After too many years, I'm finally resuscitating my blog/personal website here at SeanBoisen.com. Here are a few reasons why:
- After 15+ years with Faithlife/Logos Bible Software, I've taken a new position as Principal Data Scientist at Clear Bible, Inc (more details in this post on my LinkedIn page). Clear's mission is to apply technology to accelerate Bible translation for those who don't yet have a complete Bible in their mother tongue. This circles back for the third time to my own heart for Bible translation.
- I spent 3 months during college with the Colombia branch of Wycliffe Bible Translators, where my former youth pastor Dave Thomas was a teacher (his wife Linda K. Thomas has written several books about their missionary experiences). The later martyrdom of Chet Bitterman, who i happened to meet in Colombia, made a big impression on me.
- My initial trajectory after my undergraduate degree in linguistics was to pursue a vocation in Bible translation, though that didn't come to pass. Instead, I took a job in industry and spent 19 years with BBN Technologies working in Human Language Technology.
- Quite a few years later, I got interested in biblical data and ideas about Bible translation, which eventually led to my career with Logos (see From Blogos to Logos – Blogos for that story). While at Logos, the Content Innovation team made some progress toward the dream i'd had of a Semantic New Testament (though i understand much better now just what an ambitious idea that was), with projects like Biblical People/Places/Things/Events, the Logos Cultural Ontology, and the Bible Sense Lexicon.
- In my Clear role, i'm finding the opportunity to think and learn about a lot of different technologies and data projects. I've always found writing to be a good way to synthesize and reinforce learning, even if nobody else reads it.
- Since Clear's mission includes making all their information and software freely available (CC BY 4.0 for data, MIT License for software), I've got more opportunity to share projects I develop than when I was working in a commercial environment ( "Welcome to the other side of that argument", commented a friend on LinkedIn).
- Blogs wind up being a good record of activities and ideas, a sort of portfolio. When my Faithlife career ended abruptly, i suddenly lost access to lots of important information that I hadn't externalized. I'd like to not have that happen again.
My hope is that this will become my new outpost on the Web, supplanting my moribund website SemanticBible and blog Blogos. I've got a lot of material to transition from those sites, especially presentations and older essays that are worth keeping, so it will take a while to catch up. And this time around, i'm trying Drupal: i liked the convenience of WordPress, but i've had a hard time keeping up with the spammers and hackers, so we'll see if Drupal helps.