Previously only top-end software would allow students of scripture to easily find where God is called “Lamb,” “Word,” “Prince,” “Son,” “He,” “I,” etc. Timothy, the developer of Bible Analyzer, recently completed efforts to tag references like those for over 25,000 words to offer similar functionality in a low-cost program.
The Cross Reference Index has been rebuilt due to some errors leading to irrelevant connections found by a studious reader. This data now only includes references from the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge and excludes other cross reference sources.
This and all other files included in MetaV can be downloaded here.
This update is primarily for the tables defining People and their relationships. I have made the following changes for this version:
These files are now available on the downloads page and on GitHub.
I have recently made a few updates to MetaV. In the near future I will begin posting a detailed roadmap to lay out what improvements are planned in the short-term and long-term future. Here are the updates in this version 2.1.1:
Special thanks to Nathan Smith for providing a script to convert the Strong’s XML files to an SQL-friendly structure.
That’s all for now. Many more improvements are planned and updates will appear here as they are completed.
MetaV 2.0 is now available to download as an Access database or as a group of csv files. I have attempted to make it as easy as possible to understand the structure of the data, but feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.
This is perhaps the most complex undertaking I’ve ever engaged in and I know it simply would be impossible without the ongoing guidance and helping hand of the Lord our God. There are many improvements that can and will be made in future versions, but the time for collecting information is past and the time for turning it into action is upon us. As I’ve seen from the response to my infographic, “Mapping God’s Bloodline,” visual presentations of biblical data can reach far and wide, gaining influence in some of the most unlikely sectors of our society.
MetaV provides the foundation for more visualizations of this type. With it, data experts can correlate biblical people, places, and timelines in ways not yet imagined. For the foreseeable future, I shall be focused on bringing the big picture of the Bible into view using modern data techniques. I welcome your ideas and would be happy to share on this blog any visualizations or analyses you have performed.
A lot has progressed since I first posted the central parts of MetaV. At that time, I had only converted and indexed the text of the Bible itself. Since then, I’ve managed to add cross references, topics, time lines, readability info, Strong’s Concordance, and locations. I’ve even made a number of tools to explore each “module,” and one to explore the timeline, places, and text all in one place. But, what’s next? The diagram below shows the modules I have envisioned so far to include in the database. Black outlines indicate areas of future development; white outlines are completed modules (tables).
Each sub-group has at least the main part of it complete, with one exception: People. What can I say? People are messy. I know there are a number of genealogies out there and a number of tools produced to explore them, but finding an openly available one in an appropriately structured file that’s free for public use is proving difficult. Therefore, I expect it will take significantly longer to compile such a reference on my own using what I’ve scraped together so far.
I have chosen not to upload the updated database until I at least have people identified and tagged with basic relationship information (father/son, husband/wife). After that iteration is complete, I’ll make that available and begin work on the remaining modules and other refinements at the same time as producing new, simple tools to explore the database. Any estimate on how long that will take would only be a guess.
There is a lot of work being done in the area of Bible translation to reach people of different languages. One language we typically don’t think about is the digital language read by computers. We have many options available to read and download digital editions, but as I have written before, these formats have limits. MetaV is a new digital version which makes it easier for programmers and non-programmers alike to link each word to useful metadata and perform a wider range of analysis.
Metadata is information that describes other information. Take a photograph, for example. The picture captures information on a scene which, when described some other way, may take 1,000 words or more. Information describing that photograph (metadata) might include: photographer, date, film type, camera settings, and location. Modern software uses this type of information to efficiently organize large sets of digital photos. MetaV organizes large sets of words using similar methods.
The main limitation in freely available digital copies of the Bible is that each line contains a full verse. What I have done with MetaV is break it down to individual words, with columns describing more about each one. Currently, it can tell whether the word is italicized, what punctuation follows it, whether it is the beginning or end of a parenthetical statement, and whether it is at the beginning of a new paragraph. Of course, it also stores the book, chapter, verse, and position within the verse.
This serves as a foundational building block to efficiently add more pieces of metadata for simple searches and advanced analysis. First, I’ll add Strong’s numbers. Then, location information, genealogical relationships, speakers, timelines, and nearly anything else that can be linked back to the root text. The diagram below illustrates how this information will be joined together.
Even before any new modules are included, some useful analysis can be performed, such as: readability statistics for individual books (or any subset of your choosing), writing style analysis (How long are the sentences and paragraphs? What words does the author favor?), or just simple word counts (How many italicized words are there? How many unique words are there?).
MetaV is a new translation in the true sense of the word – it “slides” the words to a new position to make it more readable by a database language. I have done nothing to remove words or change their meaning (as too many modern translations do) and have taken great care to ensure each programming detail is correct in every way. In the coming weeks and months I will be publishing results of some analysis made simpler by this new tool, so stay tuned!
Update 6-11-2011: Version 1 has been deprecated. You can download MetaV 2.0 here.