Logos

Bible reading software with a ton of unusual “power user” reading features. Certainly the most featureful reading software I’ve ever seen.

Logos Bible Software

Was intrigued to learn that it has a hyperlinked version of the Syntopicon available.

• “Workflows” offer hierarchical guided steps which can embed content and interfaces, with check boxes to track what you have and haven’t done, and progress surfaced to your dashboard.
• “Exegetical guides” show linguistic information for selected texts: discussion of grammar, word-by-word discussions, links to lexicons, etc
• “Link sets” let you link scrolling between a source text, commentaries, lexicons, etc.
• “Text Formatting” offers some smart highlighters, so that you can e.g. hover a word in one text and see all instances of the same root or lemma in another text. Or you can color references to different members of the holy trinity in different colors. (more) There are also custom affordances to show start/stop of today’s reading plan, entries in passage lists, etc.
• Notes (with optionally multiple anchors!). Rich text. Has a corresponding icon and highlight style.
  • Notes are (like in PDFs) collapsed into a tiny icon in the text (though shown on hover) and displayed as collection in a flat list in a separate pane.
  • Notes can be organized into “notebooks”. I’m not sure how notebooks and tags practically differ: notes are unordered within notebooks. Is it just that notes are in at most one notebook?
  • There’s a LiquidText-like design which filters a book to just the passages which include notes (without actually showing the notes).
  • Kindle-like “popular highlights” styling
• “Send to” feature offers a Latticework-like direct manipulation for excerpting.
• A huge number of tools for pivoting around terms and words—lexical analysis, etc.
• Multi-pane navigation:
  • Opt+Click opens in new/opposite(?) column
  • Cmd+Click opens in new tab
  • Shift+Click opens in new window
  • Click opens in… not sure? sometimes opened in new window, sometimes opposite column. One time it split downwards? I’m sure there’s a logic to this, but I don’t know what it is.
  • Oh, I think the logic is that if you move the mouse even one pixel between mouse-down and mouse-up when clicking a link, that turns the interaction into a drag, which then can result in a new split pane in different places depending on where the link is on the screen. Ugly.
  • If a link is within the book, Opt+Click doesn’t open in a different column. I’m not sure how to view the same book in multiple views.

Some types of objects in Logos’s ontology include:

• notebooks (for your own notes on texts?)
• sermons (specially structured compositions with imagery, etc)
• passage lists (roughly, an ordered list of regions, with subheadings)
• resource collection (?)
• word list (an unordered list of words? lemmas?)
• reading plan (unsure, but: a sequence of ranges to be read on different days?)
• visual filter (search predicate and highlight styles)
• clippings (excerpts from references, like simple index cards)
  • (why are these different from a passage list?)
• canvas (2D spatial environment for other objects?)
• sentence diagram (unsure, but: parses?)
• “more”—uh oh

At a high level, I notice that most of the interesting presentational features in the reading environment are more to do with sifting, navigating, and connecting pre-existing texts, rather than one’s own work. Unsurprisingly, it’s focused on doing very deep readings of a text. The tools are less obviously appropriate for, say, a scholar working with a steady stream of new papers.

Amusingly, Faithlife (the developer) makes what appears to be an almost-identical-but-slightly-reskinned app called Verbum, marketed to Catholics, with different priorities, canonical texts, etc. Same interface.

The Syntopicon

The Syntopicon is available in Logos, fully hyperlinked.

It seems like this should be a dream. In practice, it’s pretty awful to navigate. The texts feel like big unwieldy blocks. I’m very disoriented—I have no sense of where I am in any of these texts, no visceral sense of whether I’m looking at several different windows on the same text or at several different texts. The curse of the flat undifferented digital surface. I want to be able to keep little bits of several texts (many-to-many) open at once to compare them. It’s surprisingly cumbersome to arrange that. It really wants there to be one pane per text. It really doesn’t want any slicing and dicing of texts into manipulable interface elements.