[sword-devel] Looking for help/direction with Scriptural Archiving Study Project

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for being interested!  Yes, this is exactly what we'd like to
build for INTF, ITSEE, CSNTM, and CNTTS (I trust people can google if
they're not familiar with the acronyms above and below, but if you're
interested in the TC world these are probably familiar to you)

Where we are:

The above mentioned organizations are the leading players in the NT TC
world.  They all have a good relationship with the others and are very
willing to share in work together.  ITSEE and INTF are partners on the
ECM and IGNTP; CSNTM is happy to share images with anyone, including on
the INTF's VMR; and CNTTS is working hard providing collations to ITSEE
for the IGNTP.

What they don't have is a collaborative online workspace and common
standards to share their data easily.

I am full time at ITSEE these days and trying to resolve some of these
issues.

We've only really just scratched the surface of what we want to do.  My
personal interest is 2-fold.

First, CrossWire has hosted community collaboration projects in the past
with great success, but the tools we built for the projects have been
'one-off, throw away' tools designed specifically for the projects.
We'd like to build a community framework where we can host future
projects for collaboration, e.g., more interlinearization projects like
Arabic/Greek, which is high on our priority as we have an interested
project leader.

And second, I am interested in TC and would ultimately like to have a
simple public site, http://ntmss.org which is similar to
http://ntcanon.org (see their excellent [Table] link at the top) which
does something similar by providing an easy to understand grid of the
entire NT, book/chapter, with the oldest manuscript date in each
chapters' square that attests to that chapter.  Hovering over the cells
would show a list of the oldest mss with their dates and clicking on the
cell would take you to a detailed mss list with links to their images
and transcriptions.  We simply do not have the data available to do this.

Most of the tools needed for this community will be custom tools.  Not
many people are doing this work (well, they are (google "interedition"),
but not under the TC banner and they don't share many tools yet either).

So, what we're planning, designing, and building are tools for:

Volunteer and Project management
Communication (listserv + chat)
Specialized tools for:
 Image viewing, annotation, and discussion.
 (see http://labs.crosswire.org/papyritools.xpi)
 Image Indexing (see current CSNTM community project)
 Image Transcription
 (hardly anything yet at the ITSEE community project, but my daily work)

Lots more have been in the back of our minds, but these are the
immediate needs and we'll see where we go from here.

Working at ITSEE gives us an ideal pilot project for these community
tools; it contributes toward both my goals stated above.


Jonathan, it sounds like God has given you a heart for just this kind of
work.  What are your talents and how would you like to contribute?  I
would love to work together with you; honestly, it has been quite lonely
on this front as there isn't a huge interest from the current CrossWire
engineers (/me ducks in hopes of getting a huge insurgence of response).

Looking forward to sharing in work together,

Troy







On 12/06/2010 03:35 PM, jonathan batteas wrote:
> I will try to keep this brief, I've been a member of this mailing list
> for years, and i'm really wanting to start working on a project that has
> been sitting in the back of my mind for quite a while. However, the
> programming is a little beyond my scope. I'm writing here to see if
> anyone would be interested in working on-or even simply discussing at
> greater detail- this project. It is basically an online system for the
> archiving and collaborative annotation and translation of high
> resolution digital images of original Scriptural Manuscripts, for the
> purpose of cross referencing different text types and collections. A
> brief overview, along with basic UI mockups can be seen here
> http://churchco.de/developing-a-platform-for-managing-editing-scriptural-documents/
> 
> 
> I have shown this to many different people, including Bob Pritchett ceo
> at Logos Software. They all seem very interested, yet none have any
> resources to dedicate to the task at this time. So, now i am really
> trying to reach out to the open source community and see if anyone would
> be interested in helping with this in any way. Even just speaking with
> someone who has more experience programming in order to identify
> possible barriers, and discuss ways around them, would be incredibly
> useful. Thank you to anyone for your help and interest.
> Grace and Peace
> Jonathan Batteas
> http://pasceverbo.com
> 
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