Difference between revisions of "Non-CrossWire Text-Development Projects"

Revision as of 09:37, 25 September 2017

Introduction

The CrossWire Bible Society's purpose is to develop Bible software. Part of what makes great software is the availability of great content: Bibles, commentaries, dictionaries, atlases, and other books. CrossWire depends on the availability of great content produced by others--we generally do not produce our own original content.

Other projects around the Web have been started to produce electronic editions of texts that we would love to see incorporated into SWORD. The following are a list of links to such projects. Involvement in these projects does not usually require a great deal of technical expertise, so we strongly encourage people who want to help SWORD improve but who don't feel prepared to contribute by writing code to contribute their time and work to these projects.

Some of these projects have a limited scope (perhaps just one book) while others serve as repositories for massive collections of texts. All links are just suggestions. If you find additional projects or particular works being produced by those projects, please add them to the list.

Other Ministries

This section lists other ministries involved in Bible Text Development & Preservation geared to supporting agencies such as Bible Societies.

• The Worldwide Electronic Bible & Book Service (WEBBS) – one of the projects of MissionAssist. MissionAssist is the working name of Wycliffe Associates (UK), a Christian organisation of volunteers in the United Kingdom who want to use their gifts and abilities at home to help mission work overseas.

• The Bible For The Future – This MissionAssist project arose out of their concern that, if digital information is not properly preserved, it could easily disappear! This is particularly true of Scripture that has been transcribed (or "keyboarded") into a digital format, used in the preparation of a particular translation, and then filed away in its original format rather than being stored in a server online.

Individual Works

• The Matthew Bible: http://newmatthewbible.org/

• Elberfelder 1871 Retroprojekt: http://code.google.com/p/elberfelder1871/

• Cherokee New Testament: http://www.cherokeenewtestament.net/

• William Morgan's Welsh Bible (1620): http://kimkat.org/amryw/1_testunau/sion_prys_003_beibl_mynegai_1281k.htm

• Irish New Testament Project: http://www.biblebc.com/Projects/irish_new_testament_project.htm

• David Martin 1707 French Bible: http://www.martin1707.com/ – NT is complete. OT in progress - 10 books available.

• La Bible David Martin (1744 and 1855 editions compared) http://www.dieu-en-ligne.com/

• The Codex Sinaiticus Project http://www.codex-sinaiticus.net/
  This is an international collaboration to reunite the entire manuscript in digital form and make it accessible to a global audience for the first time. Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars, conservators and curators, the Project gives everyone the opportunity to connect directly with this famous manuscript. See also [2] for details of the intended complete electronic edition, using and developing software pioneered by Peter Robinson of the University of Birmingham.

• The Aleppo Codex http://aleppocodex.org/

• TanakhML Project ^[1] aims at providing scholars with efficient tools for travelling over the Bible in Hebrew, as well as with a common descriptive language for describing the structure of the Bible according to the Jewish masoretic tradition. TanakhML is thus, stricto sensu, that specific language, described according to the XML meta-language, used to express the structure of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh (Tanach), as formalised by the Jewish tradition, or Masorah. Content is provided under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. The online Hebrew text is Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.

• The Codex Argenteus Online http://w3.ub.uu.se/arv/codex/faksimiledition/

• Codex Marianus http://www.slav.helsinki.fi/ccmh/marianus.html

• Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary, 1859 edition http://haydock1859.tripod.com/

• The Christian Bible in Lojban http://www.lojban.org/texts/translations/drbible.html

• The Paris Psalter http://www.aug.edu/augusta/psalms/ (hosted by J. Richard Stracke, emeritus professor of English, Augusta State University)

• The English Hexapla 1841 http://bible.zoxt.net/hex/hex.htm – Greek New Testament according to Scholtz with 6 ancient English translations: Wiclif 1380, Tyndale 1534, Cranmer 1539, Geneva 1557, Rheims 1582, Authorised 1611

• Portuguese Free Bible Project (Bíblia Livre) http://sites.google.com/site/biblialivre/ (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Brazil License)

• Mount Sinai Arabic Codex 151 – as described in [3] Need to find out the current status of this project.

• Curetonian Syriac – the four Gospels in Old Syriac. See [4] for a description.

• Westcott and Hort Greek New Testament with accents, punctuation, morphology and lemmas. License CC-BY-SA (USA).

