Subject: tc-list A new ENTMP

From: Wieland Willker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 10:11:52 +0200

My only wish is that there should be one section in which ALL the
available manuscripts are in plain ACII formate. 
We all use different fonts, computers, methods at home. A manuscript in
ASCII would allow for easy conversion. 
You can talk a lot about elaborate techniques like XML etc. but you need
someone who has the time to realize it. 

Therefore I think we should at first agree on a basic ASCII
transliteration scheme (Accents - no accents? Nomina Sacra? Doubtful
letters?...).
MHO.

Btw. I have some images of P. Egerton with line by line
transcription/images at:
http://purl.org/Willker/Egerton/Egerton_home.html
Look at The Greek Text. 

Best wishes
    Wieland

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From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 10:28:17 -0700

> someone who has the time to realize it. 

Agreed.  The transcriptions I have done so far, on very small mss. 
by the way, have been strictly in ASCII, using CCAT mapping.  I 
would suggest this mapping standard for most all of them because 
it's a solid, established base from which to work.  At the time he 
dropped off the face of the earth, James Tauber and I were 
experimenting with ways to take those ASCII transcriptions and 
mark them up in SGML.  I still have a little of that material, but I'm 
not sure what point we were at.  OTOH, I have all the original ASCII 
transcriptions that I made, and I believe I have most of the 
electronic images that I was working from to make them.

> transliteration scheme (Accents - no accents? Nomina Sacra? Doubtful

CCAT has accents available, and if one is working with an uncial 
that doesn't have accents one simply leaves them out.  I'll have to 
double-check to see if it has something that functions as the bar 
over nomina sacra; if not, it wouldn't take much to agree on 
something, ditto for some way to flag doubtful letters.  It seems to 
me that most of the mapping strategy is already in place, "we" 
(whoever that might be) simply need to give it a tweak here and 
there.  An added bonus is that many fonts, such as SPIonic and 
John Baima's SGreek, already use that mapping.

> http://purl.org/Willker/Egerton/Egerton_home.html

Gladly.  I need to finagle some more web space, though I do have 
about 9 meg available in various ways at the moment, but I can see 
about putting some of mine online as well.  The only problem I have 
with this is, the whole idea of ENTMP was to have most all of them 
in a centralized location so a researcher doesn't have to surf all 
over the world to find the material.

While I can appreciate Larry H's comments about routing such a 
project through the SBL, I have reservations for the simple reason 
that "a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee."  In 
order to g along with such a suggestion, I would need it stipulated 
that independents (mavericks?) such as myself could continue to 
transcribe in the agreed-upon format, and at some point when the 
committee is formed and operational, submit their (our) material to 
the group for checking and posting to the web.  The transcriptions 
that I have done already, I did simply because I had the time and 
the interest.  Had I been required to wait for a committee to give me 
the go-ahead, I suspect the latter would have waned rapidly.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.