Subject: Re: tc-list What Collate can do

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 14:26:03 -0500

A quick note regarding Collate:

It is an excellent collation program for the Mac, which I have been using
for several years. Until now I have been collating primarily Old Slavic and
Greek NT MSS. It also handles Latin and Middle Dutch and provides good
services in comparing the disparate Diatessaron witnesses. To my surprise
and that of the developer of Collate, we even manage to collate Syriac and
Arabic MSS.

With a colleague from Germany I made a small comparison with TUSTEP: what
took him three months te learn, took me about one hour with Collate. I
think that says enough.

Collate has a very handy feature called 'Regularisation', which enables you
to handle interactively orthographic variation (extremely useful for
dealing with versions). It will probably take quite a lot of time and
energy to provide a similar implementation on other platforms.

Computer collation in general enables you to work in a heuristic and
transparent fashion. Cf. the review by Dr. Parker of my dissertation
(http://shemesh.scholar.emory.edu/scripts/TC/vol02/Bakker1997rev.html), for
which Collate served as an indispensible tool.

Cheers! -- Michael

Dr H.P.S. Bakker

Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS)
Meijboomlaan 1
2242 PR Wassenaar
The Netherlands
tel.: +31 70 512 2700
fax: +31 70 511 7162

Slavic Seminar
University of Amsterdam
Spuistraat 210
1012 VT Amsterdam