Subject: tc-list Accuracy & Scholarship

From: Patrick Durusau <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 16:02:23 -0400

Greetings,

During the recent thread on "How to Collate Everything" Larry Hurtado
wrote in response to a characterization of his position as "error-free
or nothing" as follows:

> Obviously, anyone is free to spend their efforts and time on
> whatever one wants.  But the prior question before one does any
> such work is this:  What use(s) do you want to serve?  If you want
> simply to produce a working and preliminary draft exercise that is
> quickly done, and therefore is more likely to have errors, and that is
> intended simply as a basis for others to improve, then . . . OK, I
> guess.  But this would be something that would be unreliable for
> detailed usage.  If the aim is to supply virtually the ms itself, then
> accuracy is the sine qua non. And if the aim is to provide as much
> of the ms data as can be provided in a transcription, then this
> would include abbreviations, line lengths, capitalized/oversize
> letters, puctuation, marginal marks, corrections, and more.  And all
> this should be accurate too.
> So, what is unreasonable about this?  What aim is served by a
> less scrupulous care for detail?  One could imagine a transcription
> that is intended only for those who want to examine only textual
> variants (and none of the other sorts of data listed above).  But
> would not this also require as high a standard of accuracy as
> possible?
> I know it's frustrating to find (a) what all is involved, and (b) how
> difficult and time-consuming it all is.  Good scholarship is simply
> time-consuming, demanding and difficult.  It's why people have to
> give themselves to it on a career basis.
>

I am sympathetic to Hurtado's goal of providing "virtually the ms
itself" but I also think that modern methods of collaborating over the
Internet may lead to new ways of reaching that happy state for
manuscripts. I think everyone would admit that the first transcription a
scholar makes of a manuscript is probably not error-free. Rather than
have a lone scholar seek out his own errors I understand the prior
suggestion be that the initial transcription be posted on the Internet
for others to review. This is similar to the Open Source movement in
software development that takes as an article of faith (with some
empirical justification) that having many eyes look at software code
will more quickly find and resolve any errors. In the case of
manuscripts it would be necessary to provide high-resolution images of
the manuscript in question so other could verify, correct or comment on
the proposed transcription.

Setting standards for transcription of manuscripts, i.e., what should be
transcribed and in what manner should it be represented is a necessary
pre-condition to any serious effort to promote collaboration on the
transcription of manuscripts. My own preferences lie in the direction of
encoding every bit of information possible at the grapheme level (plus
all the manuscript evidence cited by Hurtado) so as to allow later
annotation or manipulation of the text at whatever level was desired.
The SBL Seminar on Electronic Standards for Biblical Language Texts
would be an appropriate forum for those wishing to organize/participate
in such an effort.

We have the technology now to create manuscript annotation mechanisms
that are web based that would allow a reader to view a particular
section of a manuscript and to enter their transcription of that
manuscript in an XML based format that would be keyed to the image of
the manuscript. I think we should take full advantage of every advance
in technology that will make it easier to record (accurately) the
information we seek from manuscripts and not continue with methods that
serve no purpose other than to be "time-consuming, demanding and
difficult."

The print publication of a collation of manuscripts is an example of
such a method. It would be much more useable for such information to be
presented in electronic form (highly structured XML) that would permit
linking to actual images of the manuscripts or manipulation in ways not
anticipated by the author. This assumes that images of such manuscripts
could be obtained for such display but there does seem to be some
movement towards more open access to primary materials than has existed
in some past circumstances.

There are any number of scholarly organizations that could function as
"gate-keepers" to insure that proposed transcriptions meet the standards
for biblical manuscripts. The existence of poor transcriptions on the
Web is no more of a problem than the local newspaper reporting on new
inscriptions found in the Middle East. For the most part we are lucky if
they get the continent correct much less the content of the inscription.
And no one would claim that scholars should rely upon the afternoon
paper as a scholarly source. The same will be true of poor
transcriptions, scholars will ignore those that are inaccurate, just as
they do now with some print versions, and use those they know are
reliable.

Yes, "good scholarship" is "time-consuming, demanding and difficult."
but I think we should use technology to lessen the times when that is
due to largely clerical tasks performed by the lone scholar or small
groups of scholars.

Patrick

--
Patrick Durusau
Information Technology Services
Scholars Press
[email-masked]
Interim Manager, ITS