Subject: tc-list Money

From: "Wieland Willker" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 10:58:59 +0200

> Please keep in mind that about the only
> way such intensive studies get done outside of the well-financed
> Muenster Institute

Eh? Well-financed???
I'm sorry?
Maybe we should define this term first?

This reminds me of something I wanted to ask for a long time:
If you have say 2 Mill. Dollar for TC, what would you do?

I would set up a collation program to collate all existing manuscripts. THIS
IS WHAT WE NEED. I think it could be done with 50 people in 2 years.
Sometimes I can't believe why this had not been done already. 2Mio $ is not
so much money (for a church to analyse their sacred texts).
If we have all manuscripts in digital form classification is easy and fast.
There are e.g. the multivariate analysis methods Tim Finney mentioned. Will
I ever see a Principal Component Analysis of 2000 manuscripts in my life?

Best wishes
    Wieland
      <><
--------------------
mailto:[email-masked]
http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/

---

From: "Professor L.W. Hurtado" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 10:24:56 +000

"Well financed" is of course always a relative term.  But I don't see 
any other setup like Muenster, with research associates employed, 
a grand publishing programme financed, and the funds to collect, 
store and analyse mss.  In comparison, the Claremont MSs centre 
is "small beer".
The collation of mss is very desireable, of course.  But that's also 
obviously only a "raw data" gathering step.  The immediately 
required step thereafter, without which the collation would be of 
minimal use, would be the *analysis* of the collated data.  And 
while current computer techniques would perhaps facilitate the 
number crunching, all the collated data would have to be "input" 
and largely manually (or at least prepared manually for any 
scanner).  Then, of course, the human task of analysis of the data, 
seeing whether and where there may be significance, and 
connecting with larger bodies of knowledge (e.g., church history, 
history of doctrine, papyrology, codicology, palaeography), none of 
which computers can help us with.  It's not promising.  E.g., how 
many codicologists or palaeographers do you know personally 
under 70??
Larry Hurtado

Larry Hurtado

L. W. Hurtado
University of Edinburgh,
New College
Mound Place 
Edinburgh, Scotland EH1 2LX
Phone: 0131-650-8920
Fax: 0131-650-6579
E-mail:  [email-masked]

---

From: Jonathan Ryder <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 10:55:59 +0100

"Professor L.W. Hurtado" wrote:
> scanner).

Could not the collation/input be but one step - ie create a huge database of all
manuscripts and their variants searchable by any criterion. And surely whatever
analysis was needed would be well within reach of today's
technology/programmers, after all 30 yrs a go we put a man on the moon!

The important thing would be to get the database right, so that the right
questions can be asked of the data. I don't think this should be too difficult,
however, as I believe, although I know little about database theory, that it's
possible to create databases that are flexible such that they can be changed to
facilitate a query that perhaps the database was not originally set up to do.

Such a project would be huge, but not impossible, especially so given the
internet etc. What we need is someone to set up a database to which all TCers
who are attached to the internet can add data as and when they work with an ms.
As such a datasbase grows, so the necessary queries can be written to analyse
the data ...

Of course, there are probably individuals and organisations out there
(Muenster?) who already have lots of data in electronic form, but I doubt they'd
be willing to share it!

Anybody out there thinking along the same lines?

  Then, of course, the human task of analysis of the data,
> many codicologists or palaeographers do you know personally

I see the problem here, especially as all your post 70 codicologists and
paleographers might be less willing to use and master such a database (I'm not
being ageist, just noticing the reluctance of some to embrace computers)

The key thing is to get all the data together in a searchable form and then
those who wish to ask questions of the data from the standpoint of 'church
history, history of doctrine, papyrology, codicology, palaeography' can then do
so and fast - especially if the front end of such a databse can be made as
user-friendly as possible (like the apparatus in NA27 to name but one GNT!).

Jonathan Ryder
Cambridge
UK

---

From: "DC PARKER" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 12:45:48 GMT

Wieland wrote

<color><param>7F00,0000,0000</param><FontFamily><param>Arial</param>> 

> IS WHAT WE NEED. I think it could be done with 50 people in 2 years.

</color><FontFamily><param>Baskerville</param>Interesting figures.  How do you arrive at them?  How many hours do you suppose it takes to collate a 
tetraevangelion?  Do you include collating each MS threee times for accuracy, travel to libraries that 
don't supply microfilms, palimpsests and other difficult texts that have to be read letter by letter?

<nofill>
DR DC PARKER
READER IN NEW TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICISM AND PALAEOGRAPHY
DEPT OF THEOLOGY
UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
TEL. 0121-414 3613
FAX  0121-414 6866
E-MAIL D.C.PARKER@.BHAM.AC.UK

---

From: [email-masked] (U.B.Schmid)
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 15:49:02 +0200

> I ever see a Principal Component Analysis of 2000 manuscripts in my life?

