Subject: tc-list New ENTMP

From: Timothy John Finney <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 19:13:32 +0800 (WST)

Wieland Wilker said

> My only wish is that there should be one section in which ALL the
> available manuscripts are in plain ASCII format.

I agree.

Here is an idea I had along these lines. If we all agreed on the basic
text of a MS (filling in lacunae with what we think was probably there)
and wrote these letters down as a column, then we could add in whatever
other information we wanted by filling in adjacent columns: 

Letter	Read?	N. S.	Abbrev.
O	Y	N	N	
_
Q	Y	Y	N
E	N	N	Y
O	N	N	Y
S	Y	Y	N
_

Some explanation... _ = a word break; Y = yes; N = no; Read? = Can it be
read?; N. S. = Is there a nomen sacrum superscript above the letter?;
Abbrev. = Has this letter been subsumed in an abbreviation? 

I'm only talking concepts here. Once the first column (the ASCII text) is
established, others can add to the parallel columns as they wish. That's
why I call this parallel mark-up. If someone comes along with another
feature that they want to include (e.g. accents) they simply add another
column. With this approach, different people can work on different aspects
of the text simultaneously. As they do so, the agreed upon text is double,
triple n-tuple checked. If an error turns up, the row in question has to
be retranscribed for every column. Believe me, it is much simpler to
process text that is in this format. In fact, I ended up writing programs
that put my in-line mark-up transcriptions into this format so that I
could write a straight-forward program to collate the transcriptions.

Bob Waltz said

> But I would argue that the first
> step is to decide what information we need in a collation.

I recommend the inclusion of spelling variations. My research indicates
that MS spellings say as much as textual variations when it comes to
grouping MSS. A big problem is regularisation, whereby spelling variation
has to be standardised before collation. It seems to me that the only safe
way to do regularisation in a highly inflected language like Greek is to
specify the standard spelling of every single word in the MS. Global
replacement is not safe because one scribe's spelling variation can be
another scribe's textual variation. 

Mike Bossingham said

> What is really needed is not a common data base - these are
> transient and come and go. But a means of sending transciptions
> in plain ASCII around the net - so that data can be built into
> the different data bases and used.

For what it's worth, I agree. All we need to agree upon is the text of the
manuscript. Mark-up can then be added by whoever wants to, for whatever
reason (see Dave Wasburn's comment below and the above idea). Of course,
we would want some quality control. 

Larry Hurtado said

> Electronic data is ephemeral enough, and people come &
> go, lose interest, get sick, etc.; we need a good institutional base
> for the work.

I heartily agree with the first clause, except to say that electronic data
need not be ephemeral. A plain ASCII transcription of a manuscript's text
need not be ephemeral at all -- letters are letters and you can either
read them or not. Even a group of scholars can agree on the text of a
manuscript when confronted with a good facsimile. I have some reservations
about the second clause. I would say that we need a good standard approach
as the basis for our work. Take the Internet as an example. It is built
upon standards (ISO, IEC, IEEE, etc). Many of these standards are pretty
much what the industry had already invented in order to get a job done.
Whether or not a committee is involved may be irrelevant. There was only
one Tim Berners-Lee needed to get WWW off the ground. 

Dave Washburn said

> As soon as someone can tell me that I won't get sued for it, I can
> post these to a temporary web site.  Since the transcriptions are
> mine, of course, I can post them with no problem, I refer to the
> images.

I have always been worried about copyright of images. I don't know whether
this is paranoia or fear of getting manuscript custodians off side. How
about if we put the images up, then one of us takes on the job of writing
to the relevant custodian and asking for permission. That way we are doing
the right thing by them (asking permission) and getting the images up
straight away. They can only say no, at which point we could politely ask
them to put the image up for us or just have a notice saying that the
image cannot be displayed due to the custodian being a bad sport. 

> Are those [images] the ones that were on the original ENTMP?  I may have
> some of those around here...I had 0166, 071, I think P22 and
> perhaps one other, I don't remember which.