• The International Q Project – at Claremont Graduate University.

• The Clementine Vulgate Text Project – The Clementine Text Project was an effort between 2002 and 2005 to create a free online text version of the Clementine Vulgate. This is an historically important edition of the Latin Bible that previously did not exist in electronic form. The text has been released into the public domain.

• Open English Bible – a completely free modern English translation of the Bible. The OEB is under a Creative Commons Zero licence.

• Abbott-Smith's Manual Greek Lexicon

• Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary

Collections

• Wikisource – http://www.wikisource.org/

• Catholic Encyclopedia 1913: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)
• Encyclopædia Brittanica 1911: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica
• Bible Kralická (it is actually the canonical source of CzeBKR in the repo) https://cs.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_kralick%C3%A1

• Distributed Proofreaders – http://www.pgdp.net/c/

• Dat nie Testament (A Plattdeutsch NT) http://www.pgdp.net/c/project.php?id=projectID47a592c11081f&detail_level=3

• Project Runeberg – http://runeberg.org/

• Nordic (Scandinavian) literature (including some Bibles, etc)

• French Bibles, etc – http://456-bible.123-bible.com/

• Several historic Bibles and other important books have been digitized by the web-master, Yves Petrakian.

• Les Écritures Saintes – http://web.archive.org/web/*/ecritures-saintes.com/

• Some significant historic Bibles and translations are hosted on this French site. (Domain expired; use wayback.)

• The Matthew Poole Project – http://www.matthewpoole.net/

• The Project is dedicated to republishing the extensive literary efforts of the Reverend Matthew Poole (1624-79). The cornerstone of the project is the translation of Poole's massive Synopsis Criticorum (Synopsis of Interpreters), making it available in English for the first time. This is an ongoing translation project. The translation work is being undertaken by Pastor Steven Dilday. He holds a Ph.D. Degree in Puritan History and Literature from Whitefield Theological Seminary. This work was drawn to my attention by reading Victor Perry's review in The Banner of Truth magazine (issue 547, April 2009). So far the first 5 volumes have been translated. These are available in print through Lulu.com, or to purchase as downloads at much lower cost. There are some samples available as free downloads.

• West African Scripts Literature Ministry – http://www.westafricanscripts.com/

• National Yiddish Archive – http://www.archive.org/details/nationalyiddishbookcenter

• The National Yiddish Book Center is a non-profit organization working to rescue Yiddish books and share their content with the world. More than 10,000 of our titles are now available free-of-charge through the Open Content Alliance.

• Look Higher ! – http://lookhigher.net/

This site has three collections of English Bibles:

• Public Domain Bibles - hosted by the site
• More Public Domain Bibles - hosted elsewhere
• Copyright Bibles - hosted elsewhere

Some of those in the first collection are translations that I have not seen hosted elsewhere. Among the more unusual digitized texts are the following:

• Anglo-Saxon Gospels - Manuscript 140, Corpus Christi College - circa 1000 by Aelfric
• Anglo-Saxon Gospels - Hatton Manuscript 38, Bodleian Library - circa 1200 by unknown author
• Wycliffe Bible - 1395 by John Wycliffe (66 books)
• Calvin Bible - 1855 by Calvin Translation Society (Joshua, Psalms, Isaiah to Malachi, Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Pastoral Epistles, Hebrews to 1 John, Jude)
• Revised Version, also called English Revised Version, 1885 Charles Ellicott editor
• The New Testament: Revised and Translated 1904 by Adolphus Worrell
• The New Testament: Translated from the Original Greek 1858 by Leicester Sawyer
• The New Testament: Translated from the Sinaitic Manuscript 1918 by Henry Anderson

None of the hosted translations include any deuterocanonical books, even though (for example) the 1885 Revised Version included the Apocrypha.

• Alaskan Orthodox texts – http://www.asna.ca/alaska/

This site is an electronic library of historic Orthodox Christian resources in the indigenous languages of Alaska. Included in this site are printed texts in the Aleut, Alutiiq, Tlingit, and Yup'ik languages. Among these are some translations of the Holy Gospels.