I guess you know that there are more than 2000 Greek NT manuscripts known today.

But let us try to sum up a few basic requirements when setting up such a 
program.

First of all lets face the fact that not everybody who knows Greek is apriori 
well equipped to read cursive hands without training. Even more depressing, not 
everybody who is trained to read cursive hands is able to produce good 
collations. Just like ancient scribes are very different in quality, modern 
transcribers are different as well.
Next, you have to establish a collation routine that keeps certain standards 
(e.g., on recording orthographicals and corrections). And you have to make sure 
that all your collators will stick to that standards. In the Muenster Institut 
for more than 30 years collations have been done with pen and paper, i.e. 
compiling huge sets of sheets with transcriptions. Every manuscript is collated 
twice independently. A third person compared the two collations spotting and 
checking the differences between the two collations. Within the last years, two 
different people had to enter the two collations independently into a data base 
in order to have the computer done the comparison. But then even more 
differences occured (because of more human intervention), have been spotted by 
the computer respectively, and had to be resolved by human intervention again. 
It is self evident that a huge amount of time and man-power is invested in 
checking and correcting routines, for a lot of details have to be accounted for. 
Since last year, the Muenster Intitute started to implement new routines for 
doing machine readable transcripts with Peter Robinson's program *Collate*. As 
far as I know, it takes an awful lot of time to adjust the people to the new 
routines as well as the program to the new requirements. Theoretically (and 
ultimately) electronic transcripts offer much more oportunities, but in practise 
it's a hard, thorny, and time consuming journey to get to the promised land. It 
may take even more time to enter a proper electronic transcript than to perform 
the old collation routine.
Now, let's turn to the bulk of cursives. What are you actually going to record 
in a collation (besides orthographicals and corrections)? Cursives very often 
have reading sections indicated (arche/telos), Gospel manuscripts include the 
Eusebian canones, you will find (partly different) sets of argumenta, tables, 
aparatus, comments in the margins or interspersed. Are you going to record all 
the information from the manuscripts or only part of it? If you are going to 
record (part of) that type of information too, people need to be trained more 
thoroughly in order to handle the often confusing abreviations and numerals, not 
to mention the better knowledge of Greek when dealing with the "Patristic" Greek 
from the argumenta and comments. It makes a huge difference, whether you 
transcribe a text of which you have a certain idea what it should read, or you 
have to make sense of it without guidelines.
Besides, it's always fun to give people a microfilm of an apostolos manuscript 
and ask them to look up, e.g., James 2.11. It'll take some time to adjust to 
finding your way through a manuscript. The most challenging experience is, of 
course, to find your way through a lectionary. 
Finally, we have the paleographical questions that Larry already indicated, the 
most basic one being the identification of different hands, which is very tricky 
to do from microfilm in case of (small) corrections.
Much more could be said on all the aspects involved. 

I'm personally not the most skilled collator, but when working on my Latin 
manuscripts I'm able to transcribe roughly one chapter (30 verses) per hour 
electronically. Moreover, in my experience it's not worth trying to collate more 
than 6 to 7 hours a day. It would be better to do not more than 5 with regular 
brakes. One person may do 200 verses a day, five days a week, i.e., roughly 
50.000 verses per year. I invite people to calculate the work that can be 
achieved with 50 people in 2 years: there are roughly 2300 manuscripts for the 
Gospels, 800 for the Pauline epistles, 650 for Acts and Catholic epistles, and 
300 for Revelation; every manuscript should be transcribed AT LEAST twice 
independently. According to my calculations it'll take around 150 people to do 
only the Gospels in 2 years. The calculation is based on the assumption that the 
above mentioned collation routines are implemented and that the people are 
trained. Moreover, correction routines are not included!!! (And I'm sure you'll 
get an awful lot of instances where you have to consult the manuscripts A THIRD 
TIME, before you can consider the transcripts safe.)
Maybe others want to share their experience...
    
------------------------------------------
Dr. Ulrich Schmid
[email-masked]

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 10:49:35 -0500

>transcribers are different as well.

[ etc. ]

This is a very useful and interesting point. Having just spent the last
several weeks reducing a series of transcriptions to collations, I think
the warnings here worth noting. I never realized how much work this was!
(And I was dealing with the generally simpler task of handling already-
regularized materials (no ligatures, etc).

