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!)

[MBushell]

Hi Guys,

The VDC was never really intended to do this sort of thing. It is intended to do verse based stuff. You might be able to shoehorn the Fathers into this shoe, but I would recommend a different approach. You can put the stuff into well-formatted HTML files, including the footnotes. The footnotes can be hypertext linked to the text. Someone would also have to do some hypertext linking to build a nice table of contents, etc. In fact al this may be in the Ethereal library stuff already. The files need to be broken down into nice-sized sections.

Once all this is done you ca build an HTML Help file of the Fathers. I can show you how to do it. Or I can do it myself. In fact if you guys can get the files into decent shape ready to be compiled, we can add hyper text links to all the scripture refs and add a scripture index for use with the Lexical & Gramattical Help feature in BW. Of course the resulting files would be made freely available to users. We have a policy of not charging for PD texts, even if they cost us money to develop. We hope we can continue that policy - pray for us!

SO basically, my suggestion is to just produce HTML files. If you break the text down into nice-niced chunks the HTML search engine works really well and we can hook it up to BibleWorks very easily. Since the text is not verse based and doesn't include a lot of Hebrew and Greek, this is the best way to go.

That's my 2 cents.

Mike Bushell
BibleWorks

[jdarlack]

Hey Mike,

That sounds like an excellent idea!

Here's a few thoughts, however:

• Speed & complexity of searching is hindered if it is not treated as a "version." This is not so much an issue if the text is English, but if I wanted to do a search on a particular theological motif and wanted to exclude certain words, etc. It would be helpful to have either the power of the Command Line or the ASE.
• Parallel display: If or when someone gets the Greek and/or Latin compiled for these texts, it is much easier to display the various versions in parallel if they are compiled with the VDC or in a similar manner.
• Synoptic display: If one wanted to create a sdf file for a "catena" of sorts, where a Biblical quote in the text would automatically be displayed next to the source file, then one can only do this if the text is a compiled version. Perhaps this could be a feature for 7, 8 or 9.0...the ability to display synoptically HTML help files next to version files...Hint, hint...

Ultimately, I think your idea of marking the text up in HTML with Scripture References, etc. is an excellent idea! The "synoptic display problem" I mentioned above would be taken care of with the Grammatical & Lexical help, as would the Hebrew and Greek mark-up.

Have you looked at the files at CCEL Mike? Here's a link to Version 2... http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/. Version 3 is in the works.

[Michael Hanel]

Perhaps if we saw an example of what you're talking about it would be easier to decide. I don't really want to divert BW programmers from important projects, so I figured this was something users could do. Also I agree with Jim, there seem to be some definite advantages to this method. One of the main reasons I even thought about putting this into BW was the searching capability. Other programs that use the Church Fathers don't have the same capability because the files are all partitioned, but here they're under one umbrella, a definite plus.

I def recognize the drawbacks of integrating them into the VDC format, indeed we've mentioned some of them like formatting to certain verses, chapters etc, the inability to get Greek display, etc. So it's not a totally one sided issue. But for what my two cents is worth unless some of the advantages of this format could be attained in the HTML format.

Also Jim, I don't know if you've seen the E-Catena link or not...sounds like it's not reliable but is a start....

Anyway, I'm open-eared to what others think will be beneficial

[jdarlack]

Hi Mike,

The E-Catena is a great resource, though if you really want an accurate account of where the Bible is referenced in the Fathers, one should consult the pricy Biblia Patristica. Here's some info:

Biblia Patristica; Index des Citations et Allusions Bibliques dans la Litterature Patristique. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1, 1975- . Each volume is arranged in canonical order. References to a passage by church fathers are listed under the biblical texts. The project is to cover from the 1st through the 9th century.

v. 1 covers the first two centuries
v. 2 covers 3rd century, omitting Origen
v. 3 Origen
v. 4 Eusebius, Cyril of Jerusalem & Epiphanius
v. 5 Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa & Amphilochius
v. 6 Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose of Milan & Ambrosiaster
Supplement: Philo
v. 7 Didyme d’Alexandrie

See the bottom of the following web page for instructions on how to use it! (http://www.hugsr.edu/ResearchGuide/2...Hist%20Bib.htm)