They are some of the ones that were on the original ENTMP. I have a few
others as well. What I would really like to see is for the custodians to
put their treasures on the Web. Have you seen the Oxyrhynchus site? They
already have images of papyri there. (Go to http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/)

> I like Wieland's idea of going with ASCII (and I will push
> again for CCAT mapping) to begin with, that way anybody who
> wants to can take them and do the markup.  If we do the bare
> transcriptions in a fairly unencumbered format, markup becomes a
> matter of retrofitting which should be easier.

Yes, yes, yes. My only complaint about CCAT (and Beta code) is the
transcription of xi with C and chi with X. In Athens, taxi is spelt with
xi, not chi. Oh well.

Jim West said

> I dont recall which mss I transcribed.  The low P's I think.

Jim, I still have your transcriptions of P1, P2, P3, P4 and P9.

Sorry for this gargantuan post.

Tim Finney.

---

From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 09:39:28 -0700

> could write a straight-forward program to collate the transcriptions.

The transcriptions I did didn't have any real way to indicate 
abbreviations (I assume you mean little ligatures like the trailing-off 
line on kappa at the end of a line to indicate KAI, that sort of 
thing?), but under James' direction I used brackets to indicate 
uncertain or supplied letters, and I believe we were playing with a 
pseudo-HTML tag <BAR></BAR> to indicate NS.  I would tend to 
prefer something like this that keeps the format of running text, 
simply because later on it should make it easier to mark up (then 
again, I may be wrong about that).  Here's the preliminary 
transcription of 071 that I did lo, those many ages ago:

-------
Manuscript: 071 
Folio: 1
Side: Verso
Transcriber: DLW
Supplied text source: TR

1: [unreadable]
2: [EKENUION]KAI[EK]ALES[EN]
3: [TOONO]MAAUTOUINTOUDe
4: iUGENNHQENtOIENBEi
5: QLEEMGHSIOUDAIASENH
6: MERAISHRWDOUTOUBASI
7: LEWSIDOUMAGOIaPOANA
8: tOLWN[PAR]EgeNONTOEIs
9: iEROSOLUMALEGONTE[CPOU]
10: ESTINOT[ei/h?]QCEISBA[SILEUS]
11: [T]WNiOUDAIWN[EIDOMEN]
12: [G]aRAUTOUTO[NASTERAENT]
13: [HA]nA[TOLHKAIHLQOMEN]

Notes:

Line 3: The abbreviation IN has a dot of sorts over it rather than the
usual bar.

Line 4: GENNHQENTOI for GENNHQENTOS.

Line 4: EI for H in BEIQLEEM.  

Line 5: GHS appears to be a visual error for the THS of the TR; 
since
the reading makes good sense, it is easy to see how the scribe 
missed
the mistake.

Line 10: Uncertain whether the ms reads TEIXQEIS or THXQEIS.  
The parchment
is damaged and stained at this spot, and the reading could go 
either
way.  Either one appears to be a simple spelling error.
------

> another scribe's textual variation. 

Agreed.  If the goal is transcription rather than collation, then 
IMNSHO the ms. should be transcribed exactly as it appears.  
Ditto for collations, though I personally prefer to work with 
transcriptions rather than collations.  That's a personal-level 
preference, though, and says nothing about the relative merits of 
the two.

> we would want some quality control. 

As I recall, this was one of the original ideas of the ENTMP.  Pass 
them around freely so anyone can use them, definitely.  But I 
would push for a centralized location (or at least style and dtd) for 
markup, rather than each doing what is right in his own eyes...

> one Tim Berners-Lee needed to get WWW off the ground. 

Agreed.  The whole idea of making these available on the Internet 
is to move away from the "institutional base" idea into a more freely-
accessible format and realm (how many of us non-affiliated 
researchers have the wherewithal to travel to the Huntington library 
to look at their microfilms of the Dead Sea Scrolls?  How many of 
said folks, myself included, have the cash to buy Brill's hideously-
overpriced microfiche set?).  If the transcriptions (with or without 
markup) are on, say, 100 people's computers and can be posted to 
the Web from any or all of them, I would hardly consider that 
"ephemeral."

