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

Tue Dec 7 12:20:07 MST 2010

Dear Troy,
It is great to speak with you. I'm not sure how I could have possibly  
missed this before, as I've been a member of this mailing list for at  
least 4 years now, and I've been thinking of this project for just as  
long. Oh well, God's timing. I am very excited to help with this  
project in any way that I can. I have general web dev experience, but  
nothing that could touch the level of programming this would require.  
I am mainly a UI and design guy. I am very interested in usability,  
because as I envision it, this could almost be like, wikipedia for  
scriptural translation and study, (error checking and quality control  
is important, as we are dealing with The Word of God) but in order to  
achieve this, the very complex systems of annotation etc. must be  
accessed though a very simple and intuitive interface. If this can be  
accomplished, I could see forming partnerships with seminaries,  
research institutes, etc. and having a constant flow of information  
into the system through students which would use it for class credit,  
and which would rotate every four years. I know my talents are  
possibly the least useful at this point in the project, but please,  
let me know what I can do. I can write emails, make phone calls,  
design mockups, give suggestions and thoughts. Anything I can do, I  
will.

This project has been on my heart for a long time. It is very  
important to me, because it was through my study into these  
manuscripts that I came to really trust Christ. I even always called  
the project, "the ad fontes project. " Ad Fontes, of course, meaning  
"to the sources," or, "to the fountain." Anything I can do to help,  
please assign me a role, and I will work on it. I so believe in this  
project, that if you need someone to lick envelopes,...I will do it.
Thank you.

On Dec 7, 2010, at 3:39 AM, sword-devel-request at crosswire.org wrote:
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2010 23:25:27 +0000
> From: "Troy A. Griffitts" <scribe at crosswire.org>
> To: sword-devel at crosswire.org
> Subject: Re: [sword-devel] Looking for help/direction with Scriptural
> 	Archiving Study Project
> Message-ID: <4CFD70E7.2080806 at crosswire.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel at crosswire.org
>> http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel
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