OPTASIA TOPICAL CONCORDANCE

A. How the topic words and Links were Formed

I developed the topic words by first compiling a huge word list from various resources. Some of the resources I utilized were Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary, Easton's Bible Dictionary, Nave's Topical Bible, Strong's Concordance, and Vine's Expository Dictionary. Next, I browsed through the list and sifted out all the words, which seemed worthless for topical study. This narrowed down the large list to 2098 topic words. From there, I created another list, where I listed the topic words and many of their various tenses. This list was used to create the links seen throughout all the library books.

B. Books Referenced in the Concordance

Twenty-one books are referenced in the Optasia Concordance. They are: ASV Bible, KJV Bible, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Josephus' Works, Edersheim's Bible History, The Temple, Sketches of Jewish Social Life, Clarke's Commentary, Wesley's Notes, Clavis Biblica, Wesley's Sermons, Finney's Sermons, Arminius' Works, Finney's Lectures on Theology, Systematic Theology, Nave's Topical Bible, Torrey's Topical Texbook, Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, Easton's Bible Dictionary, Robertson's NT Word Studies, Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary. Within the various Topic Pages, the books are organized under book genre headings. The book genres covered are scripture, history, commentary, sermons, theology, topical textbooks, and dictionaries. The Optasia Topical Concordance catalogs approximately 800,000 linked cross-references, paralleling The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge in cross-reference content.

C. How to Use the Concordance

The Concordance can be accessed in two ways. The first method is to access its index page from the Verse Master main page. The other method is to access the Concordance from one of the Optasia Topic Links, which can be found in any book chapter or section.
Once a topic page is chosen, there are many cross-references to choose from. Each topic page includes these genres: Bibles, History, Commentary, Sermons, Theology, Topical Textbooks, and Dictionaries. Under each category, there are books that relate to the category. A list of the books that are used in the Concordance can be found in the previous section. Notice that the most relevant matches for each topic word are listed at first in each book list.
Click on one of the cross-reference links. If the book chapter/section is relatively small, you can easily scroll down the page and find your topic word (note ~ you only need to glance at the linked words while scrolling down the page). If the book chapter/section is rather long, it is beneficial to use the "Find on this page" command (Browser - Ctrl+F). Just type your topic word into the find blank and hit search. It will then show you different places down the page where your topic word is located.

D. How the Concordance was Made

To make the Optasia Concordance, I had to employ various programming techniques to manipulate large amounts of text. To grasp the size, imagine a text file that is 60 MEGS. In comparison, the Bible, itself in plain text format is about 5 MEGS. Knowing that the Bible is about 1900-2900 pages printed, the 60 MEG file would be about 28,800 pages in length. As I went through the steps of making the Optasia Topical Concordance, it shrunk considerably. If the book was printed in final form, it would be about 5,000 pages in paragraph format.
The programming steps I used were rather complex. The first thing I did was find a mega search/replace program on the internet. It had to be able to spit out a result page that listed how many times a word occurred in a given file. It had to search for the occurrence of 2098 different words through over 8000 files (17 million individual searches!) and make a file that contained the results. If I remember correctly, it took a couple of days for the program to make the results file. The next step was to order the results in a manner in which the files that had the most occurrences of a particular topic word would end up on the top of that Topic Word's list. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Matter of fact, this was probably the most difficult of all the processes in creating this book. It took several programs to do several logic steps to get the Topic Pages to put the most relevant links first. Next, I used a program that a friend of a friend of mine wrote. Its function was to split text files into hundreds of pieces at certain character strings and name them in order of the split. Then I had to add HTML coding to the newly created text files, so that they would display correctly in Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. Last, I ordered all of the cross-reference links to be placed under book genre, yet still display most relevant cross-references first.