• Corpus Biblicum Catalanicum – http://www.abcat.org/cbcat/

As part of the Corpus Scriptorum Cataloniae series, the Corpus Biblicum Catalanicum will include a critical edition of all known Catalan translations of the Bible or texts directly related to it, published or unpublished, from the thirteenth century until the year 1900. On the website of the Associació Bíblica de Catalunya

• Sanskrit Web – http://www.sanskritweb.net/

This is a private website maintained by Ulrich Stiehl in Germany. The other Sanskrit documents include Bible in Sanskrit (Gospel of Matthew in Sanskrit Translation)[5].

• The Massachusetts Bible Society is scanning (or having scanned) many of the Bibles in their collection.

The Massachusetts Bible Society Collection contains over 4,000 items, which include: Bibles, parts of Bibles, and tracts. Many of the Bibles in the collection are being documented for the first time in the ongoing cataloging project. The Bibles are important, not only as sacred texts, but as a record of the people who produced them, received them, and those who were transformed by the message. See the Rare Bibles Exhibition at the Boston University School of Theology Library.

View a statistical list of the language groups cataloged thus far in the project.

• Project Gezelius

Project Gezelius is a Nordic project which has reached its aim to put out the 4200 pages of extensive biblical works from the 1700s into a web database.

• Old Babylonian Text Corpus

Cuneiform Circle is a community of scholars engaged in the study of the Old Babylonian Akkadian. Their main goal is to create an Old Babylonian Text Corpus, an Old Babylonian Dictionary, and a List of Old Babylonian Cuneiform Signs.

• The AHRC Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism project.

The object of the project is to gather together textual evidence for the use of Greek Bible translations by Jews in the Middle Ages and to produce a corpus in digital and print form. See this University of Cambridge news item [6].

• The Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

• The Oxford Text Archive – browsing the catalogue I came across The Apostolic Fathers and the Hanga NT.

• The Chinese Text Project – is a web-based e-text system designed to present ancient Chinese texts.

• Oude bijbels digitaal ontsloten – Old Dutch Bibles digitisation project.

• From the University of Zurich, Zwingli’s theological treatises can be accessed here and his letters here.

• Glaubensstimme - Das evangelische Archiv im Internet – We have been offered more or less the whole of Glaubensstimme archive for CrossWire. RefDoc has had a look at it - it is in essence a huge repository of German language texts, probably similar size as CCEL and would if we could work with it probably in one go double what we have in modules overall. Or more. Much of it is of huge quality - both theological and format wise. Most, but a few texts seem GenBook material. Commentaries and a couple of Bible translations are there too.

• University of Michigan Library opens ECCO – Eighteenth Century Collections Online to the public

Catalogues

• The Internet Bible Catalog – an experiment in creating a web-based catalogue of existing Bible Translations.

• Bible Research – The site is for Bible students who are looking for detailed information on the history of the canon, texts, and versions of Scripture.

Museums

• The Ramseyer-Northern Bible Society Collection was the hobby and intense interest of the Rev. Henry E. Ramseyer, who was from 1918 until his death in 1945 the Secretary of the Northern Bible Society. He was born in Ontario in 1873, moved in his youth to Michigan, and studied theology at Blufton College in Ohio. He became a minister in 1896 and, coming somewhat by chance to Duluth Minnesota in 1898, he decided that his life's work would be to minister to the lumber and mining camps then developing in northern Minnesota. In Duluth itself he also found a lack of ministry to the poor and homeless, and founded a branch of the Bethel Society, raising funds for the construction of a building which still stands. In 1918, he expanded the work of missions to the workers in northern Minnesota by founding the Northern Bible Society, with the objective of providing the Scriptures to all, at little or no cost, in the languages of their origins. In 1932, the Society erected the Bible House, and in it they had their headquarters, a Book and Bible Shop, and space for the public display of Rev. Ramseyer's private collection.

• The Museum of the Book in Limehouse, London holds a unique collection of rare copies and editions of the Bible in over 20 languages, including the Gutenberg Bible of 1455, first edition Bibles of the Reformation such as Erasmus' Greek New Testament, Luther's Bible, Coverdale's Bible, the Geneva Bible and, of course, the King James Bible of 1611 as well as copies of the Bible once owned by luminaries such as John Bunyan, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, Charles Spurgeon, William Wilberforce, Reginald Kray, and Elvis Presley. The curator is Rev. David J. Smith.^[2]

Specialist Societies

• The Early English Text Society – EETS was founded in 1864 by Frederick James Furnivall, with the help of Richard Morris, Walter Skeat, and others, to bring the mass of unprinted Early English literature within the reach of students.