It leads me to conclude that it's really true: Anyone who has not done
collations cannot judge how long they will take. :-) Personally, I
found that my work declined after only about an *hour*, and there
was no point after two hours. (Of course, I have the attention span
of a mayfly. :-)

On the matter of doing electronic collations, I think it *could* be
easier and faster than pen-and-ink. But there is something important
to note here: When one is collating "by hand," one can work in one's
own way. With a program, you have to work its way. So to make collating
electronically an easier job, we need programs which can adapt to the
user. We might well be better off taking our hypothetical sum of
money for collations, and using some of it to produce better software.
That might well pay for itself in productivity later.

Just a question: Muenster has already gone over nearly ever NT manuscript
for the T&T volumes. This process involved far less recording than an
actual collation, but the testers had to *read* nearly as much
of the text. Does anyone know how long that process took? We could
perhaps use that as a basis for estimating how long it would take
to collate *everything.*

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

Want more loudmouthed opinions about textual criticism?
Try my web page: http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn
(A site inspired by the Encyclopedia of NT Textual Criticism)

---

From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 08:47:25 -0700

All,

> transcribers are different as well.

There are many good points raised by all.  It seems to me that a 
lot of the "grunt" work of initially transcribing/collating could be 
done by a wide variety of "non-professionals" such as Bob Waltz 
and myself and several others here, then checked by some of you 
pros to root out errors etc.  It's a huge task, to be sure, but I 
suspect that once the pros have SOMETHING down on paper or 
electronic media or both, the rest of the task gets quite a bit 
smaller.  Such an approach, with established guidelines such as 
Ulrich has set out (whether to include sectioning, commentaries 
etc.) could conceivably be done with the framework of the 
manpower and time that M. Wilker suggested.  Any stipend to the 
non-pros could be quite a bit less than it would have to be for a pro, 
thus aiding the budgetary constraints, as well.

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

---

From: [email-masked] (U.B.Schmid)
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 21:41:33 +0200

Robert B. Waltz wrote:

> [...]

I'm not sure whether I got this right. But, as soon as you have more than one 
person involved in the process, even when collating "by hand", working in one's 
own way is gone. You have to stick to agreed principles and a certain format of 
recording. You can design and adjust a program, of course, to meet your 
requirements (BTW-- That's exactly what the people in Muenster and Peter 
Robinson are actually doing now for roughly a year). But working in one's own 
way is wishful thinking of individuals who never had to set up a group of 
collators working simultaniously on the same project.

> perhaps use that as a basis for estimating how long it would take

The work on the T&T volumes won't qualify as a basis for estimating how long it 
would take to do everything. It is much harder to spot e.g. 10 individual units 
of variation in a single manuscript than to spot the beginning of, e.g., James 
and start collating. Moreover, when doing spot collations you have to change 
microfilms more frequently. Therefore, you can't take advantage of speeding up 
after being adjusted to the new script (cursive scripts can be verx different!). 
Changing microfilms (roling, handling, storing, etc.) is, after all, time 
consuming as well.  

Maybe Bill Warren can tell us about the routines he employs in his institution 
and give us an estimation on the basis of his experience.

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 16:24:07 -0500

On 7/16/99, U.B.Schmid wrote:

>recording.

No, you don't. You must agree on what you record, yes. But there is no
reason you can't customize how a particular user *sees* that data.

To take a very simple example, suppose one person prefers to indicate
collations by showing the lemma, then the replacement text, thus:

O LOGOS ] O QEOS

while another prefers something else, say

O LOGOS >> O QEOS

The computer might use still another format for internal storage, e.g.

...{LOGOS|QEOS}...

When a new collator comes along, he/she can choose the collation
format he/she prefers. The computer will translate from the
first person's format to the second person's. If a third person
prefers still another, then it can display in that format, too.

The only time you have a problem is if both are working together. :-)

We must distinguish between the data of the collation and its
appearance. We can make it look like whatever we want to (including
a continuous text). The computer isn't limited to data processing;
it should be helping us work in our own ways, too.

(Can you tell that I don't use Microsoft programs? :-)

[ ... ]

>after being adjusted to the new script (cursive scripts can be verx different!).

I must be saying things badly today. While doing a full collation is
much more time consuming than spotting particular variants, we're
working with the same manuscripts. If we know how much time it took
to collate 50 manuscripts, and how long it took to spot check
those 50 manuscripts, and how long it took to spot check all 3500
manuscripts (or whatever the number is), we can make a pretty good
estimate of how long it would take to collate the 3500.

Of course, we could probably get about as good an estimate by just
counting chapters in all the manuscripts, working out how long it
takes to collate the average chapter in 50 or so manuscripts, and
multiplying that out.

So the next question is, does anyone have a catalog of minuscules
that is accurate enough to tell us the total number of chapters
they contain?
Bob Waltz
[email-masked]

"The one thing we learn from history --
   is that no one ever learns from history."