Posted on March 10, 2014

How the Holy Bible is Engaging the Digital Generation

Posted on March 10, 2014 by .BIBLE Registry Categories: Examples, Online Presence

The cover story of Christianity Today (March 6, 2014) Christianity Today - March 6 2014 - cover storyfeatured great examples of how software developers are exploring new perspectives and discovering insights into the Scriptures. The article, Hacking the Bible: Inside the world of the new Bible coders—and how they will change the way you think about Scripture., listed a handful of very interesting web apps developed by Stephen Smith to analyze how people and places are related (data-related, anyways) to the Bible:

... to quantify what folks on Twitter gave up for Lent and how the fasts change from year to year… He figured out what Bible verses went viral... and the most popular saints and mountains in American church names... to calculate the time and cost of each of Paul’s missionary journeys... a tool to feature contemporary photos of Bible places...

The article goes on to describe how the growing availability of datasets and new APIs (API stands for application programming interface, being translated is, code that enables applications to interact with each other) opens up all kinds of possibilities and opportunities to creatively engage the Bible text for a digital generation:

An essentially infinite glut of algorithm-created Franken-Bible translations is inevitable, Smith tells me later. “Someone is going to do this, and that will radically change how we interact with the Bible. There’s no reason that I can think of why you wouldn’t. I mean, obviously there are reasons—like the authority of Scripture. But from a technical perspective, it’s very possible.”

American Bible Society (the organization operating this .BIBL E Registry) is the provider of the free ABS BibleSearch API to enable innovations for increasing Bible engagement. At the time of this writing, there are 677 versions in 562 languages available in the ABS BibleSearch API! For all the peoples around the world in an interconnected multi-lingual global village, this is a most valuable resource for making the Bible in people’s own language. And here’s a list of other Bible API’s available [initial list courtesy of ProgrammableWeb.com and 4-14.org.uk; please add a comment and keep this list up-to-date]::

Hacking the Bible - cover story