Interested in working on a Church Fathers Database?

[Michael Hanel]

I know this was stated earlier in a previous post, but one of the reasons that BibleWorks is such a great program is because of what it includes in the main program without extra costs. Sure there are modules that you can buy to expand the program, but the program itself provides a plethora of Biblical texts. Then with BW 6 Josephus and the Apostolic Fathers were added, with no additional costs to the user.

Now another opportunity to make BibleWorks even better is coming up. I've contacted Harry Plantinga, the operator of the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and I've asked him if it would be okay to use the Church Fathers texts that are online at that website to incorporate them into a database for use with Biblical studies computer programs. He said that was perfectly okay. To my knowledge, the works at that website are public domain and with his assurance that this is so, I think it's time to take a step forward.

I'm asking for volunteers of those who are interested in using the CCEL Church Fathers texts to make them into a format that would work in BibleWorks. This would entail picking a specific work and converting it into a plain text format that BW's Version Database Compiler would then integrate into BW. I'm sure I make it sound easier than it is. I honestly don't have any experience with making this happen, but I know we can figure it out because the same process was used by BW users to get the Apostolic Fathers database into BW in the first place. The biggest thing is just to be able to spearhead activities and make sure we're not reduplicating work. I'm not entirely sure how long this project would take, but I know the more people who are willing to help out, the quicker it would go. A lot of the texts include copious footnotes. BW will allow footnotes in its text as well, but it will take a little bit of work to type them in the text in the right order.

If you think you have more skill or time than myself and would like to coordinate this project, let me know. If you would like to volunteer to be involved also let me know. This is a no glory project. No one's going to make any money on it, but it's for the collective BW public own benefit. This stuff is out there and free, it just takes a little bit of grunt work to put it on BW in a way that would pay off big.

In the future we could also include original languages to these works, but since that text is less freely available, that's an option down the road. If anyone knows of a great repository of original language works that would be in public domain, certainly speak up.

My email is of the hotmail.com variety and should be preceded by an ekim11

Mike Hanel
MDiv Student Concordia Seminary
MA Classics Student Washington University

[bcollins]

I've already done a little work on the Ante-Nicene Fathers from the CCEL site.
I suppose what I've done reflects my own idiosyncrosies. For instance, I stripped out the footnotes, the elucidations, and most things labeled as suspect or fragmentary.

I tried to post what I've done already, but received the message: "Invalid Post specified."

[Michael Hanel]

I'm not exactly sure what would have gone wrong with your post, it might have something to do with attachment size, if you meant you attached it with your message. With his permission of course, you could get the file to James Darlack since he has a website that can host a limited amount of files.

I've been working on Irenaeus' Against the Heresies, but I've been including footnotes because they're valuable to the translation and since BibleWorks is capable of having them, it seemed to make sense to keep them.

Mike

[tomc]

Michael,

What needs to happen is for someone to write a program to strip out the html code and put it in plain text to be compiled. All that needs to be decided is the versification, i.e. by word count, sentence count, ect.

I do this type of text manipulation all the time at work, it would just involve writing a Perl script. Fortunately there is a version that works at the DOS prompt called ActivePerl.

I could probably take a quick look at it later this week, but probably wouldn't have time to really do it until near Thanksgiving. If someone else can do it sooner then just let me know.

The only thing I haven't done is work with other languages in Unicode within Perl, I'm pretty sure it is doable though.

thanks,

Tommy

[Michael Hanel]

Who knew life with computers was that easy? Brian has a raw text file of all the ante-nicene fathers it looks like minus the footnotes. It needs a little basic formatting, but otherwise (from my brief glance over it -- it's hard to be certain since it was 1200 some pages long!) it probably is able to be compiled.

However, his version is without the footnotes, which i think are valuable enough to put in there. So I didnt know if it was quicker to manually add them, or would a Perl program be able to put those in as well? that seems rather difficult, but you would know better than I.

Otherwise, if all people want is the raw text, I feel fairly confident in saying if we simply divided up the text file that we have now into smaller chunks so people could review those pages to make sure formatting is ok, it could be compiled no problem.

Mike

[jdarlack]

Let me encourage you to include the footnotes. When the the original translators of the Early Church Fathers did their work, they included them for a reason, plus as Mike said, BibleWorks can do it, so why wouldn't we? In fact you can even encode the Greek and Hebrew that's mentioned in the footnotes so that it shows properly in BW! This could be done with a macro or by hand.

Also, let me encourage you to "versify" the text according to one of the standard Greek texts. Either by Migne's Patrilogia Grecae or by whatever's in TLG. This may actually take some work, but I believe the profits would be worth it... Ah, but TIME is is at a premium for those of us in Seminary/School and even more so for those of us in the pulpit/classroom!

This discussion is great!

Regarding:

I've already done a little work on the Ante-Nicene Fathers from the CCEL site.
I suppose what I've done reflects my own idiosyncrosies. For instance, I stripped out the footnotes, the elucidations, and most things labeled as suspect or fragmentary.

I tried to post what I've done already, but received the message: "Invalid Post specified."

Send me an email, bcollins, and I'll post it to my site and list it on the forum!

My email is jdarlack?@?gcts?.?edu (just remove the question marks!)

[tomc]

I don't think including the footnotes would be too difficult, if I recall it is just done with tags. Perl can do whatever you want it to do regarding footnotes, ect. As I said before, I just haven't tried using a greek font within it. That would require a little bit of work.

Jim,
Do you have a suggestion to automate the versification? Doing it according to a standard would definitely be the most difficult part.

thanks,

tommy

[jdarlack]

Jim,
Do you have a suggestion to automate the versification? Doing it according to a standard would definitely be the most difficult part.

Hi Tommy,

I don't think there is any way possible to "automate" versifying the text. This is something that has to be done by either looking at the Greek/Latin texts or by comparing with an already versified English Text...I am sorry that I don't have any other ideas.

My high school geometry teacher used to tell the story of Euclid--the Greek father of geometry. Euclid once rebuked Ptolemy, a Greek king who sought an easy way into mathematics, saying, "There is no royal road to geometry." I think his words apply here... There's no royal road to versification!

For those of you who are curious, here's the Greek of Euclid's statement:

mh. ei=nai basilikh.n avtrapo.n evpi. geometri,an

From G. Friedlein, Procli Diadochi in primum Euclidis elementorum librum commentarii (Leipzig: Teubner, 1873), page 68, lines 16-17.

[Michael Hanel]

Hopefully in less than a week I'll have the Ante Nicene text into database-ready format. After that there's tons of proof reading to do and it needs footnotes too. Now if there's an easy way to add footnotes to the text we have that's cool, if not, as Jim says, the text still needs to be checked out, and footnotes can be added then. Then there's the question of whether you want to convert references out of roman numerals and little things like that to make it more user friendly. In any event, it's a little over 2500 pages of text, so it'll prob take a good while. It'll be useable now, but not very reliable, but it's definitely a place to start.

Mike

[tomc]

Michael-

Whatever you have will be a good start to add the footnotes to. I think changing the roman numerals would probably be fairly easy, so don't do any of it by hand.