the library? By point of comparison, I don't believe this is an issue with Logos, when upgrading a series with new volumes. That could be because in the Logos library even a commentary series shows up as individual volumes, so when new volumes are added, it's essentially a new module while the old modules (individual commentaries) remain.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

I've not used either Logos or highlighting enough to know I'm afraid. But how the text is represented will certainly have an impact. But getting highlighting in the right volume in a commentary should be easy enough in an upgrade. Unless there have been major changes to content of the volumes, such as splitting one volume into two. But on a smaller scale I'd expect issues. But its interesting to hear that Logos might have a solution here.

 

Thx

D

[Abram K-J]

Okay, I figured it would be less overall hassle for me now just to manually reproduce my highlights, and I wanted the new Hebrews volume, so I went ahead and got the upgrade. Fortunately, I had only 39 highlights so far, so this was doable.

 

But, to note, when I had installed NICNT18 and NICNT2-3, with the old NICNT still in my library, I went to delete NICNT and NICNT2 from my library and got this message.

 

The reason for that message is that I had the NICNT commentary open, however, it was NICNT18 that was open, and even trying to delete NICNT2 made that message appear... and then closed my NICNT18 tab.

 

All is well now, but I wanted to pass it on all the same.

[Guntis]

Accordance should make a separate highlights update tool which would compare two commentaries and copy highlights from one set to the other. There are several good tools out there for text comparison, which show what is removed and what's inserted, so there wouldn't be much difficulties to compare two sets and copy highlights over to the new set. That tool could flag and show me only those places where there are highlights, but the text has been changed, and I could apply highlights there manually. Probably it would save up to 99% of manual work.