Subject: A big idea

From: Timothy John Finney <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 1997 12:53:45 +0800 (WST)

There have been a few messages upon which I would like to comment:

1) Collation program for PC

I believe that Peter Robinson has someone converting Collate (a Mac
progam) to PC. By the way, the Project version of Collate (still Mac only)
is about to be released. It does groovy things like produce html output:
you can make a collation which is linked to transcriptions of the various
witnesses for display with a browser like Netscape, AUTOMAGICALLY! It also
does about 500 other things. 

2) Images of P64/67

This is what the Electronic New Testament Manuscripts Project is supposed
to be about. The aim is to collect images of New Testament manuscripts to
be made available to the scholarly community. As you can imagine, there
are lots of problems with such a venture, two of which are its magnitude
(there are of the order of 1000 images required, just for the papyri), and
the problem of protecting the images from electronic theft (there is no
copyright on manuscripts, put there is on their images). 

With respect to P64/67 in particular, I have not yet been able to obtain
images to put on the site. But even if I had, you still wouldn't be able
to look at them, simply because we haven't put any images or
transcriptions up at the site yet. 

3) What's wrong with ENTMP?

No one has asked this (yet) but I feel anxious enough about it to say the 
following. At the moment, ENTMP relies on James Tauber as the Web 
Architect, and he is a very busy person. James and I are both committed 
to the Project, but are both indisposed to do anything with ENTMP right 
now. (I am trying to finish my PhD thesis.)

We do, in fact, have some papyri images and a few transcriptions (thanks to 
Jim West), but we haven't yet made them available. One issue is security 
and another is that we haven't yet got around to it.

4) An idea

Through discussions with James about ENTMP, writing my thesis, reading the
text books, talking with colleagues, and through the Lord's help, I have
had the following idea, which has probably already occurred to some of you
already. (As Klaus Wachtel once said, no one can come up with anything new
in New Testament textual criticism.) With the constant advance of computer
architecture, and the huge task of assembling New Testament textual data
in electronic form, it makes sense to try to do the job in a modular form. 

Imagine a gigantic spread sheet that has as its first column every Greek
word (orthographically levelled) that occurs in any NT manuscript, or that
is behind a version or patristic quotation, in order. That is, the text of
every witness could be obtained by selecting certain ones of the words as
one proceeds down this first column. (I have worked out an algorithm that
constructs such a sequence from a group of collated witnesses. It works
with a fair degree of reliability.)

Next, for every witness, line up its actual words (not levelled, sometimes
fragmentary) with the corresponding words in the first column. These
witnesses each form a new column. Next, for each manuscript word, provide
a hypertext link to an image of the relevant part of the manuscript
itself. Next, have columns for each manuscript of the versions (an even
bigger job than for the Greek), for each Father, for each modern edition,
for each commentator who has said what they think the original word is,
and a column for each textual criterion (both internal and external --
much refinement is needed here). Such a big data structure could be a
useful foundation from which to make assertions about the text. Every step
of its construction is subject to difficulties, but not insurmountable
ones. Java applets could then be written to do things like multivariate
analysis of the resulting patterns of agreement between these many
different perspectives on the text of the New Testament. 

This is a gigantic task: one which, I dare say, no single person or
university can achieve. However, each one of these columns, or a group of
them, could constitute a manageable project. The key is to make a
coordinated effort. What is required is a coordinating body (???), a
standardised approach to transcriptions (SGML/TEI?), a standard format for
the spread sheet components (???), and a central location that holds the
links between the various parts of the big data structure (ENTMP?). (There
is no reason why the various parts could not be held all over the place). 

Well that's the big idea. Perhaps one of these areas (Greek mss,
patristics, versions, editions, images, data bases) could benefit from
your efforts. One thing that I would like to say now, though. Don't wait
until the final standards have been worked out before you begin making a
contribution. I think that it is more likely that the standards will be
worked out later, not sooner. As long as we do not work in complete
isolation, we should be able to produce data that will go with everyone
else's. Certain scholars, universities, and organisations already
specialise in particular ones of these areas.  Acknowledged specialists
would be the logical first choice to help with coordination of the various
areas (Perhaps Aland and Das Instituet for the Greek mss, Fee for the 
patristics, Epp and Elliott for the criteria?)

Sorry for the long message. Now I will disappear again in an attempt to 
finish that thesis,

Tim Finney

[email-masked]
Baptist Theological College
and Murdoch University
Perth, W. Australia

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From: ANDREW SMITH <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 1997 08:51:37 -0500 (EST)

Current spread sheets can handle tens of thousands of columns and rows;
you can use Greek fonts to fill in the cells. Your project is, in
principle, quite feasible. [feasable? sp?]