Alex Renn
Today’s guest post is by Isaiah Hoogendyk, language editor for the content innovation department.
With Logos 5 and the new Verbum base packages, there are lots of features to talk about. Everyone will have their favorite new feature. Today I’ll be talking about a tool that is brand-new to Logos 5 and currently my favorite.
Logos users already know about Bible Search. This is always a great place to start when you want to quickly find a reference containing a few select words. For instance, a search in the RSV Catholic Edition for “Jesus bread” will give around 21 results, most of which are useful and interesting.
However, there are at least two limitations to this approach:
- The search is specific to the words searched for:
- This means it doesn’t find classic passages such as “I am the bread of life,” where Jesus is implied but not stated explicitly.
- And what about when the word “loaves” is used? Or when Jesus is comparing bread to his body?
- The search only finds where the words are in the same verse together, but it would be perhaps more useful to know when they are used in the same clause.
Fortunately, these limitations are addressed with Clause Search. Start by opening up a search window and selecting “Clause.”
You’ll notice that there are some helpful examples of how to search. The two basic things you need to know are that Logos has tagged people, places, things, and verbs throughout the Scriptures, and that each of these “entities” is tagged as either the subject, the object or the indirect object. Today we’re going to focus on “person” and “thing anywhere in clause.”
The software makes it easy to jumpstart these searches—it gives you suggestions as you type. Start by entering “person:Jesus.” Select the first suggestion. Now, type “thing:bread” and hit enter.
There are now 34 results. Along with John 6:48, “I am the bread of life,” we also see many interesting verses:
- Matthew 14:19: Taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples,
- Matthew 26:26: “Take, eat; this is my body.”
- John 6:33–34: “For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world.”
- John 13:26: Jesus answered, “It is he to whom I shall give this morsel when I have dipped it.”
Try another clause search yourself: instead of using “thing:bread,” try “thing:wine.” And to whet your appetite for more examples to be discussed in a followup post, head over to logos.com/clause-search. Be sure to watch the video!
Verbum
how much is the the Minimal Crossgrade?
It is dynamically priced just like everything else. You can find it here.
For me from Verbum Basic it was about $120-ish (cannot remember the exact price). But login to Logos and it will calculate a price based on the package that you currently have. It gives a few additional resources.
That is a great feature. Just to confirm that this is not available in all Verbum packages (for example not in the Basic package), but I believe that it will be offered at a later date at an added (but reasonable) cost for those who do not have it in their packages.
Am I correct?
Correct. Clause searching is available in Scripture Study and above.
Do you know if it will be available as an add-on for Basic users?
It is available in the main Minimal Crossgrade here. I am unsure at this time whether there will be a Catholic version of the minimal crossgrade, but it seems unlikely.
As you can tell from the post, finding and tagging all this information was quite an undertaking, so the database is one of the more valuable parts of the upgrade. It is unlikely to be available for much less than the cost of the crossgrade.
I hope that helps!
Many thanks. So, in order to get the additional features, I could buy the minimal crossgrade and that would be added to my Verbum Basic and voila, I have all of the new features, but at less than the cost of upgrading Verbum Basic to a higher Verbum product?
Correct. Remembering, of course, that the true power of the software is derived from the number of resources in your library (=more connections between resources, searchable content, etc.). So you would get the new datasets and features, but you would miss out on the additional resources.
Also—not a concern for you, but maybe a concern for someone else reading this thread—the Minimal Crossgrade does not include the resource that allows you to use the software in Verbum mode. So while it could be used to get you into Logos 5, purchasing Verbum Basic, at least, is certainly worthwhile.