I’m seeing parallels between my newfound interest in creating tools for new uses of scripture, and the work I’m doing at my school to make student data more useful to teachers and administrators.

The main challenge in using the bible online is obtaining access to the text itself. All of the major translations are available online in one format or another, but they are not, in the ultimate sense, free. You can view, copy, and paste anything you want, but you’re still limited to what you can do manually and what you’re allowed to do under existing copyright arrangements.

Bible-computer interaction is stuck in about 1997 (or 1987 if you compare what you can do online to software like QuickVerse). We can’t do much more with the major translations now than we could when the first Bible-on-floppy programs came out. (The ESV and NET Bibles are notable exceptions, though still outside the mainstream. ESV has a full set of web services).

A new generation of web tools has emerged, allowing data to be manipulated in a variety of ways - aggregation, syndication, tagging, sorting, linking, commenting, and so forth. Right now, the only automated thing you can do with the #1 bible site, Bible Gateway, is subscribe to the Verse of the Day. They also have excellent query-string input for viewing verses, but nothing to get the scriptures out of the Bible Gateway and into the wider world of the web, where they could actually make a difference in daily life and the public sphere.

If the Word of God is living and breathing, it must be suffocating inside databases with no APIs, no toolsets, no features to allow people to extract, manipulate, and use the text. Being able to read the Bible online is great, but we should not be satisfied.

In my school district, we have a wonderful student data system. It’s a big Java applet that interfaces with a massive Oracle database, and you can use it to call up all sorts of data. One of the slickest features is the automatic PDF generation of all reports - if you want labels, class lists, student profiles, test scores, or any other kind of data, you can just call up a pre-defined report or build your own and get the data you need in a PDF file.

The main problem is that all of the information is locked up into PDF files, which are good for printing, but useless when it comes to using the data in Excel or another data analysis application. All you can do is print. What’s worse, the PDF files are non-delimited, so when you copy and paste (which is so 1995), you just get a jumble of individual words on separate lines, with no way to restore the tabular structure. You can create some types of custom exports into .CSV files, but the most important data is not available this way, and even the available data comes out formatted poorly.

Our student data needs to be free (at least, free for the use of school staff - FERPA has plenty to say about student data security). We need to be able to sort, code, manipulate, graph, and generally use our data, not just print it out.

So this is a manifesto of sorts. Being able to access information is not enough. We need to be able to use it, manipulate it, do as we please with it, and not be locked into the limited uses envisioned by others in the past.

It’s also a call to arms - or at least, a call to hands that can program. We need tools. Mean Dean Peters has led the charge with his Scripturizer plugin, as have many other great developers. I’ve purchased Scripturati.com, and hope to use it in a manner similar to Technorati, only for the Bible. It’s time to move forward with the rest of the web into open interfaces, extensible, hackable, open-source toolsets, and so forth. Let’s get to work.