• The Tyndale Society – The Society exists for all who are interested in the work and influence of William Tyndale. William Tyndale gave us our English Bible. Forbidden to work in England, Tyndale translated and printed in English the New Testament and half the Old Testament between 1525 and 1535 in Germany and the Low Countries. He worked from the Greek and Hebrew original texts when knowledge of those languages in England was rare. His pocket-sized Bible translations were smuggled into England, and then ruthlessly sought out by the Church, confiscated and destroyed. Condemned as a heretic, Tyndale was strangled and burned outside Brussels in 1536. Of particular note, a complete Tyndale Bible concordance is now almost complete.

Online Resources

• The Septuagint Online: Electronic Resources for the Study of the Septuagint and Old Greek Versions – compiled by Joel Kalvesmaki.

• Translatable Exegetical Tools – TExT is short for Translatable Exegetical Tools. We desire to facilitate the development of freely distributable and translatable tools for biblical exegesis to serve the global church.

• Various Metrical Psalters collated by the Music for the Church of God, including the complete Scottish Psalter of 1650. The same website also hosts several hymnals, etc.

• academic-bible.com – the Scholarly Bible Portal for the German Bible Society.

Dictionaries

• The Kamusi Project is a participatory international effort dedicated to improving knowledge of the world's languages. Our long-term mission is to produce dictionaries and other language resources for every language, and to make those resources available everywhere to everyone. Our initial focus is the languages of Africa. Africa's one billion people speak about 2000 languages.

Software

• Greenstone Digital Library Software – Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. It is open-source, multilingual software, issued under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Read the Greenstone Factsheet for more information.

• Thai Christian Resources is an example of using Greenstone to provide material for the people of Thailand. This site is almost entirely in Thai.
• Baibala Hawaiian Bible is another site based on Greenstone technology.

• SHEBANQ – System for HEBrew Text: ANnotations for Queries and Markup – Scholarly editions of the Bible usually dedicate space to a critical apparatus and various kinds of annotations. We introduce the idea of annotating the text with queries. They show up next to the chapters where the results are. Of course you can also share your hand-written annotations! SHEBANQ is a search engine for the Hebrew Bible, powered by the ETCBC4 linguistic database, formerly know as WIVU. The data is archived for open access, and the program code is open source. For further details, see About SHEBANQ.

• There is an online version of the database at Bible Online Learner.
• The database is maintained on GitHub. See ETCBC/shebanq

Libraries (general)

The following powerful inter-library search engines are useful as aids for general research.:

• WorldCat
• COPAC

• HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

Projects

• The Alpheios project – The goal of the Alpheios project is to help people learn how to learn languages as efficiently and enjoyably as possible, and in a way that best helps them understand their own literary heritage and culture, and the literary heritage and culture of other peoples throughout history. The Alpheios Reading tools can currently be used with texts in Latin, ancient Greek and Arabic. Support for classical Chinese is under development and in the future we hope to support additional languages, such as Sanskrit, Hebrew and Persian. This software is intended for free distribution on the Web and its source code is available on Sourceforge under an open source license.

• The Bullinger Correspondence Project is offering a digital version of volumes 1-14, which has been developed in collaboration with arpa Data GmbH.

• The Wulfila project – a small digital library dedicated to the study of the Gothic language and Old Germanic languages in general. Our primary goal is to provide linguistically annotated editions that can be downloaded in TEI format or browsed online, linked to a digital glossary, POS-tags and interlinear translations. The focus is currently on the Gothic Bible and minor fragments; ...

On GitHub

• Volunteers at Free Bibles India are digitizing several public domain Indian language Bible translations. David is in contact with them and collaborating on one project.

• Project GITenberg – a Free and Open, Collaborative, Trackable and Scriptable digital library. It leverages the power of the Git version control system and the collaborative potential of Github to make books more open.

Forums

• Evangelical Textual Criticism – a forum for people with knowledge of the Bible in its original languages to discuss its manuscripts and textual history from the perspective of historic evangelical theology.

References

1. ↑ Dead link reported on 2012-10-22.
2. ↑ Smith is a former member of the Worldwide Church of God movement founded by Herbert W Armstrong, not noted for its orthodoxy.[1]