> image cannot be displayed due to the custodian being a bad sport. 

Couched in more diplomatic language, of course ;-)  What images I 
have were originally in the ENTMP "manuscript room," which 
required registration and login before permitting access.  I suppose 
it would be easy enough to set up something like that again.  I'm 
assuming that copyright restrictions were the reason for the login 
process, which may or may not be correct.

> transcription of xi with C and chi with X. In Athens, taxi is spelt with

Agreed.  However, any mapping scheme is going to have some 
less-than-ideal features.  The main reason I suggested CCAT is 
because a) it's already in place and used profusely, and b) there 
are numerous fonts for just about any platform, floating around the 
Net, that are based on it, so all one has to do is download one, 
install it, and go.

> Jim, I still have your transcriptions of P1, P2, P3, P4 and P9.

If it's all right with Jim, could you pass those along to me off-list?  I 
could start putting some of these transcriptions up now if it's 
agreeable to enough folks.

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

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 12:21:28 -0500

>transcription of 071 that I did lo, those many ages ago:

Just a few thoughts.... 

The idea of HTML tags for nomina sacra, etc. have advantages. But
I see a bit of a problem. HTML-style tags, obviously, use the angle
brackets < >. But > is a symbol one sometimes encounters in a
manuscript. Does one, then, use the correct HTML symbol &gt; in the
transcription? If so, we're not using ASCII any more. :-)

I might be tempted instead to use something else like {} for these
sorts of tags. If one then wishes to convert to HTML, it's a simple
change -- just { to < and } to >. And it leaves us [] for lacunae
and perhaps () for uncertain letters.

I'm not trying to make life difficult here, just point out some things
to think about.

[ ... ]

>IMNSHO the ms. should be transcribed exactly as it appears.

I think this should be the goal even with collations. :-) Personally,
I prefer collations most of the time, because it's so much easier to
notice the difference between, say, ECOMEN and ECWMEN. :-) But it
depends on circumstances. I do think that the collation base needs
to be posted on the site in its entirety; it's *not* enough to just
list it.

[ ... ]

>markup, rather than each doing what is right in his own eyes...

I have to agree with this one. I've had to work with some really
strange collation styles in my life (the award, I think, goes to
Davies's collations of 330, 436, 462, and 2344. I *still* stumble
over that one sometimes). Ditto the Collate format for transcriptions.
My first few attempts to convert Tim Finney's transcriptions of
Hebrews resulted in quite a few bollixes, especially as regards
correctors. Using more than one standard is a shortcut to trouble.

[ ... ]

>Net, that are based on it, so all one has to do is download one, 

Obviously the big hang-up here is X/C. (At least, every scheme I've
ever seen renders theta as Q, and the rest are obvious.) Maybe it's
actually time for a vote. :-)

I vote C=chi and X=xi, for what it's worth.

Bob Waltz
[email-masked]

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

---

From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 09:29:30 -0700

> and perhaps () for uncertain letters.

Good point.  This is the sort of thing that needs to be agreed upon, 
though I would suggest that when we're down to the level of 
tweaking individual characters like this, we're pretty close to a 
standard.  Since as I recall the > and < characters are used for 
accents, they wouldn't be a problem for the earlier mss, and such 
things could be adjusted during markup later.  I could live with that.

Of course, if this expands into Hebrew mss, then using { and } 
won't work because in CCAT these denote a couple of very 
common final-form letters...

> I'm not trying to make life difficult here, just point out some things

And your points are well taken, at least by yours truly.

> correctors. Using more than one standard is a shortcut to trouble.

I haven't tried these, but I wholeheartedly agree with the last 
sentence.

> I vote C=chi and X=xi, for what it's worth.

The only problem there is getting folks like SP to make the 
necessary adjustments in their fonts etc. as well as changing all 
the transcriptions that are already out there, such as the stuff at 
the Perseus Project etc.  Were it to come down to a vote, I would 
probably vote the same way.  However, I can see mountains of 
impracticalities in trying to get the rest of  the world to change it...

Dave Washburn