Reordering biblical books in a hits graph

[bpkantor]

I've attached a pic of a hits graph I just made.

 

 

As expected, it displays the results as you would expect in biblical order. However, I wanted to find a way to reorder the books of the Bible to go from earliest to latest so I could see linguistic development or the frequency of a particular form across time.

 

Is there any way to do this?

image

Edited November 8, 2017 by bpkantor

[Timothy Jenney]

I proposed this feature internally some time ago, but it is fraught with problems. What dating system should we use for biblical books?

 

Even in the NT, there is no common scholarly agreement about the composition date of each book. In the OT, the problem is even worse. There were often long lags between the events and their recording (historical narratives like Chronicles) or the oral prophecy and its writing (prophetic oracles as in Isaiah). Many books incorporate older material. A good number of them show extensive editing over a long period (Jeremiah, Genesis, Exod-Num, Deut).

 

At what stage of editing would one date the book? Alternately, should we date material section-by-section, rather than book-by-book?

 

I pointed out we could at least let individuals date the books for themselves. The general feeling was that this would be a lot of programming work for a very few expert users.

 

Proposal shelved.

[Alistair]

Well, what about the Hebrew canonical order at least for the Old Testament? i.e Genesis to (1&2) Chronicles

[Helen Brown]

When a Hebrew text is the search text, it appears in Hebrew canonical order and so do the parallel panes. So a search in Hebrew will give you graphs in that order, but not a search in English.

[Alistair]

That just proves I've never actually done it. Thanks Helen.

[Douglas Fyfe]

the graph pictured in the first post is in Hebrew canonical order (Gen-2Chron)

[vparunak]

I'm encountering this with GNT-Byzantine 2005, which for some reason inserts the general epistles between Acts and Romans, and Hebrews between 2 Thes and 1 Tim. 

 

I don't know why Robinson and Pierpont chose this order--that would be interesting. But more immediately, it makes the resulting hits graph very confusing for teaching to a group whose main Bible follows the traditional English order. Many users of Accordance will be searching Hebrew and Greek resources but need to present their results to audiences who do not know those languages. A plot of αγαπη in the NT peaks strongly in 1 John, which is very revealing, but it's extremely confusing to find the peak between Acts and Romans! Particularly when other Greek texts such as NA28 follow the more conventional order.

 

The ability to order books in one version according to another version would be very helpful. Or at least give us a way to dump a csv file of hit locations and verse/chapter coordinates in the underlying resource coordinate system so that we can reorder, analyze, and plot ourselves.

 

Suggestions?

[Λύχνις Δαν]

The way I do this is to collect the hit counts you want from the Analysis tab, or Table tab, and export them. You can process the saved file to CSV. There is no direct CSV output. Then you can use other tools to sort, graph and annotate. For something like this I think the Table would be easiest, if you just want overall book or even chapter stats. Custom ranges are more fiddly because you cannot get a table of hits by custom range.

 

If you want detail hit location information you can use things like select all in the search and copy as Reference.

 

You can save the Analysis tab as an RTF file and it will be a Unicode file with tab separators which you can reprocess.

 

Thx

D

[vparunak]

Very nice, thanks. A bit of Python scripting to tease apart multiple chapters, etc., but doable.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

If you use Python you can pull these into CSV format and then load them in a Jupyter notebook and use Pandas and then you can have a lot of flexibility. I've been playing with Bokeh actually and getting some nice stuff that way too.

 

Thx

D