Subject: tc-list collation programs

From: "Vinton A. Dearing" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 16:40:48 PST

In a previous communication I said I seemed to remember that the 
Library of Congress, Cambridge University and Rutgers had collation 
programs. Further thought makes me think I was remembering 
concordance programs.
  Vinton A. Dearing

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From: George Kiraz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1998 09:59:33 -0400

> programs. Further thought makes me think I was remembering

I believe Oxford has a concordance program as well.

George Kiraz

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From: "William L. Petersen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1998 11:26:43 -0400

The best collation program I know today is Peter Robinson's (formerly of
the University of Oxford's Computing Centre, and head of the Canterbury
Tales project) program "Collate."  Althought Mac-based in its current
incarnation, Peter is coding future releases for Wintel platforms.

We used "Collate" last year at NIAS on our Diatessaron project, and it is
extremely flexible.  Anything can be indicated by means of tags (ornamental
caps, corrections [hand 1, 2, 3...], etc., etc.).  Dr. Hette Bakker of the
University of Amsterdam, who is on this list, was our expert with the
program.  It is now being used by the Muenster Institut for all future work
there.

--Petersen, Penn State University.
Cheers!  --Bill.

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 14:12:42 +0200

My fellow-Diatessaronite Bill Petersen wrote:

>The best collation program I know today is Peter Robinson's program
>"Collate." ....
>It is now being used by the Muenster Institut for all future work there.

Judging by the frequency with which the topic of collation is discussed on
this list it appears to be a very basic concern of TC-ers. And indeed it
should be, because collating MSS is the fundament of text-critical work.

Nowadays information technology makes things possible which Tischendorf and
Von Soden could only dream of. Two of the most important advantages are:
1. Precise performance of tedious tasks: the researcher can leave specific
chores to the computer and concentrate on the TC itself.
2. Modularity: the complex work of (traditional) collating (using one fixed
master text and only one MS at a time) can be divided into separate steps.
These steps are:

a. Diplomatic Transcription of the Primary Witnesses
In computer collation the full transcripts of witnesses form the fundament
of the collation process. Transcription of MSS has to be done by humans,
because no OCR program can reliably transform a two-dimensional
constellation of unique handwritten graphs (a MS folio) into a string of
graphemes (content of a computer file). In addition, the transcriber has to
cut up the scriptio continua, i.e. insert spaces between the words, log
peculiarities and put in tags such as "<C 13><V 4>" to facilitate automatic
collation in the following module. The transcriber has of course to make
certain decisions; distinguishing 10 different shapes of the grapheme sigma
is very probably trying to preserve insignificant information. Once a MS
has been faithfully digitised one could throw away the microfilm, but since
errare humanum est it seems wise to provide image files along with the
transcribed folios. I think the best repository for the electronic
transcripts is the Muenster institute. It could formulate   standards and
guarantee the quality of the files deposited there.

b. Automatic Collation
The collation process itself is of course very straightforward: take one
file and compare the content of one or more files against it. The computer
is far more better at this very precise work than a human being. A computer
programmer can write  a program doing this in one day. A collation program
that is well set up allows you to switch master (base text). In addition,
one can vary the set of MSS (i.e. transcription files) that is being
collated. Computer collation is therefore a very flexible process. When the
set of MSS one is collating consists mainly of older witnesses one could
use the text of NA27 as basis of comparison. However, when dealing with
younger Byzantine witnesses one could take the TR as base text (otherwise
the program will list many variation units in which all witnesses deviate
from the master). One could even work with an operational base text (we
call it 'x-file') which one can modify on the basis of the MS evidence.

c. Data Abstraction
The precision of the computer results in long lists of variants: every tiny
difference is registered in the output. Most of the variants (which were
faithfully recorded by the transcriber) are probably not significant. Now
the real text-critical work starts; without having to perform many tasks at
the same time (handling microfilms, deciphering MSS), the TC-er can
concentrate on analysing the variants (on screen or on paper). Here the
greatest difference between traditional and computer collation comes to
light. Instead of listing variants deemed significant, the researcher has
first to identify the reading he or she finds INsignificant. This process
of data abstraction can partly be performed using global rules (e.g. ks -->
kurios). The computer can make a new collation applying these rules, but
one can always backtrack and abolish or modify a rule. Another researcher
using exactly the same transcription files may apply different rules. The
program Collate is well equipped for the process of data abstraction, it
has an extremely useful feature called 'regularisation', which allows you
to 'throw out' specific variants in specific witnesses in specific verses.
When looking at the list of regularisations, one can always decide at a
later stage to abolish a regularisation and thus preserve the connected
variant in the collation output.

Well, that seems to be enough for today. If you want to read more about
computer collation and TC, I can humbly recommend the (general) sections I
and II in  "Towards a Critical Edition of the Old Slavic NT: A Transparent
and Heuristic Approach" (cf. David Parker's review on
http://shemesh.scholar.emory.edu/scripts/TC/vol02/Bakker1997rev.html)

Finally, about the variants distilled from the computer collation cycle:
They can be fed into a database. In Muenster they intend to do so. Into
this database, variants found using the traditional collation method can
also be fed. Actually at the historic meeting between the IGNTP people and
the Barbara Aland and Klaus Wachtel from Muenster last year in San
Francisco we discovered that both are using the same database program.
So,there are prospects for co-operation. Using a database, however,
presupposes that one has already fixed the boundaries of the variation
units. If one is still (computer) collating one can postpone these tricky
decisions until one has a good impression of the Greek, versional and
patristic evidence.

Cheers! -- Michael

dr H.P.S. Bakker

Slavic Seminar
University of Amsterdam
Spuistraat 210
1012 VT Amsterdam

tel. +31 20 525 3811
fax. +31 20 525 3052