Peter Kirby

Hello,

I am thinking about developing, in the distant future, an eminently useful tool for studying ancient writings (the domain name earlywritings.com has been reserved for this purpose). This site would include Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Latin texts. It may expand later to include some Eastern, some Arabic, and a few medieval writings.

You can look at the design of the Gospel of Thomas Commentary for a starting point, but I want an earlywritings.com that has more features and more stuff included. There would be a web interface (running off a database), not an executable program on the user's hard drive.

What would you want to see in such a tool? Be creative! Please don't hesitate to mention both things that could be easy and things that might be impossible. Any idea is a good idea at this stage.

best,
Peter Kirby

Vorkosigan

Hmmm......wow!

*Interlinear with original language/English, as well as English

*topic link pages. For example, if I click on "Augustine" a page appears that lists internet links to scholarly writings on Augustine.




BTW,
Etana has a bunch of links you might find useful, to old docs, for the future site,

http://www.cwru.edu/univlib/preserve/Etana/Etana.html


and one for the present one: the whole encyclopedia biblica of 1899.

Vorkosigan

Intelligitimate

The Greek shouldn't be in a damn picture format. It should be in unicode or something that allows me to copy and paste it. Samething for the Hebrew for the OT. And I don't want to hear any excuses about it not working right on some people's computers, they can download the relevant files like everyone else. And I want the breathmarks in the Greek and vowel marks in the Hebrew, I don't care if I have to download a million files to see it.

And you should include all ancient versions of a verse in the NT; Latin, Greek, Old Syriac (for Yuri), etc. Same with OT; Septuagint, Masoretic Text, DSS, whatever. And more scholarly notes! Never can have too many of them.

Peter Kirby

Vorkosigan,

As for an interlinear, I need to think about how I could do this. Suppose I had just 4 English translations, 1 German, 1 French, 3 Greek editions, and the Latin Vulgate. And suppose I want to allow an interlinear between any two of these ten. That would be 45 combinations. I am trying to come up with a way to do interlinear without restricting it to just one combination or two.

What would be significantly easier would simply have the user be able to look up information on the Greek words, without attempting to line up the Greek words/phrases with the translation's words/phrases.

As for topics/biographies/locations/etc.:

I do expect to incorporate some of the Bible dictionaries that have fallen out of copyright, and they would have information on such stuff.

But if I were to start making entries, with links and so forth, for the thousands of terms that were worthy of such entries, I would definitely need a lot of help doing so.

On thing that could be done is some kind of Antiqwiki or Biblowiki in which many people can contribute to explaining the background, places, people, and events behind these texts. This could be hosted under the same domain name (perhaps just wiki.earlywritings.com would do).

Intelligitimate,

Actually, I wasn't planning on using images in the upcoming project (as I did with the Coptic of Thomas and its Greek fragments). The most immediate reason for that, to me, is that they simply take a lot of time to make (though, perhaps I could hack a way to make them dynamically). The other reasons are to allow copying, as you say, and to allow searching.

But things could have various options: one could choose between a transliteration, BetaCode, Unicode, or an image/images depending on preference, for example.

Including the versions of the OT and the NT that are not yet digitized, such as the Old Syriac for the NT or the Samaritan Pentateuch, is something I would like to do eventually, but which would have a lower priority than other parts of the project.

How do you suggest scholarly notes should be gathered and presented?

Thanks for replying; I hope to hear from others as well.

best,
Peter Kirby

Rick Sumner

I'm up for a biblowiki. I can state pretty confidently that I wouldn't be the only one.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Peter Kirby

Tell me your thoughts about it, what it would contain, how it would work.

Now that I am thinking about it, it would be a very good idea to start the Wiki soon so that it grows during the time that I am hammering together the framework for the earlywritings.com site. Then, when earlywritings.com is up, there could be extensive cross-linking, with the focus of earlywritings.com being the presentation of various texts and exegetical details.

best,
Peter Kirby

JohnHud

would be extremely helpful to be able to access electronically all the major different NT texts in their variant forms.....or even the top 